A lot of people ask us, “Where do you find all the companies and jobs that you write about?” We’ve already told you about how we use Google, magazine lists, and television to find jobs, but we have a few other tricks up our sleeves as well. One is blogs - we use them a lot. Some of the most useful blogs are those published by career services offices at colleges and universities. They’re full of great tips and excellent entry-level job and internship opportunities. Although the blogs are usually geared towards the students of the school, they’re open to the public.
All of the sites we’ve included on our list of the Top 10 College Career Service Blogs are of great quality, but there weren’t too many blogs that we left off the list. That begs the question: Why aren’t more career services offices blogging? Is it lack of student interest? Many career services offices offer newsletters through e-mail, and some of these are published online, but why not use a blog for updates? It’s really easy to do, and it’s a much more flexible form of communication. We hope to see more career services offices pick up blogging. They can take a lead from the blogs listed below.
The career services professionals at the University of Washington have been around the blogging block, and it shows. The Husky Career Blog is beautifully designed, updated often, and at the cutting edge of how career services offices can use the Internet to connect with students (they even just joined Twitter). The blog has a great mix of posts about jobs and internships, career advice, and student perspectives. We love that they get students involved with writing posts, and that they put a face with a name by including a small photo of the staff member who wrote each post. The Husky Career Blog is far and away the best career services blog out there. If you’re a career services professional who is thinking about blogging (or who is already blogging), use the Husky Career Blog as a model for success.
2. University of Oregon Career Center Blog
The University of Oregon Career Center Blog is all about business. It is no frills, no advice, and regrettably no personality. So why are they ranked #2 on our list? Because their blog is great for what it is - a tool to disseminate information. They mention a ton of job and internship opportunities every week with their Cool Internships and Hot Jobs posts. They also keep students up to date by publicizing all of their events on the blog. We’d love the see the University of Oregon Career Center break out of their shell and spice up their blog, but we have to say that the blog is getting the job done without the frills. We’ve found quite a few of the companies that we’ve featured here and on One Day, One Internship through the University of Oregon Career Center Blog.
Speaking of the University of Oregon and getting down to business, the Lundquist College of Business at the University of Oregon also has its own career services blog. This one is much more interactive and includes advice along with job and internship opportunities.
These two blogs make a great tag team.
3. University of Missouri-Kansas City Career Services Blog
The UMKC Career Services Blog is mostly advice based. They feature plenty of jobs and internships on their main career services site, so they’ve excluded that from the blog. Our favorite part is the Ask Kasey category (get it? Ask KC) where students send in questions that get answered by career services staff members. The blog looks great, and is updated often. We think the UMKC Career Center might want to try enabling comments on the blog. Any advice based blog should promote open discussion and encourage student interaction with career services.
4. University of California Irvine Career Center Blog
The UCI Career Center Blog has a great mix of posts. They give advice, share resources, feature jobs, and announce events. With such a mix, you might think that they lack focus, but they don’t. The posts are insightful, well written, and should be of great help to college job searchers. The blog seems to be a relatively new project, but it looks great, and we hope that they keep it up. The blog had 15 posts in April, and has only had 1 in June. We hope that’s just part of a Summer slowdown. UCI is one of the few career services blogs that uses tagging, which we think is slightly better for navigation than categories are. That’s why we use tagging too.
5. Ithaca College - Opportunity Knocks
IC’s Opportunity Knocks blog is another career services blog that is light on advice and heavy on announcements. Any time there is news from the career services office, you should be able to find it on the blog. They even used it to promote a contest where a student won a laptop. That’s a great way to get college kids engaged with a career services office! We’d love to see more insights from Ithaca’s career services experts on the blog, but we still think that they’re doing a great job.
6. Lawrence University Career Center Blog
Lawrence University Career Center’s blog has some of the best content that we’ve seen on a career services blog. You have to love a blog that puts out post titles like Sex and the City Career Lessons (even if you don’t love Sex and the City) and Unethical Interview Questions: What Are They and How Can I Handle Them? Although the design is pretty simplistic, the quality of writing and the topics covered make it worthwhile for any college job seeker to read. They’ve been around since March ‘07, so there’s already plenty of content to keep you entertained, and the blog is updated often, so there’s always more coming.
7. North Dakota State University Career Center Blog
The NDSU Career Center Blog has been around for over a year and is filled with great job search tips and tricks. Occasionally the blog posts are specific to NDSU, but for the most part it’s loaded with excellent general career advice. We really like the NDSU site, but we wonder why it’s not hosted on the NDSU.edu domain name. It would certainly make the blog a little bit easier to find. One other thing that we love about the NDSU Career Center Blog is that they occasionally introduce Career Center staff through the blog. Many college students don’t use career services because they don’t know the staff. This is a good way to approach that problem.
The Hendrix Job Blog is full of pithy posts with lots of value. Many of the posts include a short commentary with a link out to an article. Others focus on specific jobs and internships that should be of interest to the Hendrix community, and may be of interest to you. The Hendrix Job Blog is updated at least a couple times a month, so be sure to keep an eye on it.
9. Indiana University Career Center Staff Blog
The Indiana University Career Center Staff Blog is only updated about twice a month, but the posts are usually worth the wait because they’re full of great advice from IU’s career services pros. The UI (user interface) of the IU blog could use a bit of work, though, as it’s hard to navigate posts (there are no categories or tags). This is a great start for the IU Career Center, but we’d love for them to blog more often and improve the design for usability.
10. University of Michigan School of Information Career Services Blog
If it weren’t for the fact that the University of Michigan School of Information is a graduate program, the UMich SI Career Services Blog would rank higher on our list. It’s full of all kinds of great information, and much of it is relevant to undergraduate job searchers.
That rounds out our list of the Top 10 College Career Services Blogs. These career services offices are at the forefront of using web technology to interact with their job seeking students. We’d love to see many more join their ranks. One of the best ways to encourage more blogging from career services is to ask for it. If your college’s career services office doesn’t have a blog, ask them why not and share this list with them.
We know that students are increasingly relying on blogs for information, but they often forget to participate in the conversations on blogs. 6 of 10 of the career services blogs on this list allow comments, but none of them seem to have an active commenter base. This could show a lack of student interest; however, we’ve got great traffic numbers here at One Day, One Job and we see very few comments (unless of course we’re giving away a Gilt Groupe invite). If you’re a college job searcher who is reading a career services blog, be sure to thank the staff for their insights by leaving a comment. It will encourage them to keep blogging.
Finally, if you know of a great career services blog, please leave a comment with a link to it. If you’re a career services professional who wants to get started blogging, but doesn’t know how, send us an e-mail at info@onedayonejob.com. We’d love to help you out.
Tags: career services, rankings
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I’ll tell you why they don’t… but you know why I think.
The career offices are understaffed… and blogging doesn’t help them reach some of the bizarre objectives the school places on them, like revenue generation.
Plus, academia worries about risk. What happens if someone leaves a negative comment? What happens if we say something we get sued for?
Thanks for putting together this list of mavericks!
[...] Top 10 College Career Services Blogs - Willy Franzen gives an interesting list of College Career Services Blogs. Good forward to send to Career Service offices to think about new ways of reaching their audience. [...]
This is very helpful
cute. i don’t think they see how valuable a blog can be but boy, they are:)
Thank you for commenting on the Fox School of Business Blog. I have been taking some time to look through the blogs that made it on your Top 10 list. Pretty interesting to see what other schools are doing. We have been pretty successful with our blog, and while we dont get too many students to comment, we know that it is being read by their feedback in classes, workshops, and our analytics.
Thanks for all of the useful information on your site!