Offering a range of services, from internships to job fairs, résumé help to interview prep, the Santa Barbara City College Career Center helps prepare students for future success in myriad ways.
“When you come into college, there are literally hundreds of majors that you could choose from and thousands of different kinds of jobs, so one of our approaches is trying to simplify that for students as much as possible,” said SBCC Career Center Director Chris Phillips, who uses the “Guided Pathways” model to clarify a career path for students. “We try to help them make good, informed choices about their direction at the college.”
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To do so, the center helps students narrow down their major and then follows up with work-based learning content. “We bring employers to campus and we try to get them internships and have kind of a career awareness about what they’re going to do after their major,” he said.
With that end in mind, the center offers one-on-one academic counseling, workshops, career planning classes, and faculty collaborations. Two staff members focus on employers and one specializes in internships, even helping employers develop an internship program if they don’t have one. There’s also an online job and internship posting system exclusively for SBCC students.
The center works closely with the Office of Equity. “We are really trying to acknowledge the populations of our students who might not be getting this information,” said Phillips. “We want to really actively reach them and try to bring some more equity to the students when it comes to finding jobs and supporting all of our students. That’s really at the front and center of what we’re doing as a career center and as a college.”
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