Jeremy Johnson has a new guest blog post this week on using skills you learned as a student to get a job.
Jeremy is a recruiter in Kansas City for EHD Technologies, a recruiting, staffing and managed services company serving the IT, Engineering and Automotive industries.
Use Your Student Skills to Get a Job
One thing I’ve always been critical about regarding college is that it teaches you to learn, but it doesn’t teach you how to get a job. Job-hunting, interviewing, resume-writing and networking are all specific skills, but ones you don’t much learn in college – or at least learn very well. Once you get your diploma, it can feel like you’re thrown in the deep end of the real world, vying for jobs just like everyone else, without really feeling comfortable about how to do it effectively.
Keep in mind, though, that there’s a lot of skills you should have learned as a student – if you were a motivated student, at least – that you can use to help in your job search.
Research – If you’ve ever had a big term paper, or been through grad school, you’ve had to do research. You had to go to the library, use the internet, maybe interview people, and basically do a lot of detective work to find information on your topic that was relevant and credible that you could use for your assignment. In your job search, you should be researching the industries you want to go into, the employers in your area who you’d most like to work for, and finding the right type of people – probably who are already in those industries or companies you’re interested in – that you should network with. Start by asking yourself questions. What is it I really want to do? In what different ways can I apply my skills? How would I find information on ‘X’? Who are the decision-makers in the companies/industries I’m interested in and how would I reach them? You can look for industry associations. Local business journals have great information on specific companies, and will publish lists of top local companies by industry. LinkedIn is a great place to start for finding potential decision-makers and networking contacts. If you haven’t already, get serious about this step in your job hunt, and follow through. It can open up possible options that you’d never even knew were there.
Do Your Homework – Sure anyone can cram for a test, but the better students will study, study, study. They’ll learn as much as they can so they nail the test. You owe it to yourself to do the same in your job search. This part is where you flesh out the research you’ve already done. Whatever your research produced, now you dig in and learn as much as you can about what you found. And, there’s so much information out there today, that you really have no excuse for not doing this part. The internet is a treasure trove of a resource that can help you in any aspect of you job search. I still remember, years ago, that if I wanted to do my homework on a particular company, I had to call them directly and ask them to mail a copy of their annual report – and then wait a week or more. Now, I can do the same thing online in a matter of minutes. If I wanted to learn better ways to write a resume, I had to go to the library or bookstore. Now, you can Google ‘resume examples’ or ‘writing a better resume’ and find countless resources to study from. There are also all sorts of job-related blogs giving tons of advice for you to devour and then use.
Practice your Presentation – Now maybe you’ve had classroom presentations that you did cold turkey, without any practice or preparation, but it’s not a good idea. If you have practiced a presentation beforehand, I’m sure that after it was all over you were glad that you did. Or, conversely, if you didn’t, you probably wished that you had prepared so the result would have been better. This goes for jobhunting, too. You should practice everything from how you’re going to answer specific questions to your body language in an interview. These things will not only improve your performance in front of your audience, but you’ll also go into it with more confidence, knowing that you were prepared. Just like you shouldn’t ‘wing it’ in a classroom presentation, you also shouldn’t just wing it in an interview. Don’t worry about it if it feels weird. Don’t think about it; just do it.
Ask Your Peers for Help – Have you ever been in a lab class working on a project or experiment and start to fall a bit behind, a little lost maybe? Has something like that ever happened to you? It’s happened to me. So what did you do? More than likely, you noticed somebody who got past the problem you’re struggling with, you leaned over, tapped them on the shoulder and asked, “Hey, how did do ‘such and such’?” You got stuck, so you asked for help. So, do the same thing in your job search. Ask for help and advice. If someone you know has gotten where you want to be in the job world, ask them how they did it. If they have a good idea, implement it yourself. Unlike school, it’s okay to cheat here. Don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to. One job I got in the past hinged on how I answered a single question, and I only nailed it because I learned from someone else how he answered something very similar. My answer wasn’t identical to his, but I used the essence of what he said, expanded on it, and molded it to that particular situation. I can honestly say that my answer was a home run, but if I had not had this other person’s help, I wouldn’t have even gotten on base – and I definitely wouldn’t have gotten the job.
If you’ve been a student, you already know how to do all of these things. So, take comfort in the fact that these skills absolutely translate to activities you can use in your job search.