By Kiana Dulan | Staff Writer<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Sept 17th, KCC\u2019s Employment Prep Center<\/a> will host the first statewide virtual career fair with volunteers from all seven community college campuses. This event will take place from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., with the first hour being a keynote event about the future of Hawai\u02bbi\u2019s jobs. Registration ended yesterday, on Sept. 15, but supplemental presentations and handouts such as ‘Tips for Writing an Effective Resume’ and ‘Job Fair Success Strategies’ can be found at the University of Hawai\u02bbi’s Community Colleges Virtual Career Fair website<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n During the Spring 2020 semester when the pandemic just started, <\/span>O\u02bbahu\u2019s community colleges hosted their first virtual job fair<\/span><\/a>. Because unemployment rates were increasing, the Employment Center wanted to do something for students because they were losing their jobs. The hospitality and tourism industry was not hiring, so employers in areas such as finance, medicine, customer service, and marketing were present at the spring\u2019s job fair. There will be 31 organizations present at this career fair in industries<\/span>\u00a0such as transportation, STEM, public services, non-profits, the environment, creative arts, and agriculture & forestry. A full list of these organizations can be found <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n Because a lot of planning happens behind these events, the EPC had to decide to have a virtual career fair by July. EPC\u2019s Interim Coordinator Su Lazo expected to coordinate a virtual fair once the amount of COVID-19 cases started expanding into the triple digits.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “You don\u02bbt know other people\u2019s apprehensions and anxieties when it comes to COVID,\u201d Lazo said. \u201cYou want people to have access to employers in the most comfortable setting, and we want to protect their health and safety of everybody, so virtual just seems the best option for us right now.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Lazo did not find it difficult to coordinate and transition from an in-person to an online event mostly because she already had participated in virtual workshops. Some of the tasks for in-person career fairs are the same such as inviting and reaching out to employers, so the EPC had a foundation to transition to an online event. <\/span><\/p>\n However, there were still challenges to learn from the spring virtual job fair. Breakout rooms proved tedious, so students will instead be able to hop in and out of 31 virtual meetings going on at the same time. Each virtual “booth” will have a UHCC facilitator that will man the booth to support the employer, and participants will be able to jump back and forth between sessions, similar to an in-person event. The EPC made a virtual booth guide, which has Zoom links and ID\u2019s for each meeting. This guide will be updated by Thursday morning and emailed to those who have registered for the event.<\/span><\/p>\n