“How do you take charge of your career when you’re a young person?”
– Yuritzin, Belgium
We’ve been working with college students for about 15 years. Over 50,000 students have been in one of our programs during that time, and we have a lot of experience with young people who are struggling with the idea of what they will become post-degree.
The first piece of advice is not to wait until you’re a senior. And don’t worry, if you’re a senior reading this, we’ve got some things you can do too. But if you have the opportunity, and you’re in those first three years of your college experience, start to build up your strategy so that by the time you graduate, you’re just going to the job that you knew you were going to get two years before.
That may seem like something challenging to do, but it’s not, and we’re going to explain how to get to that point using some basic techniques.
If you don’t use these techniques, your alternative is doing what we’ve been doing for years and years. And it makes no sense. Think about the day you were born. The day, the month, the year you were born, and you came into this world. You open up your eyes, and you start having experiences.
Now, these experiences are like no other person on the planet in the history of our species. They’re unique experiences. Now you’re 18, 19, 20-years-old, and you have 18, 19, 20 years’ worth of unique experiences. That’s an amazing asset. That’s the asset that you bring to your professional life. Now, what do you do with that?
Well, the current process says you reduce all of that uniqueness into sameness. You take all of that uniqueness, and you put it on an 8.5×11 sheet of paper, call it a resume, and get in line at a job fair. You hand out your resume to potential employer after potential employer. You tell them what makes you unique, which includes your GPA and your extracurricular activities. You share that you are enthusiastic and should be a part of the team. But there’s nothing that happens in that process that would allow somebody to stand out and show that unique individual that they are. So instead, what we suggest is you take a different approach.
Don’t let your career choose you because that’s what you’re doing when you’re getting in that line, handing out your resumes, and hoping that someone picks your sheet of paper out of a stack of similar sheets of paper. You’re hoping that this company gives you this career, and when you get there, everything’s going to be great.
Let me dispel one thing right now. I call it the two-phone call problem. After giving a speech, I often have students from the audience call me up and tell me about their successes in finding a career. It usually ends up with two phone calls. The first phone call is when they call me to say, “Jeff, I am so excited. I just got hired to XYZ Corporation. It’s amazing. It’s going to be the best thing ever. I start on Monday; I am so excited. They picked me from the job fair, and I know it’s going to be great.”
The second phone call I get, about six months later, the same person calls up and says, “Jeff, get me out of here. They don’t appreciate me. I’m underpaid. Nobody’s listening. I don’t know where I’m going, and I have no idea why I ever thought this job was for me.”
It’s not the fault of the organization that’s hiring you. It’s our fault because we have surrendered in this whole process. We have surrendered the control of our career to somebody else. We are letting our career choose us rather than choosing our career.
What can we do to turn that around? What can you do to start to understand where you should work? Many times, people don’t know what kinds of jobs are out there for them.
Whatever your interest is, whatever your passion is, there is a job out there that will pay you and pay you well.
If you’re not sure what that passion or interest is, then I have a very specific question for you. When you were seven, eight, or nine-years-old, and your parent or caregiver comes to the door and says, “Hey, it’s getting late, it’s time to go inside.” What were you doing? What were you doing that you could have done all day because it was your favorite thing to do?
Whatever that thing is, combine that with the skill that you learned as a college student. Put those two things together, and that should be your career. You take that technical skill that you earn, and you pay dearly for your college experience. Combine that with your passion.
Let me give you two examples.
I met a young lady who was leaving pre-med. She says, “Pre-med isn’t for me. While I’m interested in medicine, what I really want to do is be a salesperson.” This struck me as odd because most people say they never want to work in sales. After looking for a few months, we were able to find her a job. Today, she travels the country selling surgical equipment to hospitals for their operating rooms. I remember seeing her in the W Hotel in New York City lobby, sitting with a huge box. Walking over to say hello, I ask how her career is going and what’s the story with the chest. Well, it turns out she has to travel with a cadaver to demo the surgical equipment. It’s the perfect job for her, and she’s doing well.
For my second example, there was a young lady who was in horticulture. She was very interested in botany and travel. Those were her two criteria. Today, she travels the world going into the jungle to find new plants with specific characteristics that are mass-produced for the big-box chains. She labels them and sends them off. She’s making tremendous money doing this because nobody else has those skills.
If you matched your passion when you were little with the skills you learn in college, you would be doing something that you enjoy. Your career isn’t just today or just one week. It’s forty years of your life day in and day out. If you want to compete at the top of your game, you’re going to need an abundance of energy to drive you, so you don’t have to make the second phone call and say, “I hate this place.”
When I was five, you wouldn’t be surprised to know what I was doing. I would build stages and give speeches. Many decades later, I jump out of bed every morning because I love my job. I love what I’m doing. Every day is better than before.
