The University of Florida’s Career Connections Center serves more than 57,000 students and thousands of alumni representing all majors and degree levels. The Center is a centralized, comprehensive unit providing a diverse range of services to connect job seekers to employers and vice versa. The Career Connections Center staff facilitates recruiting efforts to ensure easy access to UF talent for entry level or experienced positions.

In addition, the Career Connections Center:

• Is nationally recognized as the #2 career center by Best Colleges in the support of students, employers and alumni spanning all majors, degree levels, and industries.
• Serves as a hub with experts and connectors to unify the university community, connecting with over 200 faculty and staff to transform career development at UF.
• Employs 14 certified career and recruitment coaches dedicated to aid employers in developing custom campus-wide recruiting strategies and networks to reach desired candidates.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is becoming increasingly intertwined in the job market, building skills in this area can give you a competitive advantage for a successful job search. The University of Florida’s Career Connections Center is dedicated to ensuring students are prepared with competencies to engage with AI by the time they graduate.  The center's commitment to AI education includes:

• Hiring an AI-specific career coach to work within the center.
• Onboarding Quinncia, an AI program designed to improve student engagement with career services.
• Partnering with the UF AI Academic Initiative to engage with industries for talent acquisition.

First-time Gators may have noticed two new holds on their accounts this semester. These are part of the Career Prep process — a newly implemented program to encourage career exploration and professional development.

 “It's the university's commitment to students' professional growth,” said Angel Iverson, director for career foundations in the Division of Student Life Career Connections Center. “There are many partners at UF who are working collaboratively to ensure students are aware of all the opportunities in front of them.”  

Holds began appearing for students in their first semester at UF — including transfer, readmitted or traditional first-year students — on June 28, but they will not prevent registration until March 2023.

The Career Prep process is split into two steps and, in total, takes about 45 minutes to complete.

The Career Connections Center has began to partner with colleges to create field-specific career fairs. In the past these fairs were hosted by the department themselves. By using the center, colleges are able to maximize the impact of these fairs for students. The center’s platform allows for a larger hosting space and greater access to employers.

Students who attend one or multiple of this fall’s fairs will hopefully find themselves in a tailored networking environment, as the pool of actual employers will be smaller and more catered toward a specific discipline. The limited size of the fairs will also reduce wait times when it comes to talking with each employer.

Career Pathways is a new initiative designed around creating avenues for students to explore beyond their declared majors and learn about a variety of different career fields using related skills sets. This initiative includes customizable career development programming and resources, allowing students to choose from six groups of related industries. The model enables students to explore groups of related industries. 

The six Career Pathways — science, technology, engineering and mathematics; arts, communications, media and marketing; healthcare and health science; business, public service and tourism; human services, consulting and education; and architecture, manufacturing, natural resources and agriculture — were identified based on the 16 career clusters outlined by O*Net and grouped together based on which industries shared common knowledge and skills.  

Student Social Capital Opportunities

At the Career Connections Center we see social media as an extension to our programming. We hope social media can shape and influence how students learn and interact with the center through social learning. 

Social learning is active learning, which means that students participate directly in their own learning rather than passively absorbing information. 

Our social media is meant to be a repository of information. This year we experimented with Reddit and Discord. These are platforms that are not used by official university accounts. We found great success using these platforms. Here at the center we believe we should go to were the students are engaging.

1. Accounting
2. Business Management and Administration
3. Retail

Fairs

• UF Law Virtual Private Sector Networking Night
• Chomp the Vote - Public Policy Showcase
• Fall 2021 Industrial & Systems Engineering Career Fair

• Fall 2021 Agricultural and Biological Engineering Career Fair
• Fall 2021 Materials Science and Nuclear Engineering Fair
• UF Law Big 4 Tax Networking Event

The Career Connections Center is National Recognized and Locally Engaged: 

12 Conference presentations

4 Awards

9 Committees national and regional

18 Campus committees

3 Gainesville committees

1 Student success coach

1 Staff teaching UF courses

3 Staff featured in publications

2 Campus organization advisors

1 University multicultural mentor