The Future of Campus Placement and Role of a Placement Officer - II
- Tejas Subrahmanya
- Feb 7, 2016
- 4 min read
I believe you have been following the blog on the future of campus placements and the role of a placement officer in a university.
In this blog, I will describe the role of a Placement Officer in detail, and the beginning of the change that will need to be incorporated into the University academic system.
The Placement Officer’s Traditional Role:
The traditional role of a placement officer begins when the students of a particular batch are in the final year of their course. Given that many universities and colleges follow a semester system, in the traditional placement process, the role of a placement officer assumes significance when the students are in the odd semester – 3rd semester for Master’s Degree programs, 7th semester for engineering based programs and 5th semester for other graduate programs.
This is when the students are interested in getting placed, and are working on their project dissertations that are based on developing solutions to real life problems. The students would have also completed their major lines of study, and would be preparing to take on specialized subjects in their course of study, and these would build upon the foundation courses they had undertaken during their previous semesters or years.
The Placement Officer then takes up a list of students would be willing to take part in the institution’s placement / career services process. The Placement Officer would then help the students in preparing their resumes, ensuring that the resumes of all the students are uniform, in layout and varying in content based on their experience and specialized subjects they studied.
To do this, the placement officer organizes appropriate workshops for the students’ benefits – like resume writing, interview attending, mock interviews, mock group discussions, and others.
The placement officer then prepares a placement brochure that is printed and circulated among numerous companies across the country, inviting them to be part of the placement drive at their institution. Many companies visit these institutions in order to recruit a large number of students, who would be joining them at the entry level, because of the firms’ expansion plans.
The placement officer’s performance is rated by the number of students he / she has been able to place in the year. I believe this is a very crude way to measure the performance of the placement officer, because the metric used does not make sense. Placement is a collective effort, that takes years of sweat, blood and tears to achieve.
Anyways, let us not get into debating whether this is the best way to measure the placement officer’s performance. Let us get back to the task at hand.
In the preceding section, I described the Placement Officer’s traditional role, something that I was also involved in at the start of my academic career.
In the changed scenario, the role of the University and institution gains paramount importance. The first and foremost thing that the management of the University or institution should do is to write a LinkedIn policy for recruitment.
The LinkedIn Policy for recruitment for a University or institution would focus on the use of LinkedIn to showcase the students’ talent right from the day they join the institution. The Policy shall also spell out the placement process using LinkedIn and the creation and maintenance of the Institution’s LinkedIn Page.
An example of a University’s LinkedIn Policy could be as given below:
As an institution of excellence in higher education, … University strives to provide the best resource to its students. In this endeavour, the University focuses on creating and maintaining its LinkedIn Page, and ensuring that students also create and maintain similar pages. These would be used to provide online placement / career services to students.
This above is only an example, and each institution can develop a policy to suit its needs.
The role of the placement office then gets defined because this role begins right from the day the student joins the university, not when the student becomes eligible for placement services.
The new roles and responsibilities of the placement / career services officer can be summarized as given below. Again, these serve only as guidelines, and the concerned university or institution will have to decide on how to go about doing this. However, overall, the roles and responsibilities will follow the guidelines given below.
Help students develop a LinkedIn Page and have these linked to the University / Institution page.
Update the University / Institution LinkedIn Page with updates about the institution, like faculty achievements, student achievements, institution’s plans and collaborations, and new programs.
Help the students as well as faculty members create and maintain their respective LinkedIn pages.
Ensure that the students’ pages are in sync with the institution’s pages.
Engage the students from the day they join till the day they graduate from the institution.
These are only a few of the responsibilities of the placement / career services officer.
The skills required of the officer would be as follows.
A graduate in any field, with a Post-graduation in Business Management.
Excellent communication skills – written and verbal and negotiation skills.
A certification in digital marketing with hands-on knowledge of SEO, SEM and SMM.
Hands-on experience in using content management solutions and website development
Knowledge of functioning of academic institutions and placement process.
Keep watching this space. I will be updating with more information.
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