Career Assistance by Technical Training Institutes: Myth or Reality?

In more than thirty years of crafting resumes, cover letters, and other documents targeting career advancement, we have witnessed a specific trend that emerges time and again during floundering economies. Seeking reinvention of their core competencies leading to broader career opportunities, a good portion of our client base streams out of vocational/technical institutions, recently graduated and eager to attain placement in their new industry of choice.  These hopefuls span the gamut of the more mature employee displaced from the industry in which she had previously realized success, to the younger, college-age applicant who eschewed a more traditional university education in favor of a focused technical training program.

With these institutes providing career-entry resources such as resume preparation and promising assistance in terms of career placement — all of which is covered under the umbrella of tuition — why do these graduates seek our services?

Time and again, we have heard the same story from this particular client population: although the education may have been of quality and is usually cutting-edge, the schools have provided but minimal assistance in facilitating their graduates’ admission into the work force. Our clients are, alternately, disillusioned, hurt, disgusted, angry, and threatening to sue for breech of verbal contract.  Note, please, the word “verbal.”  While the schools are careful to be precise in the wording of their promotional material (literature, websites, etc.) as to what, specifically, career placement assistance means, it is a different story upon the students’ initial orientation to the school.

Training institutions are businesses as much as they are places of learning, and must run profitably in order to stay in business.  Therefore, representatives of the schools present their institutions in their best light to any and all prospective students.  This is the light that bathes the students as they progress through the program, and it grows brighter (at least, in the students’ minds) as the tunnel begins to near its end at graduation day.

Career counselors employed by these types of schools are, simultaneously, attempting to write or assist in writing resumes for hundreds of graduates while enticing hundreds more as yet “unsigned” to enter within their halls.  In this mad juggle to “serve two masters,” balls get dropped and those balls bear the names of the people about to graduate (their tuition, after all, has already been secured, but the funds of would-be students have not).  Many graduates find that resumes prepared by their schools are either cookie cutter generic or written primarily by themselves; by and large, these resumes do not work.  Imagine attempting to enter a specific job market where every recent graduate is submitting essentially the same resume, including the exact same layout!  No wonder the resumes are not effective.

To open any door with a resume, one must take the time, and possess the experience, to write the document in a manner that is accurate and yet, interesting to prospective employers.  Graduates face a particular conundrum as they have been trained in specific fields but have no practical experience; how then, can they put forth their knowledge and budding skills on a resume?  A professional resume writing service operating out of physical office locations, such as Objective: Resumes has for over thirty years, offers face-to-face consultations in which meaningful dialogs between the client (job seeker) and the resume writer (job facilitator) reveal the most relevant information as well as which aspects of the clients’ background to downplay, and result in the creation of a resume that highlights those elements in a manner that is most attractive to potential employers.

Having spent hard-earned money on a quality training program, it makes sense to invest in a resume written by writers with a wealth of experience, not harried career counselors wearing too many hats and constrained to uphold the school’s ultimate mission of increasing the student body and thereby, its revenue stream.