Hiring co-op students can help rebuild and strengthen organizations
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were numerous stories in the media about the “the great resignation” and labour shortages employers are facing.
But Carolyn Lee, a business developer who helps co-ordinate co-op and experiential learning opportunities in the Hire Waterloo department at the
University of Waterloo, has a suggestion: Hire a student.
“I think what we're seeing across the board is a talent shortage in a variety of industries and fields. A wave of retirements is coming, so this is the time to prepare for it,” Lee says. “If you start hiring co-op students and start developing that talent pipeline, it won't be such a drastic impact on those organizations when those retirements happen,” she adds.
Hire Waterloo also cites other benefits of hiring co-op students, including the fact that they bring a fresh and diverse perspective to organizations and they are an affordable way to hire.
According to Emily Burgess, also a business developer at Hire Waterloo, Faculty of Health co-op and internship students are employed in wide-ranging sectors, including:
- Health care and social assistance
- Educational services
- Public administration
- Professional, scientific and technical services
- Manufacturing (with a focus generally on ergonomics
- Information, culture and recreation
- Other sectors, ranging from finance to retail/business
About 83 per cent of co-op employers hiring students from Waterloo as a whole say in surveys that they would be ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ to offer another position to their most recent co-op student hire. Also, 93 per cent believe they are getting a positive return on their investment by recruiting co-op students, Burgess said.
Lee says the Faculty of Health is strong in fields that range from kinesiology and gerontology to public health policy and health informatics and there are worker shortages in many of those fields. “If there's one thing COVID has taught us is that there is a need for people right across the health-care and recreation industry.”
Waterloo also has a flexible slate of experiential learning programs, with the most common being the traditional four-month co-op placement. The COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns affected hiring in many areas, but Waterloo and industry partners developed a new work-term option, the Waterloo Experience (WE) Accelerate program, which allowed first-year undergraduate students to work in teams to tackle real-life projects supplied and assessed by industry collaborators, even if they couldn’t work on the job sites as they normally would.
Lee says one of the advantages of recruiting from Waterloo is that the University has a long-established co-op program and support staff available to guide employers through the process.
“We have a great team to help employers post their job and schedule interviews – and we also have a team of student advisors who check in on the students,” she says.
Waterloo also has a unique rank matching system to help employers find the right students. “When employers go through their interviews, the employers rank the students and the students rank the employers. We run an algorithm that helps match students with their employers,” Lee says.
As the country emerges from the pandemic, Lee says this is the perfect time for employers to start filling gaps in their organizations.
Not only are there wage subsidy programs to help cover the costs of hiring students, but there are long-term benefits for the employers, the students and the nation as a whole, she adds.
“It takes a lot of time and so many resources to build up that expertise in an organization. Hiring co-op students or experiential education students is a great way to start transferring that knowledge to the younger generation.”
Interested in hiring a co-op student? Register for an upcoming Co-op Fundamentals Information Session or contact Emily.burgess@uwaterloo.ca.
