Engineering Career Fair blossoming into bigger event

Spring semester’s Engineering Career Fair at Arizona State University was the largest yet.

About 2,250 students and 335 representatives from more than 100 companies participated in the recent job-recruitment event organized by the Career Center in ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Major corporations such as Amazon.com, American Express, General Dynamics, General Motors, Intel and Raytheon sent recruiters. Others included Microsoft, Microchip Technology, ON Semiconductor, Owens-Corning, PepsiCo, Orbital Sciences and Texas Instruments.

They were joined by recruiters from dozens of mid-size and small companies from throughout the country.

Representatives of many of the companies later conducted an estimated 500 or more interviews with individual students who attended the Career Fair.

“Our goal is for ASU to become one of the top sources of talent for these companies, and now it is looking like that is starting to happen,” says Career Center director Robin Hammond.

The event has been growing steadily since the university’s engineering schools held its first Career Fair in 2008 and drew recruiters from 40 companies.

Its increasing success since then is reflected in the number of students outside of engineering – and even outside of ASU – who are participating.

Hammond says the event has been attracting more science, business and information technology majors, along with students from California and New Mexico as well as the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University.

Participation in the fall semester Engineering Career Fair is likely to exceed that of the spring semester.
The latter part of the year is when companies tend to ramp up recruiting efforts, says Lauren Majure, industry relations coordinator for the engineering schools’ Career Center.

More than 100 ASU engineering students – including members of 16 engineering student clubs – and almost 60 engineering schools’ staff members helped manage and coordinate this semester’s Career Fair activities.

A group of industrial engineering students even mapped out logistics for the event, developing plans for traffic flow and a process for orderly and efficient introductions between students and company recruiters.

In addition to growing participation in recruiting fairs, the number of students taking advantage of the Career Center’s résumé-review services has doubled in the past two years, while participation in the center’s career-planning workshops increased almost 70 percent in that time period.

The center is also increasing its ranks of “career peer coaches” and industry partners who provide students career-preparation assistance.