Major Project Final Report:
A Job Search Guide for HRE Masters Students

Prepared by Bonnie Troesken
May 13, 1999

This issue that I address in my major project, titled "A Job Search Guide for HRE Masters Students", is the current lack of resources and placement services available to masters HRE students in the College of Education that are interested in working in HR-related careers in business and industry. In addressing this issue, I have developed my project so it includes links to resources and information about finding HR-related jobs in business and industry as well as job search-related activities, such as cover letter and thank-you letter writing, creating resumes, and interviewing.

The set of learners that I am particularly interested in is the current and future masters students in HRE on this campus. I am sure that other students in other related HR-masters degree programs will benefit from this use of this website as well, but my primary target audience for this project is the HRE masters students on this campus.

The first or home page of my project includes a table of contents that leads its users to a number of different areas that make up this website, including the Project Proposal, Job Opportunities in HR, Creating Resumes and Writing Letters, Mastering the Interviewing Process, and Evaluation/Feedback.

In order to finish my project, I have completed a number of different tasks. First of all, I compiled all of the links and resources that I found relevant to this issue or topic together and then put these on the website that I have created for this project. In addition, I have included some of my own experiences with job hunting, job searching, letter writing, interviewing, etc. in the website as well. Therefore, I have compiled these experiences in several text documents and also included them on the website. Another important task that I completed in order to finish my project was the development of an evaluation tool that I included on my website, where users of my website can evaluate my website and well as provide me with suggestions for improvement, feedback, etc.

In addition, I asked about 10 people, including masters HRE students, to visit my website and evaluate my project. The results that I received back from the 7 out of 10 people who evaluated my website included both positive and negative feedback. When looking at the evaluation results, I found that everybody who visited my website liked its simplicity as well as its basic layout. In addition, many of the evaluators enjoyed the sample letters and resumes that I included in the website. In addition, many of the evaluators enjoyed the easy-to-use nature of my website. I did not receive a great deal of negative feedback, however, I did receive a number of recommendations for improvement from the 7 evaluators. One recommendation made that I implemented was to add a link back to "Creating Resumes & Writing Letters" into the sample resume, cover letter, and thank-you letter pages. In addition, I also added some more graphics or images to the website, based on another recommendation by the evaluators. Also, a few of the evaluators had pointed out grammatical and spelling errors in my website. Thanks to their suggestions, I went back and corrected any spelling or grammatical errors that were in my project. By piloting my project to a few individuals in the HRE masters program here on campus, I was able to improve my project based on their feedback and suggestions. By taking into consideration the feedback I receive from the visitors of my website, I will be able to continually improve my project as well as avoid any major confusion and conflicts.

I hope, as a result of creating this project, that both current and future HRE masters students will benefit from the use of this website when beginning their job search process. As mentioned previously, currently, there is no placement service or assistance available to HRE masters students for finding HR-related jobs in business and industry. Therefore, I hope that this website/project fills that need to the best of its ability.