Job Fair

Ishara Jayawardane

Annual Career fair for 2010 was held in grand style at Sri Jayewardenepura University with a huge turnout of students.

“This is an event we organize annually” said Director Career Guidance Unit. Senior Lecturer Department of sociology and anthropology, Dhanapala Wijesinghe. The title of the program is career fair 2010.

The purpose of the career fair is to develop the relationship between the campus and the corporate sector.

“We want to provide our students with an opportunity to interact with the companies and at the same time the government sector institutions and to gain experience with relevance to interviews.”

Interviews are very important to the careers of these students and the Career Guidance Unit prepares students for potential employment possibilities. They conduct various programs to develop employability skills, which is an essential part of a job.

In addition to these regular programs they annually organize a career fair, to which various companies are invited. Over 15 companies took part in this year’s career fair.

Fifteen interview boards, consisting of nearly 60 company managers and other executives who interviewed students.

Four hundred students have registered for participating in these interviews. The main objective is to introduce the graduates to various companies, while providing the others an opportunity to test their personalities.

Dhanapala Wijesinghe explained that although this was an experience in their own environment, all students have some sort of inhibition about facing interviews. “So we conducted a workshop prior to the career fair.”

Of over 400 students who participated in the fair some had not taken part in the workshop. All were taught how to face an interview, the proper method of writing a CV’s. “All our students have prepared themselves to participate in the interviews.”

“The Career guidance unit is excellent for developing our skills” said Final Year Student of the Management Faculty Poornima Perera.

“The Career guidance unit offers us practical knowledge.” Although it is not a compulsory course, Poornima pointed out that it is a great opportunity to interact with companies. “We learn to face challenges and problems, while developing our personalities.”

“We have organized this program to improve the skills. Most of the undergraduates when they are exposed to Society they are not familiar with the skills they need” said Career Advisor Chameera Jayawardane.

“Supplying Employment for the graduates is the biggest problem in this country. Because if we do not provide employment for them, they will create lots of unnecessary problems in the country. For this matter the government sector cannot fulfill all their requirements. As a result we need to have the support of the private companies. Today’s job fair is related to obtaining that support from the private sector.

Therefore nowadays we are talking about public private partnerships all over the country. This is very important. In that direction this job fair is very important for us to develop healthy relationships with the private sector” said Vice Chancellor of Sri Jayewardenepura Dr. N.L.A. Karunaratne.

“The people who have passed out and the part timers who are seeking jobs , we provide job opportunities because we have expanded , we have branches at National level so we are mainly focusing Colombo at the moment as well as the suburbs. It is selling life insurance as well as Unit Link” said recruitment manager for the Sales Force Development Sonia Gnanapragasam.

Pics by Mahinda Vithanachchi