Northwest Campus hosts career and college fair
Last Wednesday, over 20 organizations set up tables in the UAFNorthwest Campus Education Center to talk to job seekers and future college students about current vacancies and funding opportunities. Local and regional organizations such as the City of Nome, Kawerak and NSHC set up tables, but so did the KNOM, the Alaska Court system, and the Armed Services.
Student Services Manager Kacey Miller explained that every couple of years, Nome-Beltz holds a job fair, but when it looked like it wasn’t going to happen, the Northwest
Campus stepped up and 24 organizations jumped in, looking for applicants. “It’s great to be at the point when we’re offering a community event,” she said.
The first group to visit the fair was a busload of NACTEC students, encouraged to start thinking about their future. While two high schoolers did admit that they were only there because they had to go, they both agreed it was fun to see the opportunities out there. University of Alaska campuses from Fairbanks to Juneau attended to talk about their programs and financial aid options.
Throughout the afternoon, job seekers trickled in and out. Amanda
Coughenour said it was her first time attending such an event, but called it “a really nice experience,” and got a lot of goodies. She’s open-minded about the kinds of opportunities out there and said that it helped open her eyes. “I’m excited to reach out,” she said.
Jerry Asila already has a job delivering lunches for the Nome Community Center but attended with Coughenour. He said he likes having a vehicle as his office because he gets to see the community and learned at the fair about the scholarships available to get his Commercial Driver’s License, such as
through NSEDC or Kawerak.
Sitting at a table for all the local CDL employers, Mariah Morgan said that there are currently 13 CDL openings at the Department of Transportation alone, and the Morgan Enterprises is short one school bus driver. She said there has been some interest, but the process has been slow. “We don’t have the applicants,” Morgan said.
She wasn’t the only one who felt that way. NSHC’s Culinary and Nutrition Services Department went from having too many applicants to not enough in just two years. NSHC’s current vacancies stretches onto three full pages of a printed spreadsheet, and the types of jobs vary widely, from summer internships for high schoolers with a starting wage of $16 an hour to jobs in the villages paying trainees $25 an hour to managerial positions making $50 and more an hour.
Overall, booth staff outnumbered adult attendees, and when asked why they thought that was the case, most people said they didn’t know.
In the April edition of Trends, a monthly report from the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, Chief of Research and Analysis Dan Robinson gave some possible reasons: workers aged 60 and over retired early due to the pandemic; the workforce population in Alaska peaked in 2013 and young people are leaving the state; and women are unable to return to the workforce due to a lack of childcare options.