By Patrick McCreless and David Lazenby

The Cullman Times

First-year Wallace State College student Audra Armstrong weaved her way through a string of different health care employers Tuesday as they each attempted to cultivate her favor. A pre-nursing major, Armstrong’s problem is not job availability — it is deciding which place she wants to work.

“I’m not worried about getting a job,” Armstrong said with a grin.

She has good reason to be confident.

Across the country, the health care industry faces a veritable drought of nurses. Aware of this shortage, hundreds of Wallace State nursing students turned out for the first day of the community college’s annual career fair in the Tom Drake Coliseum, as did representatives from nearly 100 health care employers.

“They’re really short in registered nursing,” Brandi Baird said of the health care industry.

Baird is a first-year pre-nursing major with aspirations of becoming a registered nurse for Children’s Hospital in Birmingham. Representatives with Encore Rehabilitation, Inc. out of Decatur had their hands full dealing with students like her.

“We’ve been really busy ... this morning (Tuesday) we saw a couple hundred,” said John Henderson, director of industrial relations for Encore. “We interviewed for occupational therapy. There were a lot of great candidates.”

Encore currently employees over 300 people and provides multiple services such as industrial rehabilitation, sports medicine and sports performance enhancement.

LuRu Jones, regional recruiter for Encore, was impressed not just with the amount of students who showed up, but also with how they presented themselves.

“Their students always come professionally dressed and come with a resume,” Jones said. “They have a very professional occupational therapy program here. Preparing students before they come here is a real plus. We usually end up hiring several from the school each year.”

For Teresa Bell, director of nursing for Golden Living Center, the Wallace State career fair was a first.

“It’s been good, we’ve gotten some good response,” Bell said. “We had applications on the table ... they’ve disappeared.”

Like the rest of the health care industry Golden Living, a senior center nursing home located in Oneonta is in dire need of nurses.

“In nursing it’s very open,” Bell said. “There’s a great, great need for nurses.”

Barbara Atchley of the career services department at Wallace State said Tuesday’s college fair did exceptionally well because the event was catered not just to the employers, but to the students as well.

“We wanted to make sure we had employers that students wanted to work for,” Atchley said.

The community college put just as much effort into the second part of the career fair on Wednesday, focusing on their business and industry students.

“They (students) are able to make that relationship and find out more about the places they will be working and what kind of career opportunities are available,” Wallace State Director of Training for Existing Business and Industry Vanessa B. Ennis said of the fair. “This is a great asset to our students.”

Joseph T. “Joe” Richardson, plant manager for ATI Firth Sterling, said he was pleased with the results of his booth set up in the coliseum’s perimeter.

“We are extremely pleased with this event,” Richardson said. “We’ve met a lot of good students here and some other folks from the local community who are interested.”

Other businesses represented at the career expo included AAR/Summa Technology, Alabama Army National Guard, Alabama Career Center System’s Career Link, American Proteins, Inc., AT&T, Athens State University, Avon Products, Axsys Technologies, the Birmingham Police Department, Cornerstone Engineering, Cullman Electric Cooperative, Golden Flake, Infinity Insurance Company, Inland Buildings and the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.

Four-year colleges also had a presence during both days of the event.

“We get a lot of great transfer students from this area,” said Lindsey Jordan, a University of Alabama admissions councilor, who was at the fair Wednesday as part of a school recruiting effort.