COOP enhances job connections
Caroline Wakelin, SFU Business coop, 778.782.7266, carose@sfu.ca
Stephen Spector, 778.782.3637, sspector@sfu.ca
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035
When it comes to looking for work in tough economic times, it helps to have connections, and SFU co-operative (coop) education students are now better connected to B.C.’s top financial employers.
Stephen Spector, an SFU Business lecturer, says students stand to reap better benefits from coop’s long-standing relationship with the Certified General Accountants Association (CGA-BC) now that the organization is recruiting more aggressively.
Spector, a CGA Fellow and the new CGA-BC president, says the provincial organization has enhanced its Partners-in-Employment Program to connect coop students with the hottest CGA employers.
The program now facilitates face-to-face interviews between employers and graduating students and offers employers a training subsidy of up to $1200 for each student hired.
Students can also now find jobs in CGA public-practice firms and private industry through this program.
Until now SFU coop’s relationship with the CGA-BC only helped students find jobs with traditional accounting firms through major job-posting web sites such as Monster.com and Workopolis.com. Only SFU graduates who had become CGA-BC members had direct access to the organization’s hottest job list, CGAjobs.org, advertising positions with more than 100 of the province’s most successful financial institutions.
“This has never been done before, and for the first time these employers can recruit on campus because of our program’s enhancements,” explains Spector. “This is exclusively about bringing jobs to campus. Anywhere in the province, if we have a partner, we can provide those employers with direct access to graduating students, top candidates whom they had no way of getting to before.”
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