**NORTHERN COLLEGE NEWS RELEASE**

Northern College is pleased to announce the resounding success of its first annual Spring Career Fair, hosted in partnership by the Northern College Alumni Association and Employment Options Emploi.
Designed to offer students access to potential employers in their related field, this event attracted 66 employers from throughout Northern College’s catchment region and beyond.

“The employers that we reached out to were very happy that the College was putting together an event like this,”

said Organizer, Alumni and Foundations Development Officer Nicole Gingras. “Many of them had been looking at ways to work with the College to get first hand access to our students, whether they are on the verge of graduating or just starting their academic journey.”

The two day event served as a pilot project to ascertain the level of interest from both students and area employers in continuing with future Career Fairs.

“We clearly discovered that there is an appetite for this kind of event on both sides,” said Gingras. “We had a really great turn out over both days, with over 500 students coming out, which is a great representation from both our alumni and student base.”

As Northern continues to grow its reputation for quality graduates, more and more employers are coming forward to offer employment incentives. Extendicare, a local senior care provider has stepped forward to offer Northern College’s Personal Support Worker graduates, four guaranteed job placements and jobs for graduates in Timmins with an employment signing bonus.

“This is a corporate wide initiative, recruitment of PSWs has been challenging the past few years,” said Timmins Extendicare Administrator Kelly Roy. “It’s a challenge across the province, there is a shortage of PSWs, so we’re offering sign on bonuses for graduating PSWs of the May 2020 class next year.”

Extendicare is offering the same incentive to five graduates of Northern’s Kirkland Lake PSW program, aiming to help fill the growing employment gap in care related fields.
Northern College is committed to providing its students with the best employment options possible, an effort which begins in the classroom and continues past graduation and into the working world.

Through establishing mutually beneficial partnerships with local community stakeholders and businesses, Northern College can better serve students, whether past, present or future.
“If you don’t go and see what is around you, you may not know where you want to end up,” said Gingras. “Many of our students may have been skeptical about the event, but once they left, they expressed that the experience was really good for them.

It helped students secure placements if they needed them and hopefully for more than a few, it may have helped land them their first career job.” Northern College is committed to providing students with those tangible employment pathways through partnerships with local community stakeholders like Extendicare, partnerships that wouldn’t be possible without healthy relationships brought closer by events like this one.

Filed under: Local News