Third year engineering students at Canada’s pioneering university in co-operative education can look forward to a shiny sleek new website potentially replacing JobMine, the current co-op and career recruiting system, before they graduate in 2017; the School of Architecture has officially adopted WaterlooWorks as their co-op program administration system this term after successfully pilot testing the software three times over the past year. The experiences gained over this period have since been used to make further improvements in the software, which will serve as the new point of relations between Co-operative Education & Career Action, students, and employers. WaterlooWorks is not simply a faster, visually updated JobMine; the new website will also provide students with information on career related workshops and information sessions, and students will be able to use the new site to schedule career appointments with advisors.
While the site works as expected for the 350 odd co-op students in the School of Architecture, further analysis and testing was found to be necessary before WaterlooWorks could be scaled up to accommodate all 18,000 work terms each term; hence a 2 year delay in the projected final launch; by identifying performance risks and doing significant performance tests, a suitable infrastructure can be prepared that is equipped to handle the stresses that would cause the current site, JobMine, to crash, inconveniencing students and employers alike.
The decision to replace JobMine, the current administration system, was made after exploring several commercially available packages of similar functionality; based out of Dundas Ontario, Orbis communications, a leading Canadian provider of co-op and career software for post-secondary institutions with a decade of experience developing software was awarded the contract to implement the proposed software package in 2012. Orbis has since been closely involved in a partnership with the University of Waterloo’s Co-operative Education & Career Action (CECA), and Information System & Technology (IST). The three parties have since been working together to determine the scope of the new project, coordinating a geographically separated team to ensure the success of the new initiative.
Most current students and Alumni have bones to pick to with JobMine—the aging application was simply not designed to handle the massive number of new students and the increase in job postings; regular crashes and thirty second load times per page have become the norm during peak usage. Searching through the list of jobs felt more procedural then it ought to have been, and the user feedback and statistics over the years have resulted in several changes that employers and employees alike can look forward to. Among the features being added to the new application, multiple contacts at an employer can now be attached to a single post in the form of a “hiring team”, and students will find it easier to search through and compare job postings. Job descriptions are now being revamped to include essential information. Notably, there will be a field for employers to include information like compensation and benefits (although they are not required to fill complete the section), and Google maps as well as keyword based search features are being integrated into the app for the convenience of students.
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