1. Vision
Empowering current undergraduate students and alumni by providing optimal and comprehensive career development services, assisting them to get employment or job creation opportunities and establishing strategic partnerships with employers and organizations in order to attain the graduates career goals.
2. Mission
Career Development Center (CDC here after) at Hawassa University is committed to assist students in making connections between their academics experience & Career Path. Provide counseling, trainings, industry & alumni connections to optimize internships & job opportunities.
3. Introduction
The life of a student is an important and dynamic component of tertiary education experience. This is because it provides the students with an opportunity to develop not only academically, but also socially. It is important to note that universities have a responsibility as part of the wholistic education of their graduates to prepare students for eventual entry into the work force or entrepreneurship.
Regardless of recent growth in the access of tertiary education in Ethiopia, there remains a large gap in turning the increased output of first degree graduates into a professional workforce. Although there is a shortage of professional jobs, those that exist are not being fully accessed by new graduates. The youth graduating from universities are facing an increasingly stiff competition to find scarce jobs. In addition, there are gaps in the professionalism of new university graduates who are on the threshold of accepting responsibilities as tomorrow’s leaders.
It is common knowledge that the average graduates with an undergraduate degree do not receive any formal guidance on how to enter and succeed at the job market including on where and how to look for jobs. In addition, our graduates might not have developed job hunting techniques, CV writing and interview skills, etc. This shows that new graduates enter the job market unprepared for the pressures and challenges of transitioning from world of education to world of work. Generally, due to the absence of career guidance opportunities, it can be assumed that new graduates do not market themselves to their full potential and that they will find the job search process more difficult than it needs to be.
Hence, this document proposes to fill that gap by providing technical support to establish Career Development Center (CDC) that will provide counseling and training to first degree graduating class students to get jobs and succeed at the competitive jobs' market. This is to mean that an effective CDC whose strategies include counseling services, student-industry linkages, apprenticeships, job fairs/expos, recruitments, venture capitals and graduate-tracker services has a critical role to play in this regard.