Career Week provides insight on how to succeed in growing industries

Professionals from growing industries, such as health care and digital media, will speak about career options at UCLA this week.

The UCLA Career Center is holding its annual Career Week this week with an increased focus on helping students understand emerging industries in the Los Angeles area, including advertising, health care and social media, said Career Center Director Wesley Thorne.

“We want to lead the campus in helping it understand what emerging industries there are, especially in the next one to two years,” Thorne said.

Zoe Borden, Undergraduate Students Association Council general representative and a third-year international development studies and political science student, said this year’s Career Week is different from past years’ because it includes representatives from industries such as advertising, design and technology as opposed to the usual banking and finance sectors.

Borden helped create the event called “The Values Driven Job Search: How to Get a Job at a Socially Responsible Company” and talked to Career Center staff about which employers students may want to learn about.

“There are so many different emerging fields that students are overlooking,” Borden said. “Employers want to hire talented Bruins.”

Somjita Mitra, senior economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation and the keynote speaker for “Career Week 2017 Kickoff: What’s Trending” on Monday, helped the Career Center research on which industries are emerging in Los Angeles. She said the area will see a decrease in manufacturing jobs and an increase in media, technology and marketing jobs.

She added she thinks dance, art and computer science students will discover financially stable jobs in their fields that they were previously unaware of through Career Week.

Throughout the week, professionals from various emerging industries gave talks about what qualities are desirable in job applicants.

A talk held Tuesday called “What’s Trending in Digital Marketing and Social Media?” emphasized developing emotional intelligence and differentiating oneself from others competing for jobs in the same field.

Bilal Kaiser, founder of Agency Guacamole, a social media agency, and one of the speakers for the event, talked about the importance of having hard skills and soft skills. He said hard skills, such as proficiency in Microsoft Excel or social media experience, are important, but soft skills, such as being open to change and insight, are just as valuable and help make job candidates stand out.

Students who attended the panel said they think the event helped them better understand the job market in that field.

Adrine Keosian, a third-year communication studies student, said the event gave her insight on digital marketing and social media and the job opportunities available in those fields.

Dylan Skolnik, a fourth-year sociology student, said the panelists emphasized the importance of focusing on brand image in the big picture rather than concentrating too much on marketing tools, such as Instagram and Snapchat.

Hoa Han Do, a fourth-year Chinese student, said the guest speakers reinforced what she already knew about job searching in the social media industry. She added she has been to five Career Week events already and is eager to learn about her job options.

“I hope to learn essential strategies to look for jobs I can be passionate about,” Do said. “It reinforced that what I … am doing is right.”