Breaking into the Real World after College
Rather than focusing on searching a job, this article is written to show college student how to really "breaking" into the real world by being competitive in the job market using their college advantage and being hired by an employer that pays real money, not just experience. Since I presume all college graduate knows about networking, on-line job listings and career center job postings in school, finding a job opportunity will not be discussed much in detail in this article.Depending on your preference, here are a few tips to be competitive and get hired:
1. Brag about your education2. Boast your prior experience3. Interview well
1. Brag about your education. The main point of bragging about your education is that it gives you a competitive edge over non college graduate by explaining why having a college education make a difference. Now, unless you speak up about your education, your degree would just be a piece of paper. When a college graduate is looking for a job, he has to realize that employers do not care about what kind of education you have, but what kind of experience you have. For people who are lucky enough to have a degree that directly leads to a job such as engineering and computer science, this point does not need to be emphasize; however, for the rest of us social science and humanities major, it is important that we explain what we have learned during our college years.
With that in mind, here are a few things you have learned in college as a graduate:
- Organize tasks effectively and the ability to meet deadlines under environment similar to an office
- Ability to articulating ideas clearly orally and in writing to persuade and explain, which will be valuable in explaining ideas to potential customer and supervisors
- Experienced in working with a team, which is essential to all business organizations because they emphasize on team work a lot.Above all, I am sure that as a college graduate, you can come up with more subtle skills you've learned in college.
2. Boast your prior experience. The main point about boasting of your prior experience is to relate an experience you had in college to a essential job duty to the job you are applying to. Whether the experience you have is the volunteering experience you have during high school or a ski bum job you held while you are in college or even you didn't do anything significant in college, I am pretty sure you have some great experience to talk about in interview. The trick to boasting about your prior experience is research. Before the interview, research about the position you are applying to, then pick a few duties that are essential to the position and relate some of your prior experience to those duties.
For example, if an office assistance job requires experience in working in an office environment and knowledge of Microsoft office, you might want to talk about your experience in the computer science course where you have to do a project on excel or access. Experience of working in an office environment could just be the experience where you once had to write an essay and go to your professor's office hours to get comments and then go back to revise your work. After all that, do talk about the grade and the comments you got from your professor.
Interview well. Interview well is important because this is the chance where you get to do your step 1 and 2 from above. If you interview well and better than other candidate, it is very possible that you can get a job over somebody who has more experience than you. I agree, it sure is easier said than done. However, even though interview might be a tough time, with some practice I am sure you can go through it.
First and foremost, be prepared to answer the question "Why should we hire you?" and "Tell me a little bit about yourself." To the first question, you should answer confidently that you are well qualify for the position and very passionate about it. Also, you should prepare a short personal story about your self to talk about to show that you are passionate for the job and have experience on the position already.
To the second question, you should prepare a story that describes your personality to the employer. Since the employer probably got your resume, it is not helpful to recite the information on the resume because the main point of interview is to get the employer to know more about you and feel comfortable working with you in the near future.
Other than that, research interviewing tips or attend an interviewing workshop at your own leisure, and remember to be assertive during the interviewing process. With all these information, you should be able to break into the real world very soon.
