Brook Oliver, Sierra College Counselor, oversees the Sierra College Internship Program and directs the district career services program called Career Connections.  A unique feature of Career Connections is a database of employer contacts to assist students with career information.  She also has developed the marketing of her programs through college partnerships and student connections.

Tell Us About Yourself?
I have enjoyed a “roundtrip ticket” to Sierra College. As a Sierra College student, I worked in the Sierra College’s Career Center. I enjoyed the work and made the decision to become a college counselor. I completed my B.A. at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo and I began work with the Private Industry Council, providing career services to at-risk teens and adults. I moved to the Bay Area and continued my education with a Master’s Degree in Counseling at Cal State East Bay. I became a “freeway flier” with a variety of part-time positions until finally settling into a full-time disability counselor position. My husband and I moved back to Sacramento in 2001, where I was hired as a Career Counselor at Sierra College.

Tell us about your responsibilities as Coordinator of Career Connections?
I direct the career services programs for the Sierra Community College District, which includes campuses in Rocklin, Roseville, Grass Valley and Truckee. The district encompasses 3200 square miles, and it is one of the largest geographical areas for a California community college district. Since our students are so spread out, I needed to develop a program with online resources for all of our students to access. These resources include online career exploration resources (Choices and Eureka), an ever-expanding webpage and an online job posting and mentor database with contacts for students to connect to employers and local professionals. I also developed a variety of job search resource hand-outs for all the campuses. The career services program is called Career Connections, since there is such a strong component of “connecting” students to careers and employers, replacing the emphasis on a “center” to physically visit.

What is a unique feature of Career Connections?
One unique feature of Career Connections is our emphasis on student-employer interaction. We work very hard to have students ‘check out’ their perceptions of a career through informational interviews, job shadows and internships. We maintain a database of hundreds of employers who are available to talk to students about careers in their field. Since all of the career classes require the students to complete an informational interview, the students are fortunate to have this resource. Many of these employers are also available for job shadowing, internships, class presentations and career fairs.

Career Connections uses College Central to offer an online job database, Sierra Job Link (in which our Mentor Network is also housed). An increasingly important part of the career program is to keep placement statistics and to develop ties to faculty to gain statistics of placement referrals from all of the departments. Accountability through statistics and tracking student outcomes is becoming more important, so our department is now focusing more on collecting job placement statistics.

Tell me about your partnership with Career and Technical Education programs?
Career Connections has strong ties throughout campus, but especially with the CTE-related departments. I currently chair the CTE (Career & Technical Education) committee, which meets monthly to develop and implement plans and goals using VTEA and TechPrep funds. This partnership and involvement has been very favorable to the development of our program and services, especially in procuring funding for our computer lab, job posting service and internship program. I also oversee a staff of VTEA-funded high school outreach consultants to help our CTE programs connect with high schools through presentations, delivering marketing materials and coordinating CTE-related events.

How do you market your services to the students?
We are always looking to grow our student email database, which is maintained through Sierra Job Link. In order to get more students registered, we use bookmarks, posters, CCTV ads and our webpage. In addition, the CTE committee has developed a survey to ask the students’ perspectives about their programs as well as their educational goals and career needs. The survey also asks employment information, salary information and whether the employment is major-related. All of this information is important for tracking learning and program outcomes. The survey is given in each Capstone CTE class and there are both paper and online versions available. We also collect email addresses using the survey which allows Career Connections to market and offer our services to these students.

If you are interested in Sierra Colleges Career Connections programs and resources, please contact:
Brook Oliver
Coordinator, Career Connections/Internships
Sierra College
Website: www.sierracollege.edu/careerconnections
916.789.2942