Looking for a place to improve a job resume? BYU Career Studio is the place to visit.
The Career Studio, located east of the bowling alley in the Wilkinson Center, helps BYU students look at different career options, improve resumes, write cover letters and more. Students seeking advice can make an appointment online or over the phone.
Justin Jones, director of the Career Studio, has been at BYU for seven years and has been doing career-related work for over 25 years. He said that the studio is a creative space to craft your future career.
“If you're not sure what it is that you want to do, we can help you look at different career options,” Jones said. “We can help you look at yourself a little bit through some assessment.”
Students meeting in-person and online can receive help from a career studio mentor. They can receive help writing cover letters, practicing interviews and understanding how job-finding sites, like Linkedin and Handshake, work.
“We're trying to help people to actually take their experience and what they have and translate that into actually getting hired,” Ethan McMullen, a student career mentor, said.
Help is not just limited to in-person meetings. Resources that are available online at the career services website include resume templates, sample resumes by college, Clifton Strengths assessment for students and more.
As a benefit, the Clifton Strengths Finder from BYU Career Services only costs $13, much less than the usual cost. Students can also meet with a strengths coach on campus for free.
"If you were to pay for that elsewhere, it would be quite expensive, but we do it for free," Jones said.
Reese Penrod, the user design experience designer at the Career Studio, spoke on how the website is easily accessible for students.
“There's one click scheduling with career studios, mentors and career mentors,” Penrod said. “We have tons of examples of resumes for specific majors. We have guidelines for cover letters. We have different job listing websites, different strength assessments, major exploration, networking and the big one is career fairs as well.”
Jones said the biggest challenge for the Career Studio is that a lot of students don’t know that the service exist.
“We have over, you know, 30,000 students on campus,” Jones said. “And honestly, our reach is about 11%, which is really good for a Career Center, but I would love for us to be able to help more students.”
Speaking on the future of the career studios, Jones said he has been working over the summer on a new AI chatbot called CosmoBot.
“What's cool about it is you can ask the bot questions just like you're asking me, and we feed it all of our information and all of our best tips,” Jones said. “So it's something that you could use 24/7, so I'm excited about that, the use of AI and how it can enhance what we’re doing.”
McMullen was able to test out CosmoBot by giving it his resume and asking it to help him make it look better.
“I felt like Cosmo Bot was very good with formatting,” McMullen said.
The AI chatbot is expected to be released in beta this fall.
Jones said the Career Studio is a great place to come and start focusing on the future.
“Our services are free and everybody wants a job, so if you want a better chance of getting a job, you should come visit,” McMullen said.
To learn more about the Career Studio and to schedule an appointment, visit the Career Service website.