St.Louis Business Journal
RECENT GRADUATES: JUST GET A JOB. IT'S THE FIRST STEP TO A SATISFYING CAREER

By Anna Navarro May 2011  

Examples in this column are fictionalized to protect privacy.



Sometimes recent college graduates think they have to figure out what they want to do for the rest of their lives before they job hunt. That’s a mistake.

With a few notable exceptions, most of us develop our careers by getting into the workforce and logging our time. If we’re smart, we pay attention to what we like and dislike about what we do, combine that with our innate skills, interests and needs, and use that insight to figure out a satisfying career direction.

By contrast, attempting to figure out a lifetime career solution from the outset can lead to paralysis, precisely because you don’t know enough about yourself or the workplace to be able to undertake that task.

The double whammy, however, is that to be successful at job hunting you have to know what kind of job you’re looking for. Without that, it’s close to impossible to package yourself effectively for the job market, especially one that’s as competitive as today’s.

So how do you deal with that conundrum?

Adopt what I call a “provisional target”-- an educated best guess that allows you to package yourself effectively for the job hunt and gets you started working.

Helen graduated from an excellent institution with a degree in English, and no idea how she was going to make a living. We devoted a few sessions at the outset to reviewing her history, doing a fast analysis of her innate skills, and examining some of her preferences regarding work.

What surfaced was that she was good at human interaction, had good verbal skills, and loathed the idea of sitting at her desk all day. Based on this very rudimentary exploration, we came to a quick decision that she would target a job in outside sales. (Note: I would have used a much more in-depth approach with an older person).

The next step was to teach Helen how to find people who did outside sales, and how to do a research interview with them, so she could learn what employers looked for in entry level people. I also asked her to do some internet research on the field.

We distilled her research into a short list of what employers are looking for when they hire for this type of position. This served as the basis for writing a resume and cover letter, rehearsing networking interviews, practicing how to do a good a hiring interview, dealing with applications, references, and so on.

We then set a goal for her to meet with at least two people in the field of sales every day. Some of these were networking interviews. Some were cold calls at businesses that employed outside sales people.

She talked to people in all manner of businesses, including overhead garage doors, dental products, extermination services, insurance, moving services, and many others. She said job hunting was the hardest work she’d ever done. She was often discouraged, and said it was very difficult to get up the next day and do it all over again.

What kept her going? Her wise parents said they would give her room and board, and enough money to pay car expenses for job hunting (based on mileage to appointments) and the most basic cell phone service (without internet or texting). But if she wanted money for anything else in her life - movies, gas to go out with her friends, clothes, music, her own apartment - she was going to have to find work so she could pay for it herself. Draconian perhaps, but a true motivator.

After several months of searching, she found a job selling beauty products to beauty salons. I met with her a year later and she reported that she liked some aspects of the work - the products, the freedom from being cooped up in an office, some of the people she met. But she really disliked other things - the scarcity of support from co-workers or the company, the difficulty of making sales, the tactics of the competition.

That was all good news, even what she didn’t like. She was well on her way to defining what she wanted and what she didn’t want in her work, and was getting the kind of experience she needed to leverage a job she liked better. That’s the stuff from which a satisfying and successful career is eventually made.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that works with clients on an individual basis to help them find more satisfaction and fulfillment in their work-lives. She can be reached by phone at (314) 367-0008 and her e-mail address is email@worktransitions.com. For more information visit the worktransitions.com website.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.