Athens State University Develops Career Seminar Course With iHire’s Student Game Plan

The full story:

Background

Athens State University is the oldest educational institution of higher learning in Alabama. As an upper-division university, Athens State serves junior, senior, and graduate students, many of whom are looking to finish or advance their degrees. The university places a “genuine emphasis on producing graduates that employers desire” and provides extensive career development resources and services to prepare students for the workforce.

Opportunities

In the fall of 2021, Athens State introduced UNV 400 – Career Seminar to its curriculum after receiving a Title III grant to expand its career development services. The seminar equips students with the skills they need – including resume and cover letter writing, networking, and interviewing – to find jobs after graduation. All students are required to complete Career Seminar for one credit.

In creating Career Seminar, Athens State sought to build upon the university’s experiential learning initiative and provide students with hands-on educational opportunities to obtain experience in the field they’re looking to enter. To support the learning objectives of Career Seminar, Athens State brought in iHire’s Student Game Plan (SGP).

Solutions

iHire’s Student Game Plan is a comprehensive online learning platform designed to empower students with the strategies and tactics needed to stand out in their job search and find meaningful work in any industry.

Meticulously crafted by career experts at iHire – an industry-focused recruitment company – Student Game Plan covers the four pillars of getting hired, broken into five modules: Gaining the Right Experience, Building and Maintaining Your Network, Mastering Your Resume, Cover Letter and Personal Brand, Interviewing for Jobs and Internships, and Soft Skills for Your Career. Within its modules, Student Game Plan offers 120+ career advice articles, 20 exclusive videos, hand-selected audio files, downloadable checklists and worksheets, and 20 quizzes and assignments. All content is accessible online 24/7, making it ideal for Athens State’s virtual courses.

Emerald Simmons, Athens State’s Career Development Advisor, led the selection and implementation of Student Game Plan, which helped her design the Career Seminar course from the ground up. Simmons has found Student Game Plan to be highly flexible and easy to incorporate into the curriculum. She has even been able to draw from Student Game Plan to create new materials, worksheets, and other assignments with an industry-specific spin for her students studying Education.

For Simmons’ classes, one of the most useful assignments from Student Game Plan is a worksheet on informational interviews – students must request meetings with individuals at companies of interest to learn more about a career path and establish connections. Prior to Student Game Plan, many students were unfamiliar with informational interviews and their value in one’s job search, Simmons explained.

Results

During three semesters, 282 Athens State students have used Student Game Plan to prepare for their future job searches and careers. Because Student Game Plan is entirely online, it integrates well with the Active Flex learning model Athens State is rolling out – students can choose if they want to learn synchronously (through live lectures) or asynchronously (through on-demand lectures).

“It’s easy to pull content from Student Game Plan for assignments,” Simmons said. When I’m using Student Game Plan, I know for a fact that students are going to get the information they need to find a job and succeed in their career after graduation. It’s a pretty complete package, from an instructor’s standpoint.”

According to Simmons, students have given positive feedback on Student Game Plan thus far – her end-of-semester survey has generated four- and five-star (out of five) ratings for Career Seminar course as a whole. In addition, students have lifetime access to Student Game Plan, so they can reference it after they graduate or whenever they need to polish their resume or prepare for an interview. Plus, information in Student Game Plan is continuously updated, so Athens State knows students are always receiving the most recent and relevant information.

Looking ahead, Athens State is expanding the Career Seminar course by creating a “master shell” for the curriculum that each instructor can customize based on their students’ field of study, just as Simmons has done for her education students. Student Game Plan will provide a foundation for those curricula, so the university anticipates a continued relationship with iHire.

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