When Ryan East stepped through the door at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox Theatre a few years ago, a strong and complex feeling swept over him and wouldn’t let go.
Fear mixed with a healthy dose of nervousness and excitement.
And for just a moment, East, a Waterloo co-op Arts and Business student, wondered whether he was really in the right place – a digital media conference attended by some of Ontario’s biggest heavyweights in the business.
Some of them wondered if he was in the right place, too.
After all, the room was populated with 40- to 50-year-olds standing by their booths and mingling. East, by contrast, was in his first co-op term of his first year of university at the time – and barely pushing 19.
To put it bluntly, he stood out.
“Some of them asked me, ‘What are you doing here?’ or ‘Do you work here? Are you the camera guy?’” says East, laughing about it now.
Rather than be offended, he simply told his story.
He was a Waterloo co-op student, working for a boutique media company, SailorJones Media. His employer, Barbara Jones, assigned him to represent the company at the conference.
She wanted to give him a work experience that might lead somewhere. The conference was a networking opportunity of a lifetime.
“These were people I could only ever dream of working for, and I’m getting the chance to introduce myself to them,” he says. “Just walking through that door, it was like I was walking into my future. That’s the best way to describe it.”
Early years
The University of Waterloo’s co-operative education program, also known simply as co-op, has been building the future of its students since the school opened in 1957. Combining academic study with alternating work terms, co-op was a founding feature.
According to the article, A History of Cooperative Education in Canada, by Bruce A. McCallum and James C. Wilson, businessmen familiar with co-operative education in the U.S. saw co-op as a means of meeting growing technical needs in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.
The 75 engineering students who made up Waterloo’s class were all co-op students.
Not that the program was universally praised at the time. Other institutions took aim at co-op, saying it would tarnish the reputation of academic learning in Canada and modify the existing school year. Besides, no business would want to take a chance on hiring students without experience.
The naysayers were wrong
Fast forward to today. Waterloo boasts the largest co-op program in the world. Students gain up to two years of relevant work experience in more than 120 academic programs and all six faculties.
Co-op annually involves about 16,500 students and 3,500 employers. In 2011/2012, co-op students earned $189 million.
In the fall of 2012, students will be working at co-op positions in approximately 60 countries. A new Enterprise Co-op program allows students to hone their entrepreneurial skills as part of their co-op training.
Not bad for a school not yet 60 years old.
“The scale of our operation really puts us in a class of our own,” says Peggy Jarvie, executive director of Waterloo’s Co-operative Education & Career Action (CECA). “We offer breadth and depth in all sorts of programs. You could hire all the talent you need here at Waterloo.”
Indicative of its scope and influence, co-operative education has spread to more than 100 colleges and universities across Canada.
Ron Gotts, a chemical engineering alumnus who was part of the first class and graduated in 1962, still has only good things to say about the early co-op experience. It helped pay his way through school, one of the reasons many students decided to take a chance on the young, upstart institution.
“The beauty of it was that the co-op program endeared itself to industry very quickly, so we didn’t have difficulty getting co-op positions,’’ he says. “And we didn’t have difficulty getting jobs upon graduation either. We had already worked in fields that were related to our courses of study.”
Gotts, who will attend his 50th-anniversary class reunion in the fall of 2012, enjoyed a long career in the environmental field, working with everything from water to industrial waste. Now retired, he credits co-op for giving him the post-secondary education he needed to build his career.
Show me the money
More than 50 years later, students still choose Waterloo co-op for some of the same reasons: It pays.
“The financial situation that a co-op student is in compared to another student is night and day,” says East. “You’re in school learning, but at the same time, you’re making money to cover it. It’s spectacular.”
Besides offering money, mentoring and experience, co-op makes students more marketable at graduation. And, as East discovered, they build a professional network before leaving school. Graduates of Waterloo’s co-op program also typically earn 15 per cent more than non-co-op grads.
The job-finding process is also more streamlined than ever, says Olaf Naese, a communications specialist for CECA. He should know. He’s been with Waterloo since 1976 and in the department since 1979. He remembers exactly how cumbersome the co-op system once was.
Co-op now and then
Then
» Step one: Co-op department publishes a tabloid newspaper for co-op job searchers. Numerous employees type each job description onto a layout sheet. They’re proofread overnight. The next day, corrections are made. Whiteout flies.
» Step two: Naese drives the sheets to Kitchener to have the paper printed.
» Step three: Students line up early in the day at Needles Hall and swarm the halls. The line snakes behind the building. Co-op staff hand out the ads with a form to fill out.
» Step four: Students choose the jobs they wish to apply for and complete the form by the deadline. They hand the form back in
for Monday.
» Step five: Staff collect papers and call up student ID numbers against the job numbers using very slow computers. Printout arrives the next day.
» Step six: A staff of 13 takes two weeks to pull filed resumés of all applicants and then couriers them in boxes to employers.
» Step seven: Employers call Waterloo on the telephone to indicate which students they want to interview.
Naese’s verdict: “Oh, it was dreadful.”
