Director brings Career Services to new heights

Maya Hall

Editor-in-Chief

An overlooked service the college provides is Career Services. The Career Services Center assists students in all forms of employment preparation, including help with field-of-study pathways and guidance. 

At the head of it is the Director Aletra Chaney-Profit. Chaney-Profit has been working at Butler since January of the 2019 school year. For school, she attended Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, where she majored in Media Arts and minored in Political Science. 

“I’ve been at Butler for one year and 10 months,” Chaney-Profit said. “Prior to coming to Butler, I worked in Workforce Development for 10 years. I was looking for something new that would still allow me to use my skills in helping people become job-ready, and when I saw the position for director of Career Services, I thought it would be a good fit; and I already had experience partnering with Butler through my responsibilities in Workforce Development.” 

The Career Services Center also recently introduced a service called Handshake, which is supposed to help with landing jobs and internships for students. The program was also a topic of discussion in the October Board of Trustees meeting. 

“Handshake is a job platform with a large community of schools and employers,” Chaney-Profit said. “It was developed by students who graduated but had a difficult time landing employment and being competitive with students from larger, ivy-league institutions. So they believed that if they created a platform to connect employers and students with the same advantages that it would help future students as well.  Handshake has a network of over 500,000 employers and 3.5 jobs and internships across the industry. We launched Handshake in June 2020 with the hopes of giving our students more access to jobs, internships and fellowships.” 

Chaney-Profit feels like the most important aspect of her job is “connecting students to employment and work-based learning opportunities.” She knows that people attend college in order to gain an education that would help them towards finding a career that suits them. Chaney-Profit does not want students to feel like their schooling was useless. 

“I want students to know that I am a resource and here to support their career journey,” Chaney-Profit said. “It’s great to build relationships with students so I can better understand their employment needs and make suitable referrals for job opportunities.”