4 Keys to Preparing for Your Career while in College

Your job is what you will be doing during the major portion of your life and it is what that will define how your life will be spent. You have to spend half of your waking hours on your job which is why this most critical decision of your life warrants for a lot more attention than what it currently gets.Keeping in view the importance and magnitude of the impact of your job on your life, no amount of planning can be enough for it. Therefore, it is recommended that you start giving your job and career a serious thought early on. By ‘early’ we mean the times when you are at school and your fellows are still planning their proms and partying hard!

Yogi Berra very rightly once said that “It gets late early out there” and this is true for the job market as well. As soon as you are in your final study year, you need to start preparing the ground and get in touch with the job world out there.

 

Find your passion – To start with, you must pay the utmost importance to your inner voice and ask yourself what is it that you will love to do for the rest of your life as Confucius’s words of wisdom – “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” – stand very valid even today.

Research & shortlist employers – After you are adequately sure of what you want to become, do your research and make a list of organizations that have the jobs that you are interested in. Scrutinize this list carefully and pick out the ones that you find in line with your personal values, work environment, lifestyle, compensation expectations or any other criteria that are in the value-list. Looking for information on employers can be tough but if you have the will, you will get your way. Make use of your network and contacts like your family & teachers; use the social media platforms like LinkedIn & FaceBook; approach their current employees and ask them your questions and you will surely get the information that will bring out the true image of that organization’s ‘employer brand’.  Certain clues like a company’s culture, dress codes, availability of federal labor law posters, working relations and employees’ attitudes can give out lots of information about that workplace.

Be known – Once you have your wish-list of employers ready, make it a point to get in contact with them and never miss any opportunity to network with anyone from those organizations. You have a number of options to become a ‘familiar face’ to your target organizations. Think about doing your projects with those companies, find internship openings, add them to your LinkedIn network, get in touch with their hiring heads and make the best use of job fairs and on-campus events where your favorite employers are present. After making that first contact, never lose sight of them and find suitable occasions and events to keep reminding them of yourself until you are ready to apply for jobs following your passing out from college.

Persevere and succeed – There will be times when you might not find your way through the first time around but keep in mind that perseverance and a positive outlook is the key to success. Never let your beliefs waiver for a second and keep pushing ahead gently until you will land your dream job which is bound to get you to the top and expand your horizons so that you never have to ‘work a day in your life’.