Columbia career counseling agency takes holistic approach
By Pete Shooner
Young adults are having trouble finding full-time employment these days, and Columbia resident Sammy Rutkowski knows how difficult the search can be.
Rutkowski, who graduated in May from USC with a bachelor’s degree in advertising, works as an apprentice at Riggs Partners, a small advertising firm in West Columbia.
Acquiring her position wasn’t easy, Rutkowski, 22, said. Out of college, she needed to quickly find a job in the field.
“I was pathetically desperate, so I wrote my boss this ridiculously heart-felt e-mail, and then she let me come in and meet with her,” Rutkowski said. “A month later, she hired me.
“They’re paying me part-time, so I work 30 hours a week,” Rutkowski said. “It can only last one year so I’m still searching for a job.”
Not all recent graduates are as successful in finding even part-time work.
In a Nov. 6 news release, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that 15.6 percent of Americans between the ages of 20 and 24 are unemployed, which is the highest rate of any skilled age group.
Locally, the outlook remains bleak as South Carolina’s total unemployment rate rose to 11.6 percent in September, according to a S.C. Employment Security Commission’s news release. Richland County came in just under the national average at 9.5 percent, but Allendale and Chester counties topped the charts with over 21 percent of residents unemployed.
Rising local unemployment rates are forcing recent graduates like Sammy Rutkowski to conduct regional and even national job searches in order to find solid career placement.
“I’m looking at Atlanta, because it’s kind of the advertising capital of the South,” said Rutkowski, who is originally from Spartanburg. “New York is a option, too.”
To help find a job, many turn to professional career counseling centers like Life Careers, which has been operating in Columbia for 10 years.
Leo Maxson, president of Life Careers, said people struggle to effectively narrow their job searches.
“I think people have trouble identifying where they want to focus in a job search, as far as careers to consider,” Maxson, 43, said. “They’re unfamiliar as to how their backgrounds would fit into the market.”
Life Careers, which Maxson said has seen an increase of “hundreds of resumes” since the economy worsened, takes “a very comprehensive, holistic approach” in helping a client’s job search.
“We help them with goal setting as far as a career is concerned and as far as a job search is concerned, with marketing programs as far as putting together research and identifying companies, and we help them with every aspect of the interview,” Maxson said. “As well as helping them to use techniques to get in front of decision makers.”
Maxson said the average job search takes about one month for every $10,000 the position pays, but some people need more help than others, which affects the program length.
“We have people that go from three months up to 12 months depending on how much work they need,” Maxson said. “We have programs from 3 months all the way up to 5 years.
Maxson said sometimes clients need more than resume writing tips and practice interviewing.
“Some people just need mental support, and they come in and tell us how their search is going,” Maxson said. RCT
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