UA's Eller College opens new career center with expo

The University of Arizona Eller College of Management christened a professional development center inside McClelland Hall with a career expo on Monday.

The new, $5 million Karl and Stevie Eller Professional Development Center, completely funded through private donations, represents the first major building project at Eller since the college’s home, McClelland Hall, was completed in 1992.

The 13,000-square-foot project spans two floors within the south side of McClelland and includes team meeting rooms, a “collaboration hub” and offices for “success teams” of career coaches and others who mentor students individually.

In contrast, the former career development center occupied just one room on Eller’s second floor.

A big reason for the amped-up career effort: Students asked for it.

The project was initially driven largely by the Eller College Student Council, which asked for more career resources for undergraduate students and offered to help pay for them.

While Eller juniors and seniors had paid more in “differential tuition” to cover career and other services, fees for pre-major UA freshmen and sophomores increased to $350 starting in 2014 to cover the cost of expanded career services including coaching, workshops, and two one-unit undergrad courses — an introductory course on the language and context of business and a career-management course.

“They came to us and said we want a more focused and direct approach in services for business students,” said Sarah Diaz, Eller director of professional development, noting that the students cited peer business schools that had extensive career services.

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The fees help pay for a staff that has grown from a couple of people a decade ago to nine full-time career coaches, who work with academic advisers.

Diaz, an Eller alumnus, said the college still works collaboratively with the university-wide career services department but the more focused Eller program is paying dividends.

Eller’s career outcome rate — the percentage of students who graduate with a job or job offer, start their own businesses or go to grad school — is up 14 percentage points, at 87 percent, in the fourth year of the expanded career-services program, Diaz said.

Jeni Schmidt, an Eller senior marketing major and president of the Eller College Student Council, said the new career center is a vast improvement over the former space, which has been taken over by the offices of Eller’s highly regarded McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship.

Besides the coaching programs, the center offers space for collaboration and students can meet to work on the school’s many team-based projects, Schmidt said, noting that a lack of space for team work was one of the students’ most common complaints.

“Now, the PDC (Professional Development Center) has a whole new meaning — it’s this collaborative space where students actually have space of their own,” she said.

The new center also features the latest in technology, as well as more basics like ubiquitous electrical outlets, said Schmidt, who already has a sales job with tobacco giant Altria Group, an Eller sponsor.

“These are the kinds of things that are going to start to set Eller apart, because all these top-notch business schools have these amazing tehnologies, and we’re just getting TVs where we can plug in our computers and work on things,” Schmidt said.