Career Development

Career Tips

 

•    Know your career goals and have a plan to reach them.  If you do not know what you want to achieve, you risk living an unauthentic life of desperation. 

•    Consider how your career goals might fit in with where you want to live and the type of family you might want to have. 

•    Have realistic expectations for achieving your goals.  You might have to begin with internships and entry-level jobs in order to gain experience for the career you seek. 

•    Network.  Join professional organizations, associations, and clubs.  Networking leads to more job offers than submitting blind resumes via job postings.

•    Foster relationships with a variety of people, not simply close friends.  Often, a friend of a friend can lead to a job offer.

•     Demonstrate that you have specific skills to solve specific problems for an employer.  Most employers want to know how you can support a company’s mission rather than how a company can advance your professional objectives. 

•    Volunteer.  Volunteerism for any non profit helps develop skills that employers in many industries seek.  Volunteerism is also an ideal way to network and to show that you are reliable and motivated.

•    Learn and develop a variety of skills.  The 21st-century job market requires that employees master skills that are often outside of a specific college major.

•    Be adaptable and willing to assume many roles.

•    Communicate well, both verbally and in writing.  Employers value communication skills—even for many math science jobs. 

•    Develop a professional online identity.  Use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to showcase your education, accomplishments, and goals so that prospective employers form a positive impression of you.  Be wary of posting pictures and content that can harm your reputation. 

•    Research industries and employers for whom you might want to work via websites, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and informational meetings with employees.  Employers want job applicants to articulate how they fit with a company’s mission, history, and goals. 

•    Draft non-generic resumes that showcase how you can solve specific problems for an employer.  Employers do not care about your objective statement: they want to see specific, quantifiable evidence of accomplishments, including education, class work, volunteerism, organizational involvement, and work history.

•    Submit cover letters with resumes.  Cover letters should be less than one page single spaced and should communicate how your education and accomplishments will make you a good fit for the position.

•    Mock interview.  Practice so that you can showcase your education and accomplishments.  Make the interview a conversation about why the employer should hire you.


•    Continue to learn and develop professionally.  Once hired, you will need to prove that you deserve to be promoted through hard work and accomplishments. 

Directions for posting resume to college central network

1)    Go to www.collegecentral.com
2)    Under the heading connect to, click student central
3)    Click register now
4)    You will be asked to create an access ID and password
5)    After that information has been entered, click continue registration
6)    You will then be asked to enter your personal information such as name, email, address, etc.
7)    After your personal information is entered click submit information
8)    You will then click on my home page
9)    On your homepage there will be a section titled manage my resume
10)    Click on upload resume
11)    Your resume will then be uploaded for approval