Career, Opportunities, Research and Exploration (CORE), Augustana’s career development center, has recently launched a new website to provide easy access for students who are looking for guides to achieve their career goals.

Before, CORE online resources were located on the Handshake website.

“Handshake was just really hard to navigate and made it more difficult for students to access those resources,” Sophomore Abigail Campisi said. Campisi works in the career, development and vocation office, as an ambassador. 

As such, there was a demand for a new, more accessible website, in which students wouldn’t have to give up on furthering their education and career due to not being able to find the help they need.

According to CORE’s mission statement it is, “committed to providing students with the resources necessary to make informed decisions and achieve career success,” as well as “support student experiences that will help them to be successful during and after college for Augustana students starting on day one.” 

Laura Kestner-Ricketts is the executive director of CORE. She said the new website proves to help the team of CORE further fulfill its mission. 

“Career development is something that we want students to be able to access anywhere, anytime,” Kestner-Ricketts said. “Before we had the website, everything was under Handshake, which wasn’t really a website, but rather a place to hold documents. We wanted to make sure we had a much more dynamic website that is accessible to students.”

The new career planning website is not only just a copy of what was in Handshake, but there were many features that were added to make it more inclusive and tailored to students’ needs, according to Kestner-Ricketts.

“One of the new features we added in was the ability to look for resources by affinity and identities,” Kestner-Ricketts said. “For example, if you click “International Students,” there will be resources about OPT/CPT (employment for students under F1 visa), about how to obtain H1B visa (for foreign workers), and employers who would sponsor such visa. Say you’re a student with disabilities, we have the same thing. The new website just really helps students to locate resources that gear toward their identities.”

Students can now also look for resources specifically towards their major and career path. 

Kestner-Ricketts said that there’s a new feature that can show students unique resources specific for their major. An example being health science majors, where students can see job prospects, internships and research sources, all tailored to their major. 

The new website also helps the CORE team provide better advice and directions for students, according to Kestner-Ricketts.

“I can see where our students are most interested, what features on the website that they access the most,” Kestner-Ricketts said. “We used that data to build our framework that best served our students.” 

With the new changes, Kestner-Ricketts said she is planning on promoting the website and making it known to students. 

“I plan on sending information to faculty so they can add it to their slides, or through interviews like this,” Kestner-Ricketts said. “We also have a QR code, and the site is also linked in the official Augustana website.”

Campisi has utilized the new website to further achieve her professional goals.

“It’s easier for me to make appointments with career coaches and career mentors,” Campisi said. “They talk about internships or help fix my resume. I can also get in contact with employers. It’s just really a much faster process, and people won’t get discouraged because they can’t find the resources they need.”