written by Michael Schmitz
It is important to understand the rules of the game and having read the first article of the series, you already know more than other graduates currently searching for their first job.
To improve your chances of success even further, the following articles will help you in asking the right questions that will guide you in finding and getting the ideal opportunity.
Let’s start with the most important question first:
Before you start browsing job boards for opportunities, you should first clarify a few things about your character, skill set and expectations regarding the future.
You could certainly just apply to a few hundred jobs online and see what comes of it, but in most cases your results will be limited and even if you take one of the jobs, you might still be unhappy with your choice a few months down the line.
Let’s be more efficient and look at everything that makes up your personality.
In the most basic terms, we humans are just a funny mixture of DNA that walks upright: Some limitations, likes and dislikes are imposed by our genes, while the majority stems from our environment and the experiences we had.
In your case, you can certainly identify some positive and negative experiences that can help you identify your preferences when it comes to your daily work.
When did you last have a wonderful and highly productive day?
A day where you woke up in the morning, knew you had to do a lot during the day, then simply started working and accomplished everything?
Take your time thinking about it, we’ll be waiting.
Okay, you found a great example.
Most likely, that day included both more mundane and more challenging tasks and you can certainly identify the two.
Now at this point, most advice articles would tell you that you should simply look at the things you liked and did well and then find an environment where you could be doing this kind of task again and again, relying on your existing skill set to find happiness and be productive.
We won’t be doing that here.
In fact, you can even find happiness in doing jobs where you fail, hurt yourself, become frustrated with the next steps and feel totally clueless and inadequate.
To be honest, these kinds of jobs are perfect for you if you want to really enjoy your life and keep on growing as a person.
If upon your graduation you feel that your personality is fully formed and you are just looking for the right triangle-formed gap to put your triangle-formed personality inside, then you are missing out on the rest of your life.
Even more importantly, the ideal job that suits your current skill set could well be a death-trap that will result in deep and lasting unhappiness further down the line if you stop growing as a person while working there.
We are natural explorers and fitting yourself into a static and non-changing environment is something most people can’t handle really well.
Instead, we will use this perfect day to look at the skills you currently have and think about how you have acquired them.
If you like working with people, then you most likely already have experiences working as a trainer for a sports team, a voluntary coach or just giving homework advice, you might have enjoyed baby-sitting for the neighbors or had a few experiences that generally put you into an interesting and responsible position close to others.
On the other hand, your very useful Excel, mathematics and programming skills were probably also developed over a long period of time when you had to fight your way through tutorials, exercises and programming tasks, alone in front of a piece of paper or your computer.
And after a few decades your skill set is simply the result of the things you did – not your genetic predisposition.
So where is the value in your perfect day, in that example we just discussed?
Going back to your job hunt and the way you can plan, you will find that this perfect day most likely was a day where you have been very busy, accomplished a lot and generally were not bored at all.
At the same time, most of the work you did was meaningful for you and you also learned something – whether you did the dishes or spent some hours working on a paper, the result was a measureable change in reality.
And that’s the key point of this first question.
Happiness in your job depends on whether you can have this feeling of accomplishment, doing something meaningful, learning new skills while using some of your existing ones, being focused on the task at hand and ideally receiving an adequate compensation (Additional salary past a certain level doesn’t influence your happiness if other things are lacking).
So you are free to choose almost any kind of industry and role, even if your university education doesn’t match it perfectly, as long as the conditions above are satisfied.
And this considerably widens the field: Many, many jobs provide inherent satisfaction and your degree doesn’t matter that much if you are willing to learn more: Whether you work in sales (Happy customers, the thrill of the close), in management (Analyzing structures, optimizing processes, making sure that people are happy) or as a specialist (Hours of focused work on a blue print or design, just you solving the challenge at hand).
Still, you might want to think about the fields and roles which are inherently interesting to you.
Draw up a list of possible paths that fully fit your criteria, and also draw up a list of fields and roles that you would exclude based on a total lack of skills (e.g. chemistry, medicine), personal motivation (accounting?) and meaningfulness.
Most importantly, think about the person you want to become and identify fields where you can learn the skills this person should have.
If something seems slightly too difficult or out of your reach, then I would still advise you to include it on your list – this is exactly the kind of challenge that will make you grow, and ideally you will end up with multiple categories that are interesting for you.
Why is this list important?
Because you will find that you lack a lot of knowledge and information at this stage.
There could be twenty different options, and having more information about these paths would be highly valuable to you.
This leads us to the next step: Learning more about the opportunities that exist.