The Career Center’s LakerJobs website will combine with the Student Employment Office’s Job Board (Money Tree) site to make job hunting easier for students at Grand Valley State University.

“Starting May 6, LakerJobs will have a new look and include both professional and student jobs in one convenient place,” said Justin McKenzie, information systems specialist with the GVSU Career Center. “There will no longer be a separate Job Board—Money Tree—to check when looking for student employment opportunities.”

Luis Lozano, assistant director of the Student Employment Office and Financial Literacy at GVSU, said combining the two systems into one is an effort to streamline the student employment process.

“The goal is to help all students obtain employment opportunities as early as possible to help them develop work skills for their future career choice,” Lozano said. “The job market is highly competitive and securing a job while in college, or creating a resume, or obtaining interview tips for your dream job are all services that can now be obtained in one location with the help of two offices.”

Though the new program will be a variation of the original LakerJobs board, the interface will be similar to that of the current Money Tree system. All types of job postings will be available on the new single LakerJobs system, and faculty will be able to create accounts with the hope that this will open more opportunities to interact with students.

The new system will involve a single program and will save GVSU money, as it requires only one license instead of two. Additionally, the new board will have the same single sign-on functionality that students use to log onto the GVSU network system, removing the need for a separate username and password.

“We have observed through the years that students are a bit confused about which system they should be using to find a job or internship,” McKenzie said. “Therefore, we felt it would be a good idea for the Student Employment Office and the Career Center to collaborate and share a single system. Our hope is that by having only one system on campus for anything related to jobs and internships, we will eliminate the confusion that we have observed.”

Though the transfer is expected to be helpful to students, the process isn’t expected to be entirely easy.

“I would strongly encourage students to download any documents (resumes, cover letters, etc…) that they have uploaded to LakerJobs and save them on some other storage device,” McKenzie said. “After May 6, when the new LakerJobs system is live, students will be able to log in and upload their documents into the new system.”

Before using the system, students will need to complete a brief online form, which will collect supplemental information for their profiles on the site. Then they can upload their job-related documents into the new LakerJobs.

“Students who have been using the existing Job Board (Money Tree) site will not have to do anything different,” Lozano said. “Their information will be there when the new LakerJobs site goes live on May 6. However, current users of the existing LakerJobs site through the Career Center will need to update their user ID so that their account can be linked to the new LakerJobs site.”

The new program setup is the brainchild of Lozano and McKenzie, but the GVSU Information Technology department is helping out, as well.

“Luis (and I) are the primary decision-makers involved in the new implementation,” McKenzie said. “IT is primarily assisting with implementing the single sign-on functionality that will allow students to login to the system using their GVSU issued network ID and password.”

For more information on the new LakerJobs system, McKenzie invites questions at 616-331-6708 or [email protected].
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