The University of Windsor held its 'Career Expo and Job Fair' Wednesday at the Toldo Lancer Center field house, an opportunity exclusive to students and alumni to connect with potential employers.
The event featured booths from various industries including manufacturing, business, finance, government, and healthcare. Among those was one of North America's largest machine vision integrators, Vista Solutions. The Windsor-based company aimed to find, connect, and hire students interested in their full-time machine vision engineer role.
"Hiring students provides such a great satisfaction seeing students so early on in their career," said Bianca Lia, a representative of the company. "Teaching them everything that they need to know and just giving them that great job opportunity coming right from school, it's really satisfactory for us."
Lia advised students to make connections by visiting every booth, pitching yourself and your ideas, and to "shoot your shot", explaining that though it's scary, especially for first-time job fair attendees, "every employer is excited for you."
Business data analytics student Mubarakatu Adebayo attended the event with the goal of speaking to IT-related companies.
"The University of Windsor organizing something like this is really nice because now we get to speak to our potential clients physically," said Adebayo. "It's much more closer to speak to them than just going on websites like Indeed and just searching for jobs."
In addition to the fair, she emphasized working outside of schoolwork is beneficial to learn essential skills.
"I started working on individual projects. I am currently learning more about SQL, Python, and R. Those are skills I know that I would need when I want to start working," said Adebayo.
Scivarin Kharbanda, another student of the business data analytics program, said alongside the job fair, the university assists in other ways like helping build a solid resume and a compelling one-minute elevator pitch.
"If I get any interview, there are portals where I can sign in, ask for help, they could guide me, they could nudge me in the right direction," said Kharbanda. "Events like this are very crucial because you get to meet the recruiter face to face."
The University of Windsor's Career Expo and Job Fair was the perfect opportunity for students in search of career options, co-ops and internships, or an early start in their careers, to find and connect with industry professionals that are able to assist in tailoring their career paths and goals.
**this story was written by Lexi Saldana. Lexi is a student in the Fanshawe College journalism program, and is currently doing an internship with WindsorNewsToday.ca
