UCLA’s Career Center is moving to a new online career-management platform this month.
Handshake, a student-created platform that launched in 2014, will replace UCLA’s BruinView services for all students starting May 14. The Career Center is switching to the new service because it allows students to more easily discover career opportunities and allows postings to be filtered for certain student groups, said Annie Maxfield, the interim director of the Graduate Students Resource Center and associate director of graduate relations and services.
Handshake currently has a network of more than 500 schools, including Stanford, Princeton and UC Berkeley. More than 250,000 employers use the service, and about 800 employers have signed up to recruit at UCLA since the university opened registration two weeks ago.
Handshake is more user-friendly than BruinView because it presents career opportunities that match the skills, interests and experience that students list on their customized profiles, Maxfield said. She added the platform continually updates to better match students’ needs and preferences.
“I think one of the best explanations of Handshake is it’s like LinkedIn and Facebook combined,” she said.
BruinView, the current system, is a search-based platform that requires students to input key terms, and is a private system that requires employers to fill out a separate application to recruit at UCLA, said Sarah Park, the Career Center’s associate director of industry relations.
BruinView also does not allow the Career Center to filter postings or events for certain groups, so students are more likely to be inundated with events that are irrelevant to them, Maxfield said.
Maxfield added she is excited about switching to Handshake because it will allow the Career Center to create separate career guides and curate resources for specific student groups, like undergraduate philosophy students or first-year pre-medical students.
“(Because) Handshake is dynamic, students will be able to see jobs that are more tailored to them,” she said. “We can pin and tailor postings down to department and degree level.”
Park said Handshake gives students access to more employment opportunities. For example, some colleges have reported up to a 30 percent increase in employers after switching to Handshake.
The transition to Handshake will extend undergraduate and graduate students’ access to all Career Center services, including recruitment and one-on-one career-advising appointments for students for up to one quarter after they graduate, Maxfield said.
Students will also be able to access jobs and internships on Handshake for up to a year after they graduate. With the current system, all services are immediately terminated upon a student’s graduation. Postdoctoral students, who do not have any access to BruinView, will also be able to access Handshake for the entirety of their time at UCLA.
“I’m really hoping this platform opens the Career Center up to students who have traditionally not felt the Career Center was for them, or that the Career Center was accessible,” Maxfield said. “I think this (will help) all students think about their future while they’re in school at UCLA, but also after they leave UCLA.”
Some students said they will be more open to using the Career Center’s services through Handshake because they think BruinView is not user-friendly.
Eduardo Ponce, a fifth-year theater student, said although he is currently looking for jobs, he does not use BruinView because he thinks it is inaccessible and ill-advertised.
“If it were more exposed, I think a lot more people and myself would use it,” he said.
Kevin Nguyen, a second-year psychology student, said he had difficulties navigating BruinView when he searched for events or tried to book counseling appointments.
“It’s one thing to have a platform that I can maneuver through, but it’s also helpful to have paths that are more relevant to me,” Nguyen said. “Having that be more filtered out and narrowed down for me would be really helpful.”