Back in January, Kamil Šejnoha thought about the mere half-year remaining before his graduation from University of New York in Prague (UNYP) and began to worry: He didn't know what job he wanted when school ended.

"I didn't know what I was going to do, what I wanted to do," Šejnoha, 23, recalls.

He began talking to friends already working for multinational companies and doing his own research on the Internet. He graduated last month, and in the last three weeks he has had two interviews at major banks and one job offer that he decided not to take. But things will work out soon, he says.

Šejnoha's confrontation with reality — that it was time to start the job hunt — awaits many students heading back to universities this month for their last year of study, graduation in some cases less than nine months away. It's back-to-school time and career development experts say it's also the time for students to begin getting serious about their post-graduation plans. They say students should start polishing their CVs and researching and reaching out to companies. They should also begin availing themselves of resources offered at universities, employment agencies and companies themselves.

The earlier students start, the better, experts say. "Waiting until the first day after you graduate is too late," says Ondřej Hlaváček, a partner at Neumann & Partners, a head-hunting firm.

"The best thing is for students to begin to seek a job in their last year at university," says Michaela Pastorová, the business manager at the Kariéra job agency in Prague. "The sooner the applicant approaches a company, the more this company will see that he or she is really interested in the job." And, Pastorová adds, "The last year offers more time, as students don't attend lectures as much as in previous years."

Right now the job market for graduates is wide open, especially for students from economic universities and those with extensive proficiency in foreign languages, says Markéta Hospodárová, a spokeswoman for the Czech Association of Personnel Services Providers. But some students wait until the last minute to begin the job search, and others simply do not know how to go about it.

One reason, experts say, is that hunting for post-graduation jobs — long a part of every student's life at Western universities, especially in the United States — is still a relatively new phenomenon in the Czech Republic. When communism fell 15 years ago, there were no resources to help students hoping to enter the new free market.

That has changed. A number of universities now have full-fledged programs to help students with career development. Business students at The New Anglo-American College in Prague can enroll in an elective course called "employment process," where they learn and practice interview techniques and job-search strategy.

Three years ago UNYP established a career-development seminar for third-year students and today the majority of the school's 750 students take it, learning how to research companies and write effective CVs and cover letters before they enter their last year. This summer the school opened a new department, the Center for Careers and Internships, meant to further assist students — both full- and part-time ones.

"It's such an important part of a student's experience to know how to really go about searching for a job," says Barbara Adams, the school's associate president.

Major companies operating in the Czech Republic are increasingly targeting recruitment efforts at students. Many have job-development programs that recruit students early in their university careers and give them experience in the form of internships and summer jobs, with the promise of full-time employment to the most-promising candidates.

Ondřej Berda, a former human resource manager at mobile phone provider Oskar, said his office worked with student agencies to recruit students in their last year of study or recent graduates. "We were looking for university-educated people with language skills and people who have had practical experience," Berda recalls. "It wouldn't really matter what kind of practical experience, as long as they had some kind of summer job that showed that they could work and be part of a team."

Employment agencies often offer the same kind of assistance as university career centers, but because there are many more of them, they have come to be the most accessible resource for many students on the job hunt.

Marek Sedláček, the national sales manager at Adecco, one of Prague's largest employment agencies, says students typically belong to one of three groups: those that do nothing after university, those who go abroad and work in service industries after university, and those who intend to begin working full-time after university and often prepare for up to two years before graduation.

Students in the latter group often meet with the most success, Sedláček says. "What is most important is for students to do something during their studies, not only just have beer and study."

Students need to show some kind of work experience to prospective employers, he explains, and those waging the job hunt with one or two summer jobs under their belts, maybe an internship, have a distinct advantage.

That certainly helped Šejnoha, the UNYP student. His job for the last two years of his studies at a German telecommunications company opened doors for him, he says. "This helped me to think about the job environment that I expected for myself," he says. Students with no work experience "don't know what to expect, because they haven't worked in any field. They don't know the possibilities."