Bulldog Award Recipient

The Bulldog Award recognizes "Shared Team Achievement and Recognition" for outstanding customer service practices. Whether an organization succeeds or fails depends on its level of customer service. Quality, pride and initiative are hallmarks of the department's performance. The department constantly strives to excel and provide quality customer service. The department's positive attitude best exemplifies the University’s shared values. The staff's customer service efforts exemplify the "community spirit" of the University. The Bulldog Award for January goes to the Career Center. The Career Center does an outstanding job of providing customer service to students, the campus community, and employers who come to our campus to hire students. The Center provides outstanding customer service to students utilizing the Career Center by receiving top-notch customer service via our Career Assistants (CA’s). Our customer service training for our CA’s is considered by many to be the gold-standard on campus; our CA supervisor, Polly Matteson, has presented workshops on the CA training program at a regional career services conference. Students needing more individualized attention can meet one-on-one with a full-time staff member for assistance with any aspect of the job/graduate school search. The evaluations for these sessions exceeded 4.5/5.0 for fall semester, 2007. Additionally, the Center provides service to all campus departments so they can list positions available for scholarship, work-study and institutional employment on eRecruiting, a web-based program purchased by the Career Center. This allows all campus departments to have equal access to qualified applicants for their student employment positions. Faculty/staff may request career and graduate school-related programming from the Career Center. Last year, more than 200 programs were presented, many in response to faculty/staff requests, and the evaluations were well in excess of 4.0/5.0. An employer using the services has been quoted as saying the Career Center at Truman State University is the best career services office he has ever dealt with. This is due to the personalized attention he consistently received from full-time staff. Employers consistently rank Truman’s Career Expo as one of, if not the, best career fair they attend. This is due in large measure to the high level of individualized attention we provide employers while they are on our campus, and throughout the registration process. It is with great pleasure that the Bulldog Award for January be awarded to the Career Center.