Career Development Center Director talks about progress of department

            “All of my jobs have been a result of networking. Networking has always come naturally to me. In my opinion, it is the most important part of business; if students can master that [networking] they will always be successful.”

Manuel Perez has held his position as the director of the Career Development Center at California State University, Long Beach for 7 and a half years.  He has worked in career services for 24 years at other colleges including University of California, Los Angeles and California Polytechnic State University, Pomona.

Perez feels he has contributed to the Cal State Long Beach career center by helping to create a vision of progress for the department to pursue. “For the first couple of years, I sat down with staff to begin establishing our values and mission,” said Perez, “I made policy and procedural changes—those types of changes, from my perspective, are easier to make and have the biggest impact.  If you ask people whether they like change they will say ‘yes’, but it’s the small things [changes] that make people feel threatened.” Perez says he isn’t the perfect manager and he has made mistakes but tries to learn from them.

Perez confirmed that the number of student workers in the Career Development Center has tripled since last year. He explained the increase in student positions is a result of two grants the department received this year allotting Student Excellence Fee funds to pay the wages of student workers. Students receiving financial aid pay a Student Excellence Fee of $94 per semester to fund programs for students. Perez says the funding helps pay the peer advisers in the career center and the peer advisors help free up time with counselors for students who really need it. The funding for the career center has been cut drastically the past four years, in order to fund the department’s programs, other sources of revenue must be considered.

“The one thing I will never do is charge students for our services, the way some career centers on other campuses do,” said Perez, “We do charge our alumni $135 if they want to continue using our services a year after they have graduated.”

            In the future, Perez hopes to improve the department’s and the students’ understanding of social media. He would like to see every CSULB student equipped with a LinkedIn profile and every faculty member. Perez also hopes to improve the communication and cooperation between the career center and other departments and colleges on the CSULB campus.