The University of Virginia's
Darden Graduate School of Business (No. 12 in
BusinessWeek's top-30 U.S. rankings) has been integrating career services into its standard curriculum for the past three years. In fact, Darden faculty spends the first week of classes helping students understand the results of their self-assessment tests and write detailed career plans. The graduating class of 2005 had an 86% job placement rate at graduation, with 96% finding employment three months later.
In his three years as the director of Darden's Career Development Center, Everette Fortner has focused on self-assessment and career plans. Having graduated from Darden with an MBA in 1987, Fortner spent 17 years in consumer marketing at Kraft (
KFT
) and Nabisco (
NA
), as well as handling financial services marketing at Dun & Bradstreet (
DNB
). Fortner uses his work experience in both the U.S. and Singapore to prepare the 300-student graduating class for the challenges of a global economy.
Fortner recently talked to BusinessWeek Online project assistant Janie Ho. Here are edited excerpts of their conversation:
What is unique about Darden's career services program?
We teach students lifelong career management, which focuses on self-assessment and career planning. Darden faculty helps them understand their self-assessment data and write a career plan. Then a string of 100 companies make presentations to brief the students on their different industries.
We have five career discovery forums, one per industry: Marketing, consulting, entrepreneurship, i-banking, and general management. Over a period of two months, we offer a series of 10 classes in networking, writing résumés, and cover letters, and case interviewing.
What trends have you seen in hiring over the years?
Companies are hiring a bit slower. They're more cautious in their interview process. In the spring, more companies have been doing this just-in-time hiring(see BW Online, 05/27/05,
"Just-in-Time Jobs"). We've adjusted our resources to this with things like career fairs.
Where do students typically gain employment?
We'll have about 40% enter...
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