What if there was a way to jumpstart your career while you’re slogging through those courses? The good news: there is. In fact, there are a number of tactics students can use to up their chances of landing a good job in their area of interest. See how many of these you can start on today:
1. Set Your Personal Career Goals Now
Assume that this may change a bit either before you graduate or after you’ve been in the workforce for awhile, but having a target to focus on let’s you keep your goals front and center. Every college program has an agenda for what they want you to learn (fair enough!), as does every instructor (also fair enough!). But you need to be the one who establishes what knowledge/connections/skills will most benefit you in your chosen career path, and make sure your learning supports that path.
So, for example, you may want to take electives in areas outside your main discipline (think of a management, accounting, or communications course, for example – skills that will always be useful in any career). You may want to do an internship with a company or organization that is in the industry that interests you, or write a class paper on a company you’d like to work for. Your goal is to identify what options you’d like to have available to you upon graduation, and then focus your efforts over your many courses in that direction.
2. Multipurpose Your Assignments
Whenever possible, use your assignments to connect with potential employers or clients – for example, do a research project on their industry or non-profit area, and ask if you can interview someone there. If you’re working on a group project, use the assignment as an opportunity to connect and build relationships with your fellow students – you will be establishing the beginning of your professional network, one of your most important career assets.
Or consider turning your A+ assignments into magazine articles, conference presentations, on online pieces for your target audience to start building your professional visibility in the field that you’d like to pursue. Unless you’re targeting an academic/scholarly audience, you’ll need to do a bit of rewriting to move from “academic speak” to the way the rest of us communicate, but this should be minimal.
3. Create Your Own Learning Assignments
Part of setting up your personal career agenda is identifying what else you need/want to learn as you’re going through school in order to be competitive in the marketplace. So for example, you may want to learn how to write more effectively, learn how to present more confidently (to colleagues, to decision-makers, to organizations), learn how to think critically and make knowledgeable decisions, and understand how you learn most effectively and quickly.
Or you may want to focus on your technical skills – learning how to create a basic website or do a blog, for instance. Whatever you want to learn, try to create assignments that although focused on the course topic (so the instructor knows you’re a committed, engaged student!), also allow you to practice whatever additional skills you’d like to develop.
4. Start Building Your Professional Network
Even in online courses, you have many opportunities to start establishing your professional relationships with potential colleagues – also known as future business contacts.
Consider reaching out to your fellow students in your courses, your instructors, class guest speakers or lecturers, internship contacts, and people you may connect with as you work on your (self-directed?) learning assignments. Your goal is to build a relationship that lets them know who you are, to communicate your genuine interest in and respect for them and their goals, and to find areas of mutual interest or benefit.
Have conversations (virtual or voice) with your classmates about their lives, let your instructors see your excitement about their class, send thank-you notes to guest speakers/lecturers, internship contacts, and people you may have connected with through your assignments. You don’t need to be pushy, you just need to express your interest and appreciation – and then occasionally drop an e-mail note to ask them how they’re doing, and let them know what you’re up to, if you feel this would be welcomed.
5. Grab Every Opportunity to Build Your Portfolio
Your portfolio is your body of work – the things you can point to that demonstrate the skills and/or expertise you want to be known for in the professional world. Want to be known for your leadership abilities? Volunteer to lead a student initiative or organize a group of students with a shared interest. Interested in writing work? Volunteer for the student paper to create a “clips” collection.
Considering a specific industry? Do a class assignment on emerging opportunities/companies in that industry to demonstrate both your understanding of the industry and your analysis skills, and you’ll have it to leave behind at job interviews. Or volunteer to do the website for a community organization for free so that you can practice your webmaster skills (and point to their results). The goal is to start thinking of yourself as a professional, and looking for opportunities to demonstrate the value you can add to a given organization.
6. Get Visible on Topics That Interest You
These days, with the online environment, it’s easy to “get visible” on topics that engage you, even while you’re a student – start a blog or comment on others’, create an information-rich website, do book reviews or write articles for online publications in your topic area, volunteer to give presentations for local organizations.
You may want to do it from the angle of “a student’s perspective,” or approach from the context of how your disability influences your perspective. But as you do so, understand that you are building a brand, whether or not you are doing it consciously. Your words and ideas and actions create a set of perceptions that define not only how people see you, but also what they expect of you.
7. Practice Doing Scary Stuff
Almost none of us like to operate outside our comfort zone. But college is a great way to practice doing the things that seem most intimidating, because the stakes are so low. You’re not going to blow a job interview if you go through the mock-interview process with your school’s career center, you’re not going to get demoted if the snazzy Powerpoint presentation you did for your class doesn’t quite work out.
In the meantime, however, you’ve accomplished two important things: you’ve practiced a new professional skill, and you’ve gotten just a little bit more comfortable with taking risks and pushing beyond your comfort zone. You’ve learned that the world didn’t come to an end when you weren’t perfect, and that’s powerful knowledge to have as you continue to develop your career.
8. Practice Your Transferable Skills
One of the most important concepts in the work world is “transferable skills” – those skills that you may have picked up in one job or volunteer project that can be readily repurposed into another job opportunity.
Some examples of transferable skills are strong written and verbal communications skills (consider a business communication or technical writing class?), good team skills, especially virtual teams (one of the best reasons to take on group projects when you’re in an online program!), and project management abilities (ready to lead one of those group projects?)
While you’re a student, pay attention to guest speakers/lecturers and what their jobs involve, with an eye toward considering whether you have skills that could be applied in a similar type of work. And don’t hesitate to ask them what business skills they consider most valuable when looking at new hires.
9. Find a Mentor – or Several
One of the great things about being a student is that often other people are willing to talk with you about all sorts of work-related topics. Although they can’t disclose propriety information (private information about their company) – and you shouldn’t ask! – they may be willing to talk about how they got their job, what skills they view as most important, what to say (and not say) in an interview, etc.
Mentoring relationships may be informal or may be more formal arrangements with a set agenda, meeting or discussion time, goals, etc. However, it takes an unusually dedicated individual to be willing to commit this amount of time to your goals, so what you may want to do instead is identify several people – possibly a couple of faculty members, maybe a guest lecturer you’ve connected with, perhaps someone in the business world you’ve met through one of your assignments – who are occasionally willing to share their wisdom with you.
If you approach them with specific questions, they will probably enjoy the brief exchange – but don’t forget afterwards to always thank them for their time, and ask if there is any way you can repay the favor.
As you think about connecting with a mentor, consider how important it is to you that the individual have a disability. Would it be helpful to have advice and counsel from someone who shares your particular disability and has built a successful career? If so, then you may want to connect with your college’s disability services director to suggest some potential individuals for you to contact.
10. Practice Self-Leadership
One of the most challenging concepts for many of us is understanding that we are the leaders of our lives. Yes, events happen around us, logistics can stump us, people and organizations we rely on can make us nuts. But the bottom line still is, we are the ones in charge of our lives – our attitudes, our efforts, our commitments, our outcomes.
So in terms of your getting your career going while you’re in college, this means you need to assume that although the disability services people may be able to help, it’s going to be up to you to identify your goals, put the effort in to pursue them, and figure out how to overcome obstacles when they inevitably occur.
Consider these to be some basic actions that will help you get your career into high gear while you’re hitting the books. But don’t stop here – use your imagination and take advantage of every opportunity to move from student to employee as quickly as possible (with, of course, a small stop-over for “ecstatic graduate” in between!).
