Today’s job market already offers many opportunities.

Yet, Saint Louis University’s Career Services Center is makes finding a job even easier for students.

Next Wednesday at the Simon Recreation Center, over 100 employers will be present at the 2000 Fall Job Expo, looking to recruit SLU students for full-time and part-time jobs, internships and co-ops.

“It’s open to all students and all majors,” said Dee Kaufman, the Career Services internship coordinator. “We’re encouraging all students, even freshmen and sophomores, to come and check it out. For a lot of students, this is a great venue to really explore a section of the job market.”

While some students may think that late September might be a little early to start the job hunt, Kaufman said that employers think otherwise.

In the early fall, companies like to get an idea of what new employees they’ll have at the beginning of summer.

“Some companies know right now that they’re going to need to hire X number of people in May or June,” Kaufman said. “This is the start of the recruiting season.”

The Expo begins at 11:30 a.m. and continues until 4:30 p.m. Students serious about getting a job at the fair should wear business-casual clothing. For those just looking to see what’s out there, casual dress should be fine.

“We eventually would like to go business-casual across the board,” Kaufman said.

“It’s a good idea to come looking professional. If you’re not there specifically job-searching or internship-searching, come as you are.”

Students will notice a difference in the job fair this fall, compared to last spring’s Summer Job Expo. In the spring, the fair was dominated by companies that were particularly interested in students with business majors.

While that wasn’t planned by the Career Services Center last spring, the Center made a concerted effort to get more companies looking for nonbusiness majors.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work in our office to increase the opportunities for our nonbusiness majors,” Kaufman noted.

“We’re also trying to reach out to help our arts and sciences and liberal arts students to explore what it is they want to do with their majors and learn to market themselves.”

Kathy Day, director of Career Services, added, “We are definitely working on expanding the variety of employers that we bring on campus, both for the job expo and on-campus recruiting. However, it can’t happen overnight.

“To some extent, the employers that want to come on campus are the ones with the most openings. The ones that do the most recruiting on college campuses, tend to be businesses in the IT (information technologies) companies. We want those companies to come back, but we want other businesses to join us. And we do have more variety this fall than we had last spring. We’re going to improve our efforts to do that.”

Day and Kaufman both stressed that students are more than welcome to suggest companies that the students would like to see come to SLU.

If students don’t get around to this job fair, the Spring Job Expo will be Jan. 31.

Day said the reason for the earlier date is that many companies came to the spring fair last year with many full-time openings. But most students already had their summer jobs lined up.