Students gathered at St. Clair for the annual job fair

This year marked the twentieth year in a row that St. Clair College and University of Windsor partnered to host Southwestern Ontario’s largest job fair.

On Jan. 23, St. Clair’s Sportsplex housed  the job fair which included over 108 employers and more than 3,000 advanced registrations.

Job fairs are a great opportunity for graduating students to speak face to face with representatives and professionals from local, national and international companies. The companies that were represented at this job fair offered a range of opportunities from jobs in farming, medical and engineering to jobs in border security, Windsor Police and the RCMP.

The Canadian Armed Forces attended the job fair to search for the best recruits. Sgt. Sandra Harding was one of the members assisting with scouting.

“In the Windsor location, we have three different units, the Essex and Kent Scottish Regiment, the 31 Service Battalion and the Windsor Regiment. We have 14 different part-time careers available that we are hiring for today,” said Harding. “We’ve spoken to a lot of people with interest and we keep directing everyone to our Forces.ca website.”

Karen Gill-Gore, the St. Clair College Associate Vice President Employment and Training Services was happy to announce how successful this year’s job fair was.

“This is our largest in terms of employer attendance as well, we are expecting it to be a banner event for our student attendees,” said Gill-Gore.

This year, a new way to keep updated on the job fair was introduced: the Job Fair app. It helped students prepare for the event, showed a list of employers that attended and had great details of what happens at a job fair. The app was in place to help students before and after the event. The app helps students post-job fair, by allowing them to interact with employers and keep updated on future job fairs.

Many students registered in advance for the event, however this job fair had more students than expected. Most of these students were coming from the University of Windsor in search for a job right after graduation.

Nathan Anthony who studied four years in engineering at the University of Windsor attended his first job fair hoping to find a good placement.  

“Looks like there are a lot of companies here, which is awesome,” said Anthony. “There are also a lot of students here too, so I think it will be really competitive, but everything is going good so far.”

Some graduates have a hard time getting a job right after college or university. The unemployment rate in Windsor in 2018 was 5.9 per cent on average, which can have a negative impact on students getting jobs right of school.

Job fairs create channels which allow students access to the employer. The 2019 job fair is the largest and most successful job fair since it first began.