Strong Network Backs William & Mary Grads

At William & Mary's Mason School of Business, all students meet with career-services staffers at least once a month, and the number of intern recruiters who come to campus tripled in 2006. Career services has transformed itself in the last two and half years since Jeff Henley signed on as director. The office now focuses on offering students personalized attention and reaching out to employers, says Henley.

Henley says it's an exciting time to be at Mason. A new B-school building -- Alan B. Miller Hall, named for an alumnus -- will be ready in 2009. The business school was recently renamed for Raymond "Chip" Mason, chairman, president, and CEO of Legg Mason, who has made multiple large donations to the school.

Henley, a 1986 William & Mary alumnus, has served as associate director of career services at UNC-Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School and at Duke's undergraduate career services. He recently spoke with BusinessWeek Online project assistant Janie Ho. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation:

What are the strongest points of your career services?
Individualized attention and active outreach to both students and employers. Students meet with a director and have a functional alignment, so if they're interested in marketing, they meet with our associate director in marketing. We try to help students narrow their career focus before they start the program.

What's unique about the training Mason students receive?
Every student is matched with an executive partner who serves as a coach through graduation. Actually, 94 of the 100 executive partners are not alumni, they are people who retired to the Williamsburg area. In this Leadership Advantage program, each student can develop technical competencies and conceptual skills (see BW Online, 3/26/06, "Creativity Comes To B-School"). Also, in our Career Acceleration Modules, faculty and executive partners team together to teach second-year students for seven weeks. Students aren't taking any other classes during that period.

What do students do before they start the program?
We work with students to develop a result-focused résumé before they enter the program. The first week of orientation we have one big program, then we meet with every first-year student.

What companies usually come to recruit at your school?
We bring in about 100 to 120 employers to help us train students, but it's also an evaluative exercise, and many of our students get hired as a result of that. Legg-Mason (LM ), Wachovia (WB ), IBM (IBM ) and IBM Consulting, and Fannie Mae (FNM ) hired our students as full-time employees after visiting campus this year.

What new companies are you trying to attract?
I don't know that we necessarily have a focus on new companies. We'll look at the marketing, consulting, and finance industries and then see where we have alums and reach out to some of those companies. But there isn't necessarily a new focus on a particular type of sector.

What's the average starting salary for a recent graduate?
The mean in 2005 was $72,647 and the median was $75,000.

How does the job market look?
It seems like it's picking up this year. It's really the traditional three industries -- consulting, finance, and marketing -- they tend to do well for us. We work aggressively with companies in those sectors to focus on the job search and work with our alums to get the jobs.

Do you offer any internal networking among students and graduates?
We have an intranet database of 850 alumni who have volunteered to help students. The alumni will list any advice they want to give someone trying to break into a field, post their résumé, and tell students how they would like to be contacted as well as the services that they offer.

Are there any other ways that you help ensure that students will get placed?
We have a newsletter that goes out to all our alumni four times a year. It helps keep them informed, but we also get a pretty hefty number of job postings as a result of that.

How do you work with international students?
The international students are assertive. Within three months of graduation, 85% of the international students had employment, compared to 81% for U.S. students. We also put together a list of where all our international students have gone over the past five years, and we publish that on our intranet for students to see.

How do your services differ for part-time students?
Part-time students, in what's called the Flex program, have access to all of these services, but we're not as proactive with Flex students (see BW Online, 1/19/06, "The B-School Route to Career Change"). We'll wait for them to let us know that they're looking for a job. Many from that group are actually [already] working.