Laid-off alumni asking alma maters for help

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) - More alumni are returning to colleges this year _ not just to visit, but to seek career help.

Schools are offering their career centers for assessments, launching support groups, running more networking receptions and calling on employed alumni for help.

Texas Christian University waived the $350 charge for the 100 employers who exhibited at the university's spring job fair this year.

The added demand from stressed alumni, who have either been laid off or are worried about their jobs, has put a strain on the university career centers that are already working to help soon-to-graduate students find jobs.

"Whenever I hear of a company having layoffs, I immediately think of how that's going to affect us," said LaTanya Johns, director of the Graduate Career Service Center at TCU's Neeley School of Business. Johns is handling all of the Neeley MBA alumni who "are coming back," allowing her staff of five to focus on helping students about to graduate. About 60 alumni are actively using Neeley's services, many since the holidays.

That has pressed Johns, who previously spent most of her time cultivating relationships with potential employers, into the added role of job coach. But she said she sees something positive there.

"I'm always thinking of the goodwill that will come back our way" from working with alumni who need help, she said.

Other universities report similar upticks in inquiries from alumni who want to tap into their alma maters' contacts and jobs boards, resume tutorials, interview tuneups, career assessments and refreshers on job-search strategies.

The number of calls to career services at the University of Texas at Arlington has jumped 30 to 50 percent since the start of the year, said Cheri Butler, associate director of the unit. At the University of North Texas, traffic has picked up since October, and the center is seeing 50 to 70 alumni per month who are coming in for appointments, said Alison Delicati, assistant director.

"And that doesn't count the phone calls and e-mail, the quick questions," Delicati said.

TCU's career-services unit, which often teams up with Johns, has seen a 400 percent increase in the number of alumni seeking help in the last five or six months, said John Thompson, executive director. Typically, the department will see 20 to 30 alumni in a school year. Already this year, "we're over 100," Thompson said.

UT-Arlington launched three alumni support groups that began meeting this month at the Arlington campus and Tarrant County Workforce Development Center in Arlington. One of the groups met Friday for a tutorial on using LinkedIn, the popular networking Web site, from one of UT-Arlington's employment supervisors. The university has also bumped up the resources on its Web site, launching the Hire a Maverick blog in February and promoting career services through the alumni association and LinkedIn.

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At the College of Business, Michael Buckman, assistant to the dean for corporate relations, launched LinkedIn groups last fall for graduate and undergraduate students. The groups now have 1,600 members, and Buckman said he expects 4,000 members a year from now.

"It's a great resource for us," Buckman said.

Monica Hurtado, a 1999 UT-Arlington communications major who lost her public-affairs job at Charter Communications in July, hadn't tapped into the school's career-services network until she attended one of the new support groups a week and half ago.

The next day, she borrowed an idea from a friend, bought a pair of $10 gold-colored tennis shoes at Payless Shoe Source and mailed them with a card to a company she'd already applied to _ but heard nothing from. "Just trying to get my foot in the door. Thank you, Monica Hurtado, your next marketing coordinator," her card read. The tactic landed Hurtado an interview Thursday, but she learned the company had already offered the job to someone else.

"I just wanted support," Hurtado, 32, said of her decision to attend the support meeting. Since her layoff, Hurtado, whose husband is a police detective, had turned down two offers for low pay, including one at half her previous salary and is second-guessing herself.

"I honestly didn't believe there was a recession going on until I stopped getting the calls and the interviews," she said.

Like UT-Arlington, the University of North Texas has added services.

This spring, the university launched Career Connection, a series of panels featuring speakers from area employers, including Verizon Communications; Trace Life Sciences, a Denton nuclear medicine company; and Fidelity Investments. The university plans two panels in May and more through the summer, Delicati said.

Additionally, in March, career services and the alumni association teamed up on a networking reception and workshop in Addison, and Delicati said they want to put on more. Thirty-five alumni showed up, and, after enjoying sandwich wraps, chips and dip, were treated to a seminar on finding unadvertised jobs.

"Employers may have opportunities but may not be advertising them," Delicati said. "The focus is on how to uncover those through networking."

That's a key reality of the new job market that many freshly laid-off alumni are unaware of, even if they've been out of the job market for just a few years, Delicati and other college career advisers say.

Sites like Monster and CareerBuilder took a big bite out of traditional newspaper job listings within the last several years. But potential employers and headhunters are increasingly bypassing those sites and using stealthier networking tools to find candidates.

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"You're not going to see a lot of the positions advertised somewhere," Johns said. "You're going to learn about them through a professional association mixer. You really have to rely on face-to-face interaction and less on technology."

One ray of sunshine for universities is that alumni who are still employed are offering to help.

TCU's Neeley School this month launched "Neeley MBA for a Day" with help from alumni employed in the area. Twenty companies are participating, Johns said, allowing MBA candidates and laid-off alumni the opportunity to visit workplaces.

To hear Johns tell it, she and her staff spend much of their day on the phone with potential employers, professional associations and other sources, trying to divine who is hiring. "Then we bring all this back to campus and try to figure out how an MBA figures into this," she said.

One thing's for certain: Career advisers don't have to spend a lot of time tempering alumni's expectations.

Workers who are re-entering the ranks of job seekers are quickly running up against competition from fresh college graduates and other younger candidates. And many of the jobs being offered at employment fairs are aimed at entry-level workers.

At a University of Phoenix job fair in Dallas last week, Susan Perez and Jay Dawson _ MBA candidates who expect to graduate in July after spending years in industry and bumping up against their respective ceilings _ are finding a tough go of it in conversations with potential employers.

Perez, 47, who works in quality assurance for FedEx Express, said she wants a better job in that field, audit or risk management. Making $47,000 now, she wants to increase that to $50,000 in her next job. But she worries that age, experience and salary requirements are making it tough, even though, she said, "I don't feel $50,000 is that much" to ask for.

Dawson, 54, an Albertson's bakery manager, wants to switch to human resources. At a $47,000 annual salary now, he wants to make $55,000-$60,000 in his first job as a new MBA.

For now, however, everyone agrees "the packaging of jobs that are out there is not pretty," Johns said.

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© 2009, Fort Worth Star-Telegram.