Cisco and StepStone help Networking Academy students get on the job ladder

StepStone and Cisco Networking Academy today launched a revamped careers portal for Networking Academy alumni and students, featuring career advice, resources and a searchable database of thousands of active jobs.

NetAcad Advantage (www.netacadadvantage.com) aims to provide access to jobs, career advice and support to the hundreds of thousands of students and alumni of Cisco’s Networking Academies in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Already boasting more than 100,000 subscribers, NetAcad Advantage now features a job search service powered by leading online recruiter, StepStone, specifically designed to help Networking Academy students find and apply online for the right job to match their skills.

Through NetAcad Advantage, Cisco Networking Academy students will be able to search through job vacancies from StepStone’s online job sites in nine European nations and soon be able to expand their search to StepStone’s other sites and network of job site partners to cover 60 countries worldwide. The NetAcad Advantage site also provides career advice, job profiles, industry news, interviews with top industry figures, and profiles of students who have successfully gained employment after graduating.

Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, Networking Academy has helped more than two million graduates gain skills that have been instrumental in improving their employability. Cisco created the program to provide students in underserved communities with the expertise to work in the information technology (IT) field. It offers 16 courses covering various IT concepts and skills to prepare students for the industry-recognised certification. The programme currently has 465,000 participating students across 9,000 academies worldwide.

Cisco Networking Academy has helped millions of graduates improve their skills, but we wanted to give our graduates a helping hand in building their careers in IT, which is why we developed the NetAcad Advantage careers portal, said John Edwards, Networking Academy director. NetAcad Advantage not only helps graduates look for suitable jobs but is also packed with advice and information to form a comprehensive career resource which we hope graduates will keep returning to over the course of their careers.

NetAcad Advantage users can carry out a multi-country search for jobs, sign up for job alerts of relevant posts, or access information on core job-seeking skills such as preparing for job interviews and filling out online applications. Recruiters looking for skilled Networking Academy graduates can benefit from low-cost job listings on the website that can also be posted across all relevant StepStone sites and those of its partners.

The strong demand across the world for skilled technology graduates makes Cisco Networking Academy even more relevant to today’s employers, StepStone CEO, Colin Tenwick, said. We believe the NetAcad Advantage careers portal is not only a great resource for graduates but it will become a vital link for employers looking to access a large pool of skilled talent in an increasingly networked world.