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Seminar to Help Seniors Market Themselves

Posted on: Thursday, 16 February 2006, 18:00 CST

By Don Dodson, The News-Gazette, Champaign-Urbana, Ill.

Feb. 15--CHAMPAIGN -- A guy who's helped market Bud Light, Wheaties and Windex now wants to help University of Illinois seniors market themselves.

Bob Klein, a former advertising agency executive in Chicago, plans to hold a 5-hour seminar in Urbana on how soon-to-be grads can land that first job.

As an incentive for signing up, he summons up the age-old fear of being unemployed.

"According to a (2004) survey by MonsterTrak, the online career service, only 10 percent of college graduates will have a job lined up by the time school is over," Klein says in promotional releases.

If that doesn't frighten students who are finishing school, Klein throws a couple of shivers up their parents' spines. Again citing a 2004 MonsterTrak survey, Klein says "57 percent of current-year graduates plan to move back home, joining the 50 percent of last year's graduates who are still living at home." The number moved up to 60 percent in this year's survey.

That oughta get parents scrambling for their wallets. After all, what's a $125 registration fee compared with the cost of having Junior under roof until he's a senior citizen?

Klein said he started his for-profit company, FirstJob Inc., in 1989. Initially he saw it as a way to "give back" to his alma mater, the University of Wisconsin.

He's held similar workshops at that campus for 16 years.

The UI seminar, to be held Sunday, Feb. 26, at the Levis Faculty Center, will teach students FirstJob's 12-step process, Klein said.

College students will learn "how to market themselves to potential employers utilizing the same principles employed by Fortune 100 companies," he said.

"They'll learn how to think of themselves as the most exciting and innovative new product ever brought to market," he said.

Klein, who calls himself FirstJob's "chief optimism officer," said he's held only one seminar at the UI, and that was in 2002. But it was an abbreviated version that didn't accomplish all he wanted, so now he's offering the whole shebang.

Gail Martin, a UI senior in advertising, is student marketing director for the local program. She called it an "awesome" seminar that includes breakfast, lunch, a career guide and planning booklet.

The workshop will have room for 125 students, with the registration fee for Ad Club members discounted to $100, she said.

Klein said his company makes a "significant donation" to the FirstJob Scholarship program at each university he visits and provides "a scholarship opportunity" for the student marketing director.

He spent 20 years with the DDB Worldwide advertising agency, serving as senior vice president and director of business development. Most recently, he was executive vice president and managing director of JWT Chicago, part of the nation's largest advertising agency.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The News-Gazette, Champaign-Urbana, Ill.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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BUD,

Source: The News-Gazette

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