Five Minutes with Alicia Audino, Assistant Director of Career Services

Alicia Audino hit the ground running at Excelsior College as the Assistant Director of Career Services! From her passion around higher education and the Career Center Alicia has such a positive energy geared towards impacting students. Join me in taking five minutes with Alicia today, learn more about her and what the Career Center has to offer!

Questions:

1. What do you enjoy about working with students?

For me, the best part of working with students is that I have the potential to really make an impact on their educational and professional lives. As a student, my life was changed by my academic and extracurricular advisors, now I have the opportunity to impact our students in that same way.

2. What are your favorite resources in the Career Center?

My favorite new resource on the Career Center is Focus 2! It is a career and educational planning tool that allows students and alumni to engage in self-assessments, explore a variety of career options and job market information, and set their goals in motion. I like it so much because it has something for everyone, no matter what part of the career development process you are in. I am also a huge assessment geek, so I love geeking out with students when I talk about it

3. How is utilizing a Career Center online different than going to a traditional Career Center?

The main difference is obvious, we don’t have a physical space filled with students and employers. What we do to compensate for that is really bolster our online presence. We have so many resources available through the Career Center that can help with career exploration, job search, graduate school applications, military and veteran transition to the civilian workforce and more. We also provide webinars for current students and alumni, and are always looking to new technology to improve our services. Many people may think that since we’re online we don’t have the same one-on-one services, but we do offer both resume and cover letter critiques and career counseling appointments!

4. What are the benefits behind scheduling a career counseling appointment?

By scheduling a counseling appointment, you’re guaranteed one-on-one assistance with whatever career questions you may have. You will speak with either the director or one of the assistant directors who will ask you questions about your goals and figure out what we can do to help you meet them. We find that many times it is helpful to speak with an objective person when considering big decisions. Beyond that, we’re a fun group and thrive when working directly with our students!

5. How often should I update my resume and cover letter?

I recommend having a master resume that you update every time you have a new job responsibility or accomplishment. This resume will include information from all past job, volunteer, educational, etc. experiences and may be very long. This version of your resume would never be submitted to anyone, but will allow you to keep track of all the great work that you’ve done over the years. When it comes time to apply for a job, you’ll take the relevant information from that master document to target the resume you’ll use for application. If you have been in a job for a while, I would revisit your resume at least 2-3 times a year to make sure you’re capturing all of your accomplishments, professional development, and any other relevant experience.

When it comes to the cover letter, you will write a new one for each job that you apply for. Employers can tell when you use the same generic letter for each job and those cover letters will almost always get you a quick trip to the ‘no pile’. Targeting your resume and cover letter to each job is crucial to a successful job search. Great news is, we can help you learn all of the skills necessary to accomplish this!

6. How do I search for jobs in the Career Center?

We have multiple ways to search for jobs on the Career Center!

1. EC JobLinks is our job search portal for current Excelsior students and alumni. Here you will find an average 2 million+ jobs all over the country and even internationally.
2. Public job search sites can also be found on our website. Of these, I highly recommend Indeed, Vault, Glassdoor, and USAJobs.
3. Our degree specific resources section includes career exploration, professional associations, and job search resources that are targeted for each Excelsior College school.
4. Nursing students interested in working in hospitals will want to check out our Excelsior College micro site on LiquidCompass!

7. What hot fields are trending right now?

This probably won’t shock anyone, but IT fields are really hot right now. Specifically, Cybersecurity is huge – there are currently 5,000 job openings on EC JobLinks that come up in the cybersecurity search and over 68,000 that include information technology!

Nursing is also a huge field right now, the Northeast US alone has over 2,600 RN jobs in hospitals currently.

8. What services do you provide to prepare for interviews?

For interview prep, students and alumni have some great resources and I recommend using all of them! They can begin by viewing the information we have on our website, then schedule a counseling appointment to talk through the process and some tips with one of us, and lastly we have a mock interview tool integrated within EC JobLinks. The mock interview tool allows students to practice interviewing in the comfort of their own homes. They select a collection of interview questions, or pre-existing industry specific interviews and are asked the questions via a pre-recorded video, they respond to the questions via a webcam. Once completed the student has a link to the recording so they can critique themselves or send it to someone for feedback. It is an AWESOME tool!

9. As a former student what is one piece of advice you would give to students?

My #1 piece of advice for students is to make use of all the resources (OWL, SSC, Learning Services, Library, Career Center, etc.) you have available to you while you are in school. I know that many of our students have very busy lives with competing priorities, but the time invested in exploring all that Excelsior College has to offer will provide great benefit to the educational experience and beyond. I didn’t even know that my career path existed until I was in college and started engaging with what my school had to offer, so you never know how impactful these experiences might be!