Career Advisor

Overview:
**Term: 18 months**

Career Advisors support students and/or alumni to identify and achieve their career and employment goals. They help them to identify their values, needs and skills and use this information to seek out, engage in, and extract meaning from a wide variety of experiences. Each career advisor tends to work closely with a particular group of learners, such as undergraduate students, graduate students, students who wish to pursue professional or graduate school and/or alumni. There are opportunities to specialize within the role in areas such as career indecision or change, continuing education, navigating the co-op process, career curriculum development, peer advising supervision, etc.

**Responsibilities**:
Support students and/or alumni in employment, career decision-making and strategy, further education, and/or co-op and work-integrated learning (WIL) contexts
- Develop strong, supportive advising relationships that are adaptable to people from all identities and experiences
- Cultivate trust with people in one-on-one environments, centering attention on the values and needs of the person seeking service and creating an environment that encourages the development of self-efficacy, resilience, and career optimism
- Facilitate reflection through active listening and interviewing skills to help people identify and synthesize self-information for use in a variety of career, employment, and further education settings
- Capably help people to find and access the tools and resources that will help them identify and/or pursue their priorities and goals
- Support people to understand and navigate sometimes-opaque employment and institutional systems
- Facilitate learning through group advising, workshops, webinars, presentations, events and resources to meet student/alumni needs, customized to the audience (e.g., specific associations/academic programs; in and outside of the classroom)
- Guide people in accessing and using labour market and other sources of information to build their understanding of the world of work
- Plan and run effective, tailored career
- and employment-related events
- Enhance programming for prospective and pre-arrival students across campus

Strengthen on-campus reputation as source of curricular and co-curricular career learning and growth
- Support other on-campus Advisors in developing best practices-aligned services encompassing career education
- Coach other on-campus Advisors on a case-by-case basis to enable effective career supports
- Build relationships with campus colleagues to educate on referral processes, resources, and train-the-trainer opportunities
- Build or facilitate access to career resources that anticipate and target campus partners’ needs in supporting students

Deliver inclusive career education in partnership with CCA’s stakeholders
- Design creative approaches to supporting and guiding a community of students and/or alumni in career, employment, further education, cooperative education and/or other experiential education settings
- Ground career development approaches in contemporary career education and student development theories (e.g., Narrative, Design Thinking, Active Engagement, Planned Happenstance, Career Construction)
- Maintain awareness of current career development issues and labour market trends
- Develop and maintain a thorough knowledge of other University of Waterloo and community resources
- Develop training and tools for fellow Career Advisors; share expertise; support cross-training
- Support Faculty personnel (instructors and academic advisors) to develop their confidence and depth of understanding of how to facilitate effective career and co-op conversations
- Influence stakeholder perspectives on career education, such as: the value and pervasiveness of non-linear pathways, emerging labour market trends, relevant career development theories/metaphors
- Collaborate with the Faculty Relations Managers and the Career Education Strategy and Communication Specialist to develop effective storytelling for clients
- Educate and support student-staff and other student and alumni leaders/influencers in employment topics; collaborate on targeted events (in person and online)
- Promote awareness and understanding of CCA (e.g., through student orientation, outreach)

Bring functional leadership to key service(s) and portfolio(s). Areas of impact could include:

- Alumni
- Partner with Waterloo alumni, often in time-limited situations, to find or create meaningful work and learning opportunities
- Career Exploration and Decision Making
- Support clients through individual and group engagement methods to deepen student/alumni self-awareness
- This portfolio may provide the opportunity to meet clinical experience requirements for College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO)
- Undergraduate and Co-op Employment Advising
- Support students to gain employment (resumes, cover letters, managing online presence, work se