Category Archives: Career Advice
Career Services: Taking Advantage of Social Networking
Entry by Pat Patterson
Social networking may help you reach your student body, keep in contact with alumni, connect students and alumni with employment opportunities, and market your events. John Hill, alumni career services director at Michigan State University (MSU), has had a lot of success with social networking:
The MSU career services network’s social networking strategy is to have alumni help it access industries, interest areas, and professions that it wouldn’t be able to reach through traditional on-campus recruiting or career fairs.
“The MSU alumni who get involved in these groups through social and professional media are our low-hanging fruit and it’s up to us to mobilize them,” Hill says. “Social media gives us a ready-made repository to identify them.”
MSU primarily focuses on LinkedIn as there are 135,000 MSU alumni and students using it. Through information and data on resumes, the career services network creates communities that …
The #1 Interview Question: “Tell me about yourself.”
Entry by Valerie Petrey, Public Relations & Event Planning Intern, Purdue Liberal Arts Career Development
Preparing for an interview, whether for an internship or job is stressful. It’s simple to answer questions about yourself, right? The hard part is answering those questions in a way that will convey your specific skill set to an employer.
When answering the infamous question, “tell me about yourself,” you must limit the answer to a minute or two. Also keep in mind your future employer doesn’t care about your obsession with the Chicago Cubs, that you like music or if you’re double jointed, UNLESS you can turn those things into experience that would benefit the job you want to do for that employer. In which case it would make you stand out among the hundreds of other candidates.
A fabulous guest speaker came to my class this week and told us the story of …
Interning After Graduation?
Entry by Valerie Petrey, Public Relations & Event Planning Intern, Purdue Liberal Arts Career Development
For those of you job searching with me, this blog is for you!
Regardless of the economy it can be difficult to find a job. It’s different now because companies have more to lose if their recent hire can’t handle the job responsibilities. Let’s say Company X hired “Mary” on as their copywriter. It appeared that “Mary” knew how to write and could work under pressure but when she was assigned to produce a brochure for Company X, her writing skills were less than immaculate and she crumbled under time limits.
Company X’s time and money was wasted, and they were forced to let her go and search for a new copywriter. Unfortunately things like this happen in the workforce, which may lead an employer to assume all new grads are like this. This is …
Will The Great Internship Please Stand Up?
Entry by Brittney Horn, Membership Intern, Greater Lafayette Commerce
Whatever major you have during college, most students are urged to do as many internships that they can while they are finishing their undergrad. It’s obvious why it’s important, I mean how else are you supposed to get experience? What’s more important to search for is the GREAT internship. I feel as though there are 3 different kinds of internships: the great, the good, and the really bad. Here are few tips for finding the perfect internship.
Before accepting the internship, make sure you ask if you will have a mentor/supervisor. Most companies that provide internships will have a specific person appointed to be in charge of all of the interns. This is extremely important because if you have no one to report to then you may not learn much from the experience. Talk with previous interns from that company. These …
Getting Yourself Noticed by New Blog Author Valerie Petrey
Entry by Valerie Petrey, Public Relations & Event Planning Intern, Purdue Liberal Arts Career Development
Hello everyone! My name is Valerie Petrey. I’m currently a senior at Purdue University majoring in public relations and advertising and will graduate this May. To learn a little bit more about me and what I will be blogging about, please read on!
In today’s workforce you need to have an internship to get a job, and most of the time you need a few. Employers LOVE to hire students fresh out of college with real work experience! This semester I will be sharing experiences of my current internship with Purdue Liberal Arts Career Development (LACD), advice I have received from past internships and my current journey of locating internships and jobs via social media and traditional methods.
The best advice I can give anyone is to take a chance. While it is easiest to …
Temps are Dropping, but Career Services is Heating Up
Entry by Bobby Wade, Peer Career Advisor, Wabash College Career Services
It’s been a hectic first half of the semester at Career Services, and it promises to get even busier. As students returned for fall, the scramble for on-campus jobs was in full swing the first few weeks back. As a result, all 14 peer career advisors, including myself, were busy every day with resume and cover letter critiques. Now that campus jobs are mostly filled and recruiting season has begun, I’ve kept busy helping seniors who are flooding the office with questions about post-grad job applications.
I’ve had a number of independent projects this semester that I am very excited about, one of which began this past summer. In June, I was notified that Paul Wineman, former president of my national fraternity and current negotiations consultant, was going to visit my house for homecoming weekend. With the help of …
Career Fairs 101: Avoid the Herd Mentality
Entry by Pat Patterson
After attending a few career fairs this fall, it seems like a lot of students attend career fairs with a group of their friends. That in itself poses no problem, but showing up to a career fair with your friends and walking around the career fair with your friends are two different things. What I am getting at is – it is important to navigate your way through a career fair alone.
First off, think about the reasons that you may walk around a career fair in a group. The group acts as a ‘crutch.’ You may be nervous, unconfident, or unsure who to approach at a career fair, and your friends may make you feel more comfortable. And that is how employers may perceive such a group of students – recruiters may see such students as unconfident, unsure, or unprepared (not necessarily admirable traits for …
Internship Are Not Just for Juniors and Seniors
Entry by Pat Patterson
Although the National Bureau of Economic Research recently announced that the recession ended, this does not mean it will be easier to land a full-time job. Employers will always be looking to hire those competitive candidates who have previous work experience. In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal’s survey of college recruiters, an internship may be one of the best ways to land a full-time job offer.
