SSU’s Business Career Center feeds employment pipeline

With continuing low unemployment rates across the North Bay Area, smart employers are building relationships with college students well before they graduate.

One place to do that is the School of Business and Economics Career Center programs at Sonoma State University which is thriving as a student-business matchmaker.

“Many companies looking for employees think short-term, and are not willing to develop the time for training. But providing internships and mentoring is really a cheap way for businesses to select employees,” said Sarah Dove, recently retired SSU business professor, and director of the Career Center.

Each year, the center partners students and businesses in about 300 internships and 100 professional mentorships.

“We place internships everywhere, in economics, finance, management, marketing, wine business and accounting,” Dove said. “It’s one of the best things we can offer students seeking extra career exposure.”

New this year, the career services has joined forces with the Accounting Forum, a club within the School of Business, which had been operating a separate internship program for 20 years under the auspices of part-time accounting instructor Joe Standridge.

The Accounting Forum helps place more than 100 students yearly in accounting positions in northern California, including PricewaterhouseCoopers, where SSU placed as many tax interns as UC Berkeley in 2015.

The student pipeline is “exceedingly good” Standridge said, with high GPA’s drawing other large companies such as KPMG, Deloitte Consulting, and Ernst and Young.

“The demand is incredible. There are more jobs than students. Right now there is a huge, huge demand,” he said. “It’s pretty crazy.”

And businesses are starting recruitment early. Beginning in their sophomore or even freshman year, students are “wined and dined” by the big firms and it’s not uncommon to have a job offer by their senior year.

“There’s a 99 percent chance if you do an internship you will get a job offer,” Standridge said.

For businesses to take advantage of the Career Service, Dove advises them to make themselves known on campus and become familiar to students.

“Students need to know who the company is. Create a presence on campus. Get your logo out there,” she said.

For small businesses that can’t afford to advertise or support the center in other ways, Dove suggests mentoring or providing an internship.

“It’s extremely affordable. If you want to hire our students, we will accommodate you,” said Standridge.

Salaries in accounting start at about $60,000 a year with three weeks vacation, but there are challenges, Standridge said. Accounting has a bad reputation of being boring, but it’s not just math, it’s more like a different language and has changed over the years with the advent of new technology.

“It’s not a 9-5 job, it’s a career. The hours can be tough, and it’s seasonal, which can be kind of extreme,” he said, however, often new employees will find a peer group of former SSU students within the company for support.

Maycee Cuevas is a senior at SSU, who has completed two internships with the international accounting firm KPMG and has been offered a full-time position as an audit assistant upon graduation in December.

KPMG gave her the experience of working internally with marketing and recruiting, and also externally with customer audits. It helped, she said, that she worked alongside former SSU graduates.

“It was nice to work with some classmates,” she said.

The Career Center got its start about 30 years ago, and its success is credited to recently retired SSU business instructor Duane Dove, and his wife, Sarah. Aside from instructing, Duane served as the director of the Career Center, and was instrumental in the initial stages of the program.

“The program was underfunded, but when the School of Business Economics got accredited, the school needed to start doing more to assist students in finding careers. That’s when the Career Center was started,” he said.

Sarah joined the center about 20 years ago, and noted back then the school had a reputation for operating in isolation, but that has changed in the last 15 years, and increasingly so.

“A huge part of the center’s effort is to develop relationships with local companies. The center gets the word out by reaching out to the community by networking at professional community meetings such as PASCO (Professional Association of Sonoma County),” she said.

Compared to the university’s Career Services, which serves to about 9,000 students, the SBE Career Center serves about 1,600.

“It’s a huge advantage as teachers to be in front of the students. They still respond best face to face, rather than by text or email,” Sarah Dove said.

Students also respond to recently graduated alumni who come back to share their experience, lending a great deal of credibility to the system, Dove said. They are also in a position to turn their company on to bring in other interns.

Cynthia Sweeney covers health care, hospitality, residential real estate, education, employment and business insurance. Reach her at Cynthia.Sweeney@busjrnl.com or call 707-521-4259.