Planning for Your Future

A job is work you do in exchange for money — one transaction, or a particular role and title. A career is a field you train for and build over time through progressive, usually consecutive achievement, and it takes more strategy and time than getting hired does. Shira is the example the chapter follows: she worked at an ice cream stand, noticed she liked the part where she helped coworkers do well, heard the same thing from her boss and customers, took psychology and management courses that suddenly connected to her job, landed a human resources internship at a bank before graduating, and built a career out of it. Along the way you will hear a lot of career mythology worth discarding — a degree alone does not guarantee a job, since employers want evidence you can apply what you learned through internships, part-time work, service learning, or research; there is no single perfect job waiting for you; no major automatically closes doors, as long as you learn what knowledge, skills, and abilities your target jobs require and go get them; and chasing a hot field you do not enjoy is a bad trade, because hot fields cool. Two more: your path will look like a winding road rather than a straight highway, and it is almost never too late to change direction, since plenty of people start college in their 30s, 40s, or 50s and are better positioned for it. And the advice to do what you love so the money will follow is genuinely bad advice — people who are happy in their work can do it well, have some impact on people or organizations, and find satisfaction in it, and the passion usually shows up after that rather than before.

The Career Planning Cycle starts with you, across four kinds of self-knowledge: interests (topics and ideas you want to know more about), skills and aptitudes (things you do or could do well, split into hard skills specific to a job and soft skills that travel with you), values (what you believe in), and personality (what makes you distinctive and how you show up). Employers hire you for what you know, what you can do, and how well you can demonstrate it — think of those as your knowledge, skills, and abilities, the KSAs in a tool kit you keep adding to as you gain experience. Formal assessments can speed this up: the Strong Interest Inventory, the Self-Directed Search, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, CliftonStrengths, and career planning software like FOCUS 2 are commonly used, but free quizzes floating around the internet are usually not credible, so ask your career center which instruments they trust. Informal methods work just as well and cost nothing. Notice when you enjoy something or do it particularly well and ask what specifically made it feel that way; pay attention to what people come to you for, since almost everyone is the go-to person for something; keep a career journal; and ask friends, professors, advisors, coaches, and family what strengths they see in you — not what career you should pick, just what they notice. Finding a mentor and joining an activity that uses skills you never get to use in class both add information you cannot get by sitting and thinking about it. No single test will tell you what career is right, because this is a discovery process that uses many methods over time.

Knowing yourself is only half the equation; the other half is workplace knowledge, which comes in three layers — labor market information (economic conditions, which industries exist where you want to live, supply and demand for jobs), industry details (trends, standards, and expectations in a field), and work roles (what a specific job involves day to day, the KSAs it requires, the education, certifications, or licenses needed, what it pays, and how people get hired and promoted). Fit is where the two halves overlap: when what you bring lines up with what a position requires, you are more likely to be hired, and when the job also matches your interests, skills, values, and personality, you are more likely to enjoy it once you are there. Good places to look include the Occupational Outlook Handbook and mynextmove.org for what jobs actually involve, the What Can I Do With This Major? site for where a major can lead, and professional associations rather than whatever a general search turns up. Even better, talk to people: professional clubs on campus bring in guest speakers and run site visits, job fairs and recruiting sessions put you in a room with people who do the work, and your own faculty often had or still have jobs in the field, including adjunct instructors with an entire second career. One thing to hold onto while you explore is that the training is not the job. Course content is foundational knowledge, so one hard class is rarely a good reason to abandon a direction — when Shantelle struggled in general chemistry and unexpectedly loved intro psychology, an advisor helped them postpone the major decision for a semester and take both a clinical psychology course and another science course, so the choice rested on more than one bad experience.

You can only learn so much by gathering information, so the next step in the cycle is testing an interest or a skill in a real environment. Clubs and volunteering are the low-stakes entry point — organizations rely on college students for their motivation and energy, and once you are in you can look for leadership roles or take shorter-term ones like running a fundraiser or planning an event when the officer positions are not open to first-years. Volunteering can also be how you test a profession before committing to an internship, and in some fields, like politics, it may be the only accessible way in with no prior experience. Internships put you inside the job rather than near it: you are usually treated much like an entry-level employee, and a good one has duties, responsibilities, and learning goals agreed on by you and the site and approved by your college — in a national survey, about 75 percent of students said their professionalism, teamwork, and communication improved very or extremely, and 66 percent said the same of critical thinking and problem-solving. There is a whole family of these experiences beyond internships: job shadowing and externships, fieldwork, apprenticeships, undergraduate research, related employment, clinicals or student teaching, and service learning. If you have to work through school and none of that fits, build transferable skills where you already are — the four competencies employers say they want most are critical thinking and problem solving, teamwork and collaboration, professionalism and work ethic, and oral and written communication, and you can build all four in a retail or restaurant job by asking to help with inventory, bookkeeping, ordering, or event planning. Whatever you do, write down what you did and what you learned while it is fresh, because that record is what you will draw on in an interview.

A resume is a one-page summary of your education, experience, and accomplishments — not a list of everything you have done, but a showcase of the best you have to offer for one specific role, tailored each time. As a first-year student you probably do not have degrees or a long work history, and that is fine: include high school academic, extracurricular, and community experience, which show your work ethic and your ability to contribute, and have a career counselor look it over. Start a portfolio now, because early on your job is collecting the pieces rather than polishing a display — projects, papers, certificates from workshops, write-ups of volunteer work, materials from talks or competitions, and anything showing computer or communication skills. A LinkedIn or similar profile can wait past your first year, but when you build one, draft it separately, check it for errors, have someone review it before it goes up, keep it honest and professional, and do not send connection requests to people you have no relationship with. Assume anyone hiring you can see what you post: tasteless posts, harassment, and pictures of high-risk behavior can cost you a job, although nothing tied to federally protected parts of your identity can legally be held against you. For letters of recommendation, ask instructors, advisors, club advisors, coaches, or managers who actually know you, ask in person, tell them your deadline and where you are applying so they can tailor it, and send a thank-you note afterward. And when you meet alumni or faculty at an event, do not try to impress them with what you know — they know more; talk about what you are learning, ask how they got into their career, listen, and have contact information ready that you would not mind an employer seeing.

Career planning is a cycle you run repeatedly, not a decision you make once — you will change responsibilities, roles, companies, and probably industries, and even if you somehow stay put, the job and the company will not stay the same. Changing your interests and goals is a normal part of developing a career rather than something to be ashamed of: most college students change majors several times, and plenty of people end up in jobs they did not know existed when they started school. Employers are usually unfazed by that, and when they ask about your greatest weakness or a failure, they want something genuine — they tend to be more impressed by what and how you learned than by a tidy preplanned path. It helps to think in three layers, along the lines of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: a job covers the basics by paying your bills and keeping you fed and housed, a career adds consistency, investment, reward, and a community you belong to, and purpose sits on top as the reason behind the other two. Purpose is not necessarily one job, and if the obvious front door does not open, the side door counts just as much — an excellent salesperson who cares about closing opportunity gaps could sell low-cost internet service to school districts or sell educational technology and still be doing the work they care about. You will likely hold more than one purpose at the same time and they can shift as you gain experience, which is exactly why the useful habit is to keep asking yourself the questions while you are somewhere full of people whose job is to help you answer them.