I’ve recently attended a few career fairs where freshmen and sophomores have approached me to learn more about Indiana INTERNnet and ended up surprised to learn that internship opportunities exist for underclassmen.
As many students may not realize, employers are starting to identify a potential future employee as early as a student’s freshman year:
A quarter of the nearly 480 respondents to The Wall Street Journal’s survey of college recruiters said more than 50% of their new-graduate hires had …
Career Fairs 101: After the Career Fair
Entry by Pat Patterson
Students
After a career fair (From the 2010 September INTERNnetwork):
Jot down your notes and organize the information you collected (including contact information – it is a good idea to note where you met certain individuals and what you talked about), write thank you notes to those you met, apply for positions you are interested in, and follow up with employers about applications you submitted.
Remember, making a positive impression with people greatly influences your internship and career search. When recruiters sift through resumes and decide who they plan to interview, you are more likely to stand out if the recruiters remember who you are and the interest you showed in their particular organization.
Employers
After the Career Fair (From the National Association of Colleges and Employers NACE)
Post-fair activities do help with your recruiting efforts. Here are some ideas:
Host a networking …
Students: Internship Experience May Increase Your Salary
Entry by Pat Patterson
As you may already know, there are many benefits of interning, including:
Enhancing your educational experience, testing out a new organization or industry, exposing yourself to multiple departments within an organization, discovering your talents and aspects of a job you find appealing, gaining real-world job experience, learning new skills, building your resumé, making new connections, and setting yourself up for full-time employment.
In addition, according to NACE’s 2010 Student Survey, students from the Class of 2010 who had internship experience received higher average starting salaries than students who had no internship experience:
In terms of starting salary offers, there is a definite financial advantage for students who have internship experience, according to results of NACE’s 2010 Student Survey. Overall, students in the Class of 2010 who had internships received an average salary offer of $41,580. Meanwhile, their classmates who didn’t take internships received an average starting …
College Touring: Don’t Forget the Career Services Office
Entry by Pat Patterson
In the current competitive job market, students need to begin thinking about and planning for their potential careers early on in their college experience. Since students go to college to attain an education that will eventually be used to secure a career, students (and parents) should explore each college’s career services office on their campus visits. A recent news release from Wake Forest University echoes this sentiment:
As high school students and their parents begin the annual fall ritual of campus visits, experts are recommending that families make the career office one of the first stops on any college tour. “In this competitive job market, the tools and resources that a career office provide have become nearly as important as academics when choosing a college or university,” said Patrick Sullivan, Associate Director of Experiential Education at Wake Forest University.
In fact, college internships can be one …
Students: Preparing for a Career Fair
Entry by Pat Patterson
Fall career fairs are beginning to take place as early as next week, and recruiters look positively on candidates who show up to career fairs prepared. But what does that mean exactly? Here is some advice to help guide you:
BEFORE a career fair you should prepare by:
Keeping up on industry/market trends, keeping up on current events in your areas of interest, pre-registering for the career fair, researching the participating employers and their opportunities,
– General company information: industry, market outlook, products and services, history and corporate culture, organizational mission and goals, key financial statistics, organizational structure (divisions, subsidiaries, etc.), and locations (main and branch).
– Employment: career paths and advancement opportunities, benefits, diversity initiatives, current internship and job opportunities. identifying the employers you plan on speaking with and the positions you plan on applying for, preparing resume(s) (creating specific, tailored resumes for different …
Students: Pay Attention to the Details
Entry by Pat Patterson
Just because you may not have landed the internship of your dreams in the past does not mean it’s not possible. Writing a great resume and cover letter and “looking the part” at a networking event or career fair are not the only determinants of whether or not you will get a call back. It is important to also pay attention to the details that may set you apart from other candidates.
Spell check your resume and cover letter over and over again. And then after you are done spell checking, have one of your peers spell check for you. A typo can say a lot of negative things about you – such as, you may not be able to spell, you don’t care enough to check for spelling errors, you are not organized or detail-oriented, etc.
Invest in professional resume paper. Although business stationary paper …
Career Services Professionals: Best Practices
Entry by Pat Patterson
Now that students are back to school and somewhat settled in, it is likely that more students will start visiting their campus career services office. As career services professionals, it is important to keep on top of the best practices in the current market to help students acquire internships and jobs.
The following is a list of advice from the Intern Bridge’s blog The Intern Advocate, which will help you help your students:
Get a RSS reader account. Find blogs that dole out daily or weekly advice pertaining to job searching and career centers. Add each blog to an RSS reader, such as Google Reader, and make a point to check it at least three times per week. If your career center has social media accounts, be sure to share helpful articles with your students directly!
Read new literature available. There are countless …
How Will You Be Remembered?
Entry by Pat Patterson
Regardless if you are at a networking event or a friend’s cookout, you are likely to meet new people, perhaps someone who will lead you to your next internship or job. Whether you will continue to keep in touch with new contacts depends on how favorably they remember you.
A great first impression will increase your chances of continuing a relationship with someone you meet. Especially for those internship and job seekers at career fairs, making a great first impression may determine whether or not a recruiter decides to toss your resume aside or keep it in the pile of potential candidates.
In Kevin Eikenberry’s blog, Leadership and Learning, he provides ten valuable tips on how to make a great first impression:
Relax. This comes first, especially if the situation is one where you feel you need to make a great first impression. You want the new …