Kristina Melgar

Excellence in Career Services
CHEP Status: Active
CHEP Awarded: 03/22/2024

Badge Evidence | Completed Courses (4 Hours Each)

This course offers strategies to provide employment and job search skills training that enables students to seek jobs in the field for which they are trained. You'll learn how to offer comprehensive career services regardless of whether your career services department is staffed full- or part-time. The course provides strategies for an institution to set up a Career Services Department, enhance and run it, and measure results. It describes how a successful career services department can ensure that your students have the skills and self-confidence to succeed in the workplace. You'll learn techniques to increase placement rates and reach out to the community to meet and maintain relationships with hiring decision-makers.
In this course, you will be given tools to help your students find the job that's right for them, present themselves impressively on paper, and interview with ease. This course is designed so you can successfully support your students in four phases of their job search: doing a targeted job search, writing a powerful resume and cover letter, presenting professionally, and developing effective interview skills.
Social media is critical tool for career services professionals to interact with and reach their constituent groups yet many career professionals aren't aware of how to develop a purposeful social media strategy. Without a social media strategy, career services departments risk losing relevance with their audience, and they also lose the opportunity of harnessing social media to achieve department goals. This course describes the phases of planning and implementing a social media strategy for your career services department. Each module is based on the fundamental steps of preparing a comprehensive and measurable plan to achieve the goals of the career services department.
Educational institutions have opportunities to create unique alumni associations which will look and feel more like alumni communities. This course will show you how you can create active alumni communities to increase enrollment, retention and placement for your entire institution. You will learn how to provide your alumni with valuable services and how to seek their help to enhance your educational programs and career services, as well as marketing and admissions. From getting started to setting up an alumni data base management system and determining the institution's return on investment, this course provides you with operational strategies for establishing an effective alumni association.
Although job developing requires a mix of critical skills, many career advisors are forced to learn them through the "sink or swim" method. They're often asked to immediately make a specific number of cold-calls daily. They learn that "job developing" is synonymous with cold-calling. It isn't. This course covers how to properly prepare for job developing, how to prospect, prioritize employer contact, and communicate with employers to address objections, get job orders, manage them to completion, and continuously engage employers and candidates to develop long-term partnerships. Job developing should be more comprehensive than a simple list of employers to cold-call.
In today's world where jobs are posted online, matching algorithms screen digital résumés, and recruiters source candidates online, students must market themselves online. Writing a résumé and cover letter alone is no longer an adequate skill set for career seekers to successfully find and secure employment as well as manage, advance, and transition their career throughout life. Students must know how to digitally market themselves, and 21st century career advisors must know how to advise them. This course will help you advise students on developing digital career-marketing strategies for career success.
In the most competitive economy ever, crafting powerful job search documents, communicating strategically with employers, and presenting evidence of one’s qualifications won’t even necessarily get candidates jobs—it’ll barely get them interviews. This course covers advanced writing techniques, shows examples, and offers detailed strategy explanations to help career professionals enhance their ability to teach students how to craft modern job search documents and strategic employer communications. You'll be able to more effectively advise students on how to use impactful strategies that differentiate them from competitors through résumés, letters, portfolio evidence, and strategic post-interview correspondence. *This course also contains several downloadable resources to be used in your career center.
Effectively coaching students to achieve their goals in a way that builds autonomy, confidence, and accountability is fundamental to the role of a career services professional. Despite this fact, many career professionals have never engaged in professional development to build their coaching skills. This course helps career services professionals develop fundamental coaching skills so they can act as a catalyst and facilitator in assisting students to work towards their self-identified goals, with the belief that self-identified goals lead to increased student buy-in and motivation for attainment. Learn to put practical coaching techniques into action to maximize your results with students. *This course is relevant to a variety of career support professionals regardless of titles such as career counselors, advisors, coordinators, or "case managers" serving a variety of populations which may include students, out-of-school youth, or dislocated workers (youth or adults).
