Finding employers who will hire our new graduates is sometimes challenging. Quite often they are told they do not have enough experience even after completing an externship. Our Placement Dept. works closely with our graduates in their job search.
Most of the challenges we face in the Dayton area is finding the students stable employment and in a facility that will take them without experience. We have begun have the clinical sites that are willing to document the student's skills and experience they received at the clinical site to show some proof of experience. As for the stability issue, we have been trying to pre-screen some of the area facilities to determine their current status before sending an applicant there.
Some challenges with placement include getting students to be consistent with their job search, and taking test to get certification. We have begun to offer tutoring for students preparing to take a certification exam. This has increased the number of students taking the exams and increased the number of students passing the exam. Also giving students who are job searching a set goal for the number of employers there are contacting for week helps with increasing thier conistency. Somethimes they have an unrealistic expectaion of how many employers they should be contacting. Although, we have not solved all the challenges related to placement, these minor changes have been helpful.
In our case, the biggest challenge is helping students understand that placement occurs during non-traditional working situations (e.g. freelance work, contract work, overnight hours).
We overcome these challenges by communicating with students available opportunities. The use of social media (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) allow us to keep tabs on most students post graduation and allows us to see what they are doing work related.
Many of our graduates are offered employment at their clinical externship site. For those who are not, the biggest challenge, I find, is finding employers who are willing to accept new or unexperienced graduates. Some of the graduates have a difficult time during the interview process. Our placement department is excellent at dealing with each student on an individual basis to determine how best we can help him/her.
When we were first starting out meeting the placement rates made me very nervous because we are unable to place most of our students. I have since learned how to properly calculate the students that are available for placement. Most of our students are enrolled by their employers, and therefore are already employed, and unavailable for placement. But, when our program was licensed, I initially thought these students would count towards are overall placement rate.
Currently, the biggest challenge with placement assistance and meeting the placement rates is student involvement. Many times students have chosen not to be contacted by prospective employers, which decreases our chances of being able to place them. Additionally, many students are hard to keep in contact with, i.e. not returning calls or responding to emails. During the course I try to overcome those barriers by explaining to the students the nature of our correspondence after they graduate with the hopes that they may be more likely to respond.
