These are some of the more common questions about the Career Management Center; we decided to put them together in a blog post. If you have any questions regarding these or any other topics, please contact your Career Counselor.
About the Career Management Center
The Career Management Center at IE is an active member of the MBA Career Services Council and the MBA Career Services for Working Professionals Alliance which is an alliance of the top 32 business schools recognized for providing outstanding career services to alumni and executive students. Within that, IE’s Career Management center is considered among the top in international recruiting.
What are the roles of the Career Management Center?
The Career Management Center’s number one mission is to improve students’ employability. In order to do this, it works to promote an everlasting relationship among the members of the IE community, facilitating a common platform of business, career development and lifelong learning opportunities, with the objective to propel personal and professional development of IE students and alumni, in accordance with the principles and values of IE.
Nevertheless, the Career Management Center does not place students in jobs. It’s not about that. It’s about providing students and alumni with tools and resources and a very robust career education. Then it’s up to the students to perform well in the interviews, to prepare themselves well, to write strong cover letters, to do an internship to help lay the groundwork if they’re interested in a career change. The Career Management Center is here to support students and assist them with these necessary steps. However, it’s up to students to secure their own opportunities.
Tools and Resources Provided by the Career Management Center
The Career Management Center offers very similar services of Career Education to IE students.
Career Pre-Program
The Career Management Center provides a career pre-program. Approximately one month before students start studying at IE, they are sent something along the lines of a career portfolio. Through the pre-program, once students come on campus, they can start to concentrate more on the academic content because they are immediately going to be overloaded on the academic side or their core program.
Career Self-Assessment Tools
Students start working on Career Leader and self-assessment tests. Career Leader is a company founded by Dr. Jim Waldroop who was Director of Career Services at Harvard Business School for nearly 18 years. He developed self-assessment tools for HBS students and discovered that this would be useful for business school students worldwide. The Career Management Center has been using it for years and it really helps students to gain focus, to see where they get a score on their best career paths, what are the best work environments for them, what are their motivators. This is what they should be doing even before they arrive.
Identifying Potential Career Opportunities
Then students work on identifying potential career opportunities. A lot of it is in their court. They should be really doing the research to prepare themselves. Career Management Center provides them with all the tools so that they become their own strategic career managers. No matter how good a career advisor is, you should never leave your career in the hands of somebody else. Career Management Center provides students with skills and techniques that they’re going to carry with them throughout their entire lifetime, long after they graduate from IE.
CVs, Cover Letters and Career Marketing Plans
The Career Management Center suggests students to do their CVs, cover letters and a career marketing plan. Right in the beginning of their academic programs, students have an introduction at the Career Management Center session with their point-of-contact at the Career Management Center All students who receive Career Services are assigned to a key person at the Career Management Center Then they have one 60-minute appointment with their careers point-of-contact to ensure that they have their career portfolio documentation in order, their CVs and cover letters are all set. Right from the beginning, they can start applying to internships.
Meetings with the Career Management Team
Once they’ve had a 60-minute meeting with the assigned point of contact, they’re welcome to have a 30-minute focused appointment with another member of the Career Management Center team who might be more specialized in the sector or area of their interest. Then they have unlimited drop-in sessions that they can participate in. These sessions are posted on the IE Career portal so each student can see every member of the team, what their specializations are and drop in for brief 10-minute appointments. Somebody who is applying for international organizations can come in and see if their application for the UN is in order and the person here who specializes is the one who advises the students in that area and is also the person who is handling recruiting for those organizations.
Career Strategy Course
Career Management Services offers a course to MBA and Master in Management students called Career Strategy. For the IMBA program, there are 13 sessions on CV writing, cover letter writing, speed networking, managing career transitions, networking, piloting your career, career design and job hunting, interview skills, mock interviews, negotiating an offer and then we talk to them about the IE job bank which we give them access to, 3 months prior to graduation and all the services we provide to alumni lifelong.
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