Career Comes First In Charlottesville

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 finance-related industries, (i-banking, corporate finance, sales, and trading), 20% management consulting, 35% Fortune 500 general industry, and 3% to 5% entrepreneurial, nonprofit sector.

We have a robust entrepreneurial population here, but many graduates will work for a Fortune 500 company for three to eight years and then do something on their own (see BW Online, 10/25/05, "Teaching the Startup Mentality").

What top companies are hiring Darden MBAs this year?
In investment banking, we have McKinsey, Booz Allen, Merrill Lynch (MER ), and Goldman Sachs (GS ). For technology, there's United Technologies (UTX ) and Danaher (DHR ).

How are your students adjusting to the global economy?
We're starting to see more students go abroad, and that includes our U.S. students and the 26% of international students who normally stay in the U.S. to gain experience. Two reasons: A better economy causes people to think outside the box, and this economy offers better environments for an MBA to go, particularly in China and India.

What advantages do Darden students have in the global market?
Forty percent of our class takes a week-long Global Business Experiences program. They work with partner companies and Darden faculty to explore global international business. We also work with some international companies. We have case studies that deal with international situations and courses in international management.

How do you attract recruiters to campus?
Our primary source is through marketing to alumni. We are constantly engaging alumni to think of Darden as a suite of activities that helps them with their executive needs. They can send people back to get their MBA, as we have an Executive MBA program launching this year.

How do you market your students to recruiters?
Darden uses 100% case method in our curriculum, so our students know how to dig in and solve ambiguous problems. We have intimate classes with 60 students, learning in teams of six or seven, where they have to sell their solutions to students and professors.

How do Darden students subscribe to the University of Virginia's Jeffersonian ideals?
We're one of the first schools to have a mandatory graded ethics program in the first year, and we have the Business Round Table for Corporate Ethics housed here. We're one of the schools known for training ethical leaders.

How has the career services changed since you took charge?
We've integrated self-assessment into first-year curriculum and developed a real culture of outreach to companies. Five career consultants focus on counseling students, which is probably higher than at most places.

Has Darden made any career-oriented curriculum changes to better prepare students?
We've just launched "core electives" that will help our first-years get more out of their summer and be more sure about their career objectives. These classes, like marketing research, at first were only taught during second year, but are now taught before your summer internship. It helps students be better prepared for their summer experience by taking these extensions (see BW Online, 03/26/06, "Creativity Comes to B-School").

How do you prepare students for rigorous consulting interviews?
Our career center has one model that students can use to tackle cases studies. Some of our professors, who were former consultants with Booz Allen Hamilton and Bain, also have workshops. We have a set of dedicated alumni who come back and do mock interviews. Some students get 10 to 20 mock interviews.

How do you help ensure students will get placed?
Each student is assigned to both a second-year coach and a career consultant, who touch base with the student at least once a week during key times of year. Then they hand students off to alumni after three months if they still need help.

What is the most effective job finding tool at Darden?
More students get summer jobs through on-ground recruitment. Second-year students look at a broader range of ways to get jobs -- 50% of them will use on-campus recruiting. Job posting is second, and networking is third.

Any last thoughts about the job outlook for Darden and your career center?
The job market can change quickly, but it looks positive, especially for the services industry. A career development center needs to develop a system that works great in poor economic times. We're trying to develop a system for any economy.

The key to being part of companies' recruiting plans in good times and bad is having deep relationships. We do this by reaching out to key recruiters over the summer and brainstorming ideas for them to be even more successful the next year. Alumni will also always be the key to a long-lasting relationship with a company.