As you are all well aware, we are facing the worst global economic crisis of your lifetime, if not mine. I’m sure this is making many of you who will be graduating soon anxious about your future. While there is no easy solution for this dilemma you are facing, we want you to know that faculty and staff of SHTM have begun taking several actions to help better connect you to future job opportunities.
One of those actions is the establishment of a "Career Appointment Services (CAS)" provide by our Industry Partnership office for you. The objectives of the CAS are:
1. Assist our final year students in getting jobs in the hospitality industry
2. Facilitate our industry partners to recruit our graduates.
The "Career Appointment Services (CAS)" works as follows:
Sometimes SHTM faculty and staff may receive requests from industry friends to refer or recommend students to an organization. Some may refer or recommend students they are most comfortable with to the directly to the organization. However, in other cases, they may want to reach a broader student audience or more information is needed, so in these cases the SHTM faculty or staff member will refer the requests to CAS.
CAS will follow up with the requests, collect more information about the offer, and communicate with all of you, the students. CAS will communicate with students via email, website or notice board.
The CAS contact person is Edelweiss Yeung (email hmey@polyu.edu.hk, tel 34002646). Since this is a new service, requests have only just begun, so it make take a little time before many job opportunities are identified, so be patient as we are working on it.
In addition to the CAS, other job referral options might be taken by SHTM faculty and staff, depending on the nature of the job openings and each faculty member's individual preference on referring, such as:
• When there is a job referral opportunity identified by faculty members, they can either notify all eligible candidates or pre-screen the candidates for the organisation as one option.
• Another option will be to utilize the SHTM Student Association External VP as a liaison to the students when trying to access student interest in a specific job opportunity.
• Another avenue for referring specific job opportunities is by refer students that faculty have advised in the Honours Thesis process as they are more familiar with these students and their capabilities. So, be sure your supervisor knows of your career path interests
Still other actions we (the faculty and staff of SHTM) are taking are:
• Introducing students to any potential employers at the Professor for a Day and Career Day on March 4.
• Subject Lectures have been encouraged to lead their classes to visit the exhibitors at the Career Day on March 4 as one of the class activities to promote awareness of job opportunities.
• Utilize the SHTM Alumni Association network to proactively assist in the recruiting process by encouraging them to think first of our SHTM grads.
Another key initiative is the Student Year Book you probably have already heard about. The School is preparing a Student Year Book for all final year students in 2009. All final year students have been invited to provide a brief profile and a photo to go into the Student Year Book. The Student Year Book will be distributed to our industry partners, for us to encourage them to employ our students upon graduation. Students are reminded to submit their information to the School by 26 February 2009
Other options regarding the possibility of continuing your education or working as research assistants are also being explored through the entire PolyU efforts to help you. You’ll hear more about those options soon.
So, as you can see, we are working on being pro-active on your behalf to identify job opportunities even in these difficult times. As I said earlier, it won’t be easy, but hopefully it will be easier with all of us working together. If you have any other suggestions or thoughts, please feel free to let me know.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
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