Thinking ahead as an open letter to the Class of 2014 and the Class of 2015, continued

Six days ago I posted the first half of a longer open letter to the Classes of 2014 and 2015, with a goal of offering advice on better preparing for life after graduation. I focused there on finding the right college major:

• That you find personally satisfying and enriching,
• That will give you skills and credentials in demand in the marketplace, and
• For which your school has a solid reputation.

All three points are crucial here and to pick up on the one that I wrote the least about in Part 1 to this, if you select a field that is in demand but it is something you would not be happy pursuing, then you have found a career path and a college major for entering into it, that you cannot thrive in. That cannot and will not work for you. Bur for the sake of argument in this half of this letter, let’s assume you find an area to major in that you enjoy and find satisfying, and that you could do well at. Let’s assume it is also a field and a degree major area that is in demand in the marketplace and for which your school has a positive reputation. So you would get good, solid training in it there, and your diploma would be viewed by prospective employers as holding real value. Internships and part-time work can help you set yourself apart from your competition with similar degrees and similar career path goals. Well planned work experience of this type can help increase your chances that you will be the job candidate hired for the entry level and career-starting job you would most want and in the right field and with the right employer.

What should you look for in a summer job or an internship, or in a part time job while still a student?

• For many students, work while studying, or while on summer break or during the shorter breaks from classes can be essential if you are to be able to afford school at all. So in the real world and facing real financial needs you do have to take what you gain here and now into account when selecting work opportunities. But the longer term job and career-enablement potential that you can cultivate and develop from work while in school is important too, and my focus here is on that source of value that you would gain from this.
• Working on a real job while a student can give you invaluable experience learning you way around a workplace and working with people who may be very different from you. You develop good work habits and better interpersonal and communications skills. And you can start to build a reputation for reliability.
• Working on a real job while a student can open doors to finding mentors, and sources of reference and recommendation. This work experience can help you build an initial professional social network and one that you should be actively nurturing and growing throughout your career. But you can start this process here.
• These are positive values and resources that you can find and built upon in any real job where you have to make a professional commitment and where you can contribute to business success – and even if your contribution does not involve experience directly related to your major.
• As a freshman you are a lot less likely to find work that would give you hands-on direct experience in your major area. But you can plan for and follow through on a work experience trajectory where you find and secure positions that successively bring you closer to working in your intended career area.
• That means getting a clearer idea as to what working day to day in that field and in that type of job is actually like, and what professionals actually do and how they do it.
• That means strategically building a potential reference and recommendations base that includes people who are working in areas closer to where you would be seeking your first post-college job.
• Ideally that means developing bullet point content for a starter resume that would highlight how you could begin offering value to an employer, and even when just starting out. Shorter learning curve requirements to get up to speed on a new job make a candidate much more attractive to a hiring manager. So look for work opportunities that can help you build a basis for those bullet points where you can legitimately claim to have worked on and helped out on tasks that you have seen, real world, to be of importance to employers.

Take some time off and recharge your batteries – don’t just work if you can afford that. But do not simply repeat the high school summer job experience – unless of course, you were already starting to seriously plan for a career then too.

And bring your work experience back to the classroom with you, and view and think about what you learn in class for how it does and in some cases does not connect to what you have seen there. Bring both your classroom and workplace experience with you as you talk with your professors, cultivating them for the insight and guidance they can share with you and as potential references and sources of recommendation. And do not forget that faculty members can be great networking contacts as many have both academic and workplace contacts and they can be of real help in your networking your way to that first real full time job.

You can find this and other material about jobs and careers at my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development and its continuation page, and with these open letters included at the bottom of those directory pages as supplemental postings.

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