Career boost – The Trinity Reporter

Individual career consulting services for all alumni

Trinity College’s Career and Life Design Center offers comprehensive, individual career consulting services to all alumni through a joint program organized by the center and the Office of Alumni Relations. Trinity is one of only a few NESCAC schools offering this program; its objectives include enhancing outreach to and engagement with alumni career and professional development and providing an additional mechanism to support direct student-alumni interaction and mentoring opportunities. Another aim is further building professional and career management support for alumni, with the added benefit of developing downstream career development opportunities for students.

Paul Gagnon M’01, Trinity’s alumni career consultant, has four decades of experience in several realms, including Fortune 500 companies and higher education. Alumni may schedule a time to meet with Gagnon for a one-on-one career consulting appointment via Handshake. In addition to helping alumni navigate the job search or graduate school application process, Gagnon assists alumni with a wide variety of career and life design efforts, including working on résumés, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, networking, interviewing, and negotiating, as well as supporting the process of applying to graduate or professional school.

“I think one of the best features of this service is that it is conducted in an environment of complete support and confidentiality,” said Gagnon.

Additional resources available to alumni include access to the Handshake jobs board, the Career and Life Design Center’s online platform that lists thousands of positions each year for members of the Trinity community. Handshake also offers many career management tools that enable alumni to pursue self-directed career development and graduate school application planning efforts. In addition, alumni are encouraged to explore and register with the Bantam Career Network (BCN), the exclusive Trinity online community networking and mentoring database composed of more than 4,000 alumni and student members. BCN provides alumni and current students with the ability to connect and network as they assist one another with helpful professional and career development insights and resources.

For more information, please visit the Career and Life Design website.