We hope you have enjoyed our series of articles focused on career advice for students. We started discussing the future of jobs and careers, talked through some exercises to help students think about where they would like to start, and in our last piece we focused on trying to bridge the gap between student expectations and work realities.
In our final article, we will focus on the one big subject that remains –how do you find a job?
We can often assume that finding a job is easy, but the journey from school to professional life is daunting and sits as one of the most challenging transitions we face as human beings.
From dependence to independence. From having a plan laid out for us to being faced with imponderable choices and a sense that we are being judged and compared – it’s entirely understandable that the uninitiated stumble.
Explore this SecEd series: Careers advice and entering the workplace
-
- Part 1: The future of jobs: What will work look like in 2034? Published April 30, 2024
- Part 2: Helping students to consider early career goals: Three exercises. Published May 7, 2024
- Part 3: Preparing students for workplace expectations: Two exercises. Published May 13, 2024
- Part 4: Finding your first job after school: Three exercises (this article)
Embracing the career multiverse
Consequently, what we recommend is to begin the process of thinking about and building “on-ramps” for careers in the middle teenage years. We hold to the view that initial ideas about careers will evolve and change as students experience the realities of work. For many, a high-profile graduate scheme with a bank might seem like the pinnacle of desirability, until they try it and find it is not nearly as glamorous as it sounds.
Moreover, our mental picture of careers is not some linear succession of predictable steps. They are dynamic and opportunities often are hidden from sight.
In this sense we hold a mental picture of a series of doors – as you pass through one set an entirely new set appear – all holding different opportunities and new destinations. We have dubbed this outlook the career multiverse.
In a previous article, we also discussed our view that careers increasingly will cross traditional professional domains. Therefore, encouraging students early on to test multiple different avenues and opportunities is consistent with this.
Overcoming the work-experience-deficiency-paradox
At the same time, it is important to overcome the work-experience-deficiency-paradox well in advance of any full-time job applications (see Molinsky & Newfield, 2017).
This is summed up, if somewhat exaggerated, by the old joke about employers looking for college graduates with at least five to 10 years of prior experience.
Rather than wait to confront the obstacle in your early-20s, it is just easier to accumulate work experience early on.
We have three exercises that we suggest to help students with the nitty-gritty transactional aspects of identifying and applying for their first full-time professional positions.
1, Taking stock and filling in the gaps
In an earlier article, we suggested a number of avenues for job/career experimentation. We hope in many cases students will participate in one or more of those suggestions. However, we return to it here from a more defensive perspective. When the time comes to apply for jobs, the question of business or even more basically “office” experience will be a real one.
Businesses prefer to hire people who have already had a grounding in the daily routines of work. We describe it as a paradox simply because full-time students looking for their first job by definition haven’t previously had a traditional job.
So, for multiple reasons, we suggest a further exercise to help students think about and build-up the work experience quotient prior to making job applications:
- School associations and clubs: Review opportunities to participate in or launch school activities. The obvious ones are newspapers, helping with school office administration, or organising an event.
- Non-school activities: Look for opportunities to participate in the administration work, from helping with budgeting to maintaining communications and announcements.
- Social media interests: Can you develop a channel with consistent content on a subject that can promote your digital marketing skills and show knowledge of how platform economics work.
- Establish your own affinity or interest group: If you are interested in something which does not currently have a support structure behind it, think about building one of your own. Whether it is chess, books, or fashion, maintain a blog, newsletter, and enlist others to participate. This can help you to demonstrate the basic skills of business organisation.
Desired outcome
We discussed a longer list of work experience opportunities in an earlier article. Here we want to impress the importance of encouraging students to reframe normal interests into something that might be elevated to work or organisation experience.
2, How do you find and evaluate jobs
The single biggest assumption that we would seek to challenge is that the process of finding jobs is somehow intuitive and easy. It isn’t and it’s not.
Consequently, the one crucial exercise we recommend for all students is to help them understand how to use the following sources to identify and then pursue potential job opportunities.
The assignment can be to set aside a week to review and explore each possibility in a classroom setting or ask students to form teams to research each and provide a class presentation.
- LinkedIn: Increasingly the most powerful online marketplace for jobs, self-promotion, and networking.
- Professional networks: All major professions have organisations with programmes designed to help young people begin their careers.
- NGOs focused on youth development: We have worked with the AFS Youth Assembly but there are many others. These organisations provide incredible opportunities for scholarships, networking, and work experience.
- Apprenticeship programmes: Increasingly there are major government supported programmes focused on helping students launch careers.
- Personal networking: Often the best career opportunities emerge from inspirations and connections we already have. Helping students identify them and overcome any hesitation in accessing them is important.
Desired outcome: Demystify the process of identifying job opportunities and accessing them.
3, Resumes, interviews, offers, and first 90 days
Our final exercise is perhaps the most obvious but sometimes the most overlooked. Resume-writing, applying for jobs, interviewing, and thinking about how to make an impact in the first three months of a job are incredibly useful skills to have. We recommend putting in some time to walk through each of these as follows (including some useful hyperlinks for your students):
Resumes
- Resume templates.
- Getting the right tone and content.
- Resume dos and don’ts
- Getting feedback.
Interviews
- How to prepare and what to expect.
- Practise with a mentor or business contact.
- Thinking about the questions that almost every interview poses.
Job offers
- Discuss how this works – rules for negotiating.
- Frame how “negotiations” occur.
- Look at what an employment contract includes and implies.
The first 90-day plan
- What to do before you start
- How to navigate day one and week one.
- Being clear what is important to learn quickly.
The main thrust of this exercise is simply to make sure students have the basics down. We think you can both under and overdo the preparation for job applications. You must have the expected tools to hand but you must stay short of being too rehearsed.
Desired outcome: Students know how the job application process typically works and have the foundational aspects covered.
Final thoughts
We have enjoyed writing these articles for SecEd. We have had an opportunity to discuss the big picture right the way down to the coalface. Across the spectrum, we’ve covered what we view as the big challenges and opportunities that face students today. We hope in some small ways these articles help you to help your students to make better career choices.
- Dr David Oxley and Dr Helmut Schuster are co-authors of A Career Carol: A tale of professional nightmares and how to navigate them, (Austin Macauley Publishers). Visit www.drsschusterandoxley.com/books
Further information & resources
- Molinsky & Newfield: How to gain credibility when you have little experience, Harvard Business Review, 2017: https://hbr.org/2017/10/how-to-gain-credibility-when-you-have-little-experience