How To Get Your Perfect Post-College Job

Most students are in college so they can become qualified for their ideal job. It takes a certain combination of skills, knowledge and experience to make you the perfect candidate for whichever career you may be interested in.

Many students think that once they officially get their degree, they’ll automatically get the job they want in that field; they may think just the degree is enough.

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The truth is, the degree itself is not enough — what makes you prepared for your chosen career lies in careful planning and sharp awareness of what employers in your field are looking for in applicants. There are plenty of ways college students can begin preparing for their dream careers while still working on their degree — in fact, college is the best place to take advantage of resources that can make you a killer job-seeker when you really need a full-time job after college.

1. Work backwards.

Even as a first or second year, search online for job listings similar to those you imagine yourself pursuing after graduation. For example, say you’re a second year trying to work in social media after college, and the dream goal for you is to work at BuzzFeed. While you’re still early in your college career, find out what your dream jobs require of applicants. Do they want two years of internship experience? An editing background? What about administrative skills?

Long before you actually need to apply for these jobs, figure out what will be asked of you as an applicant in the future so that you can work on getting these experiences now. If you start working towards a certain career goal early on, you’ll have much more time to become qualified if you aren’t yet qualified. It would likely hurt a lot to leave college with a degree but no surrounding experience to draw upon in applications for the jobs you really want.

2) Ask questions to people who have done what you want to do.

Most universities have a career center that can connect younger students with older graduates in the form of a mentoring program of sorts. UC Santa Cruz’s Career Advice Network is designed for undergraduates to be able to seek resume critiques and mock interviews from older graduates in their same field.

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Even if you don’t do this formally through a program at your university, networking and question-asking can take place over LinkedIn or even through other platforms if you know a few acquaintances working at your favorite company. If you’ve got the privilege to ask someone already in your field what it took them to get there, do it.

3) Make a running list of experiences.

Even small experiences should be written down somewhere for future reference. If you volunteered two hours with an organization and it taught you something important, that is noteworthy. Create an online document or list (on GoogleDocs or some other accessible website) that you add to as you gain new positions, attend certain conferences, experience new leadership roles and more. You never know when those two days working at that funky apple farm last summer may be relevant to cite in an application for some position. The best part about having a comprehensive list of experiences is that you can handpick which ones you want to highlight on a resume for a particular job.

If you are someone who doesn’t normally customize resumes for different jobs, having this list in existence will make it easier for you to slightly alter your resume to suit a certain employer. Make sure not to forget all the things you’ve done throughout your college career that could come in handy during the big job search post graduation.

4. Connect with professors relevant to your ideal career.

You’re going to need shining letters of recommendation when applying for your perfect job, and those letters will look most impressive if they come from professors or researchers in your field. If you’re a college sophomore hoping to work as a science educator in a few years, seek out that plant development professor you had last quarter or your current chemistry professor and ask them if they need any assistants for research projects, or just set up a meeting to chat with them.

The more contact you have with professionals in your field, the better off you will be later having those references. It never hurts to make yourself known to your professors, although it can be scary in theory.

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The more educated students are about job-search strategies in the years preceding their career search, the more efficient and productive they will be in developing strong applications that result in job offers. No student should forget to harness their experiences and seek out new ones as an undergraduate, especially since college is brimming with lucrative opportunities directly in line with many popular job pathways.