Now
» Step one: Students check co-op opportunities online, through JobMine. As of fall 2012, students will be able to upload PDFs of their resumés.
Naese’s verdict: “Everything is done online. Students can apply for jobs, search for jobs and applications are all electronic… Of course, most employers still conduct interviews here on campus, but an increasing number are using our Skype option. They can still see and talk to their candidates, but they don’t need to travel to Waterloo.”
Coming full circle
While today’s co-op job-searching tools and system are far better for students, they’re not the only ones who benefit.
Jarvie at CECA says that within the last couple of years, employers were asked what they liked most about Waterloo’s co-op program. Time and again, they mentioned how smoothly the process runs.
“When you’ve been doing this for as long as we have and are as big as we are, we’ve been able to learn the best way to do co-op. Scale teaches you a lot,” Jarvie says.
Little wonder that co-op at Waterloo runs like a well-oiled machine. More than 100 employees are fully dedicated to the department, and close to 50 work out of off-campus offices to be closer to employers and offer support. Thirty are posted to the Greater Toronto Area alone.
Bill Tatham, chair and CEO of NexJ Systems Inc. in Toronto, hires about 50 Waterloo co-op students every year to work in his company of 350 employees.
The William M. Tatham Centre for Co-operative Education & Career Action – the first building in Canada dedicated to co-op – was named after him.
Giving back to co-op just makes sense, says Tatham, a systems design engineering grad from 1983.
“Co-op teaches you something important at school,” he says. “You’ve got to learn, you’ve got to work hard, it’s pass or fail, and you’ve got to go all out. You’re always doing something new.”
While students are known for bringing fresh ideas to the companies they work for, hiring them is also a great business move for another reason: Cost.
Tatham estimates that when a company accounts for the tax credits and rebates it receives for hiring students, the average annual cost for a full-time, senior co-op is $10,000.
Outsourcing a similar job to India costs about $40,000 per year.
“More importantly, it’s the investment you’re making in personnel development, Tatham says. “Co-op students are our (human resources) talent pipeline. You start to see their work ethic, passion, cultural fit, determination – all the determinants of success you see only in real life.”
Laura Victoria, a talent acquisition manager for Towers Watson in Toronto, agrees. The risk-management and human resources company has primarily hired actuarial students from Waterloo as far back as the late 1990s. The positions have real-world relevance.
“We get to challenge them and throw them into real-life client situations,’’ she says.” It gives us a preview of what they could be capable of down the road. A lot of these students do walk out of their co-op placements with job offers in hand.”
Jordan Sheldon graduated in 2006 with a degree in mathematics and computer science. He works for Bloomberg Sports in New York City.
His co-op experience seems to have come full circle. In school, he held co-op positions at CIBC, the Ontario Ministry of Health, and Triversity, a point-of-sale software company.
All that experience paid off, not only in how quickly he’s able to jump into any software-development environment, but in his leadership skills. He says he went back to each employer for a second term so he could take on bigger roles and act as a mentor for new co-op students.
Sheldon uses those skills to hire and manage Waterloo co-op students for Bloomberg.
“The first time I went back to Waterloo, and I was on the other side of the table interviewing students, I was pretty nervous,” he says. “The students were really smart and I was just out of school. I was thinking, ‘Do I really know much more than these people I’m interviewing?’ ’’
That feeling has passed.
International scope
Like many co-op employers in the U.S., Bloomberg prefers to hire Waterloo students. It isn’t just because of the talent. Waterloo’s program runs year-round.
That is one of the reasons why the international side of co-op continues to grow with hundreds of students taking jobs around the world, says Merrirose Stone, the student adviser for the international side of CECA.
Getting visas and sorting through paperwork can be a challenge. Waterloo works with a visa sponsor, “Cultural Vistas” in New York to help employers and students through the process in the U.S. They also employ two International Employment Specialists – one for USA visa advising and one for students who are outbound to locations outside of North America and require a work permit or visa.
It can take several years to sell the idea of co-op to an employer in a country unfamiliar with the concept. Students also have to be prepared for change and cultural adaptation.
But when it works, it works
Stone remembers one engineering student who took a position in China for a four-month work term. Homesickness set in. Over the first few weeks, he called Stone daily in tears, ready to throw in the towel. They talked about coping strategies.
“There were two things he said he missed from home: Tim Horton’s and Swiss Chalet,” says Stone. “So I bought him a little packet of Swiss Chalet sauce and some vacuum-sealed Tim Horton’s coffee and mailed it to him.
He stayed and received an outstanding mark on his evaluation when the work term ended. The employer asked him to come back, and he did.
Waterloo’s co-op program, and the staff behind it, helped East choose Waterloo over other universities. He listened in awe as the presenter talked about the program, the high employment rates and the money that could be earned over his years of study.
“I looked at other schools and other programs, but most seem like an additive to a degree,” he says. “Co-op at Waterloo, it’s not so much an additive, it’s a major part of your education. Half of your degree is co-op. The program is so spectacularly done because Waterloo gives it the attention it deserves.”