School hiring events are staples for many institutions, whether ground-based or virtual. They are a large undertaking. However, when done correctly, these events should yield many positive results for students, employers, and the school. This course examines each part of the process involved in a school hiring event: from the planning and ideation phase, to budgeting, staffing, logistics, marketing, student preparation, and a complete process for post-event surveying and follow-up. Beyond practical tips, ideas, and strategies, this course will provide a resource of documents that will help support a robust and dynamic school hiring event.
Establishing, developing, and maintaining employer relationships is a large aspect of a career-services practitioner’s responsibility. This involved process requires insight into your institution, your department, and your industry, as well as an understanding of key strategies that can assist in the building and nurturing of employer relationships. From acquiring industry knowledge to marketing your services and identifying opportunities for long-term employer engagement, this course can assist you in providing a roadmap intended to move you from a potential cold-call relationship to understanding an employer’s perspective on return on investment and gaining effective and long-lasting employer partnerships.
Help students ace the interview with successful tactics to showcase their qualities and make them the best fit for the job. A career management specialist will be able to master the appropriate actions for students to take before, during, and after the interview. These tactics can then be implemented in a career management class or during the preparations for prospective job interviews. The goal of this course is to help develop a better understanding of the topic and produce tangible resources to help implement plans, strategies, and ideas at your school. In addition to lecture videos, resource links, and assessments, you will be able to utilize Journal and Learning Activities, which will continue to be useful after successful completion of the course.
Derived from the feedback of over 100 institutions, empirical research, and case studies, course participants are presented with specific strategies and best practices that promote graduate employment. This course is for all education professionals seeking to understand the institutional practices that maximize graduate employment outcomes. Because employment outcomes are as much a function of institutional behaviors as they are of student behaviors, this course is based in systems thinking, which challenges participants to examine the interdependent relationship among institutional infrastructure, student career-readiness, and graduate employment rates.
Awareness has grown in recent years that, to be effective today, learning must include more than knowledge and "hard skills," or technical ability. In a world where work is often team-based and project-driven, teaching needs also to encompass attitudes and social competencies. This course will describe ways students can enhance their professional skills across the curriculum. Strategies for teaching effective personal interaction and ways to support student professional growth and development will be discussed. This course will also explain how students can improve their writing skills and computer literacy across the curriculum.
As opportunities for education become more prevalent, educational institutions must compete to increase, or even maintain, their student enrollment levels. More and more institutions are adopting the strategy of treating students like customers in order to be successful. This course will review the characteristics of adult learners and determine the reasons adult students leave the institution. It will discuss the concept of interacting with students as though they are customers and how the students-as-customers concept relates to the instructor and the classroom. This course will also describe the methods and techniques of effective communication. Included are guidelines and techniques for advising and mentoring students.
Focus is essential to effective teamwork. In this course, you learn how to diagnose and overcome common problems - such as poor communication and interpersonal conflict - that can impede team progress. You will also learn to take corrective measures to remove team problems and improve team performance.
In this course, you will learn how to strengthen your coaching skills by using a four-step process to facilitate the professional growth of the employees you coach.
Feedback is an essential component of the communication process. In this course, you will learn when and how to give effective positive or corrective feedback, how to offer feedback upward, and how to receive feedback.
This course will show you how to set realistic goals, prioritize tasks, and track milestones to improve performance and morale.
In this course, you will learn how to identify underlying issues related to a decision, generate and evaluate multiple alternatives, and then communicate and implement your decision.
This course provides practical advice for managers in charge of shaping and executing organizational strategy. The course includes tips for analyzing opportunities, challenges, and the potential consequences of high-level action plans. It also addresses identification of broad patterns and trends, creative thinking, analysis of complex information, and prioritization of actions.
This course uncovers the secrets of today's successful businesses and their strategies of first-class customer service. You will learn the components of first impressions that can help you increase and keep your enrollments. This course will also help you to locate the specific areas of your operations where you can implement an improved customer service plan for your institution - whether it is admissions, student services or academics.