College Students

Are you a college student wondering what to do for your career?  If you are, you likely are worried about what comes after college. And, you likely have stress about finding a job. Given the economy, finding a job – any job – is a victory. Figuring out what you want to do for your career will not only lead to greater happiness but will also help you find a job.

Here’s why: if you know what you want, you will be far more effective in two critical areas of your job search:

(1) you will be better able to target jobs that suit you and

(2) you will be better able to explain to an employer why your targeted job suits you.

By sorting out those factors, you will have a decided advantage in your job search since you will be employing a targeted, focused, intense search.

We can help you:

(1) Determine your college major

(2) Identify your distinct career themes

(3) Understand yourself more deeply in the context of real-world jobs to maximize your happiness and success

The challenge with the shot gun job search approach is that searching for anything often leads to searching for nothing. If you don’t know what you are looking for, how will you find it?!

On a simple level, distinct and specific career goals work better.

Think about physical fitness. There is an enormous difference in approach between someone who wants to “get in shape” versus someone who needs to lose 7 pounds to make weight for a wrestling match. The former might achieve his goal. The latter will achieve his goal.

The same difference in approach occurs when the amorphous job seeker looks for “a job” as opposed to the job seeker who is seeking a junior analyst position with financial service firms in the New Haven, Connecticut area.

Most importantly, your RAS (reticular activating system) will start to notice things that relate to your hoped for future job. For example, if you hope to develop a career in marketing somewhere in the New Haven area, your RAS will notice things – in the news, in conversation, everywhere – that might relate to developing a career in marketing in Connecticut.

In addition, job seekers often do not realize that most seasoned employees can quickly assess someone who is not a fit for a job and/or has not really thought through whether she is a fit for the job. By not doing any work to figure out what would fit, job seekers are often discovered when they try to fake a fit.

Ask about Our College to Career Transition Program

What should you do to figure out what suits you?

Ideally, you should get internships in fields of potential interest. But, of course, you need to know what fields could be of potential interest. In addition, the amount of time required for one internship precludes the possibility of having many internships in different fields.

You should speak to wise elders. They can provide some thoughts. The challenge is that the main elders you know are likely your parents. They might be wise (or maybe not!). But, parents are naturally consumed with a dominant focus: make sure my child is safe. As such, their advice will be focused on low risk options, perhaps wisely! However, there are many unhappy accountants, lawyers, doctors and dentists who chose those paths due to parental advice.

Ideally, you should speak with an objective career counseling expert.

That’s where Career Counseling Connecticut can help you. By leveraging thousands of past patterns, we can explain to you what types of work are out there that might suit you. This is not as good as an internship in field of interest. But, our career counseling process is far more efficient. And, perhaps unlike your parents, we have no agenda other than helping you find your ideal career path.

Read: Give the gift of career counseling

What Do I Want To Do When I Grow Up?

That is the basic question that we all ask ourselves at some point.

As you have likely noticed, that question plagues you more after you have, in fact, grown up.

We provide career counseling to our Connecticut clients to help figure out their career direction. We then provide distinct guidance to help them on their job search.

Many of our clients are young adults trying to figure out either their college or post-college path. Some of our clients are in their mid-late twenties or early thirties. After a false start or two, they are looking for career direction. Some of our clients are older and are repositioning themselves for a new career path.

But, essentially all of our career counseling clients want answers to that basic question: what career suits me?

That’s where our career counseling expertise has literally changed the lives of our clients.

And, from what we have seen, there are not many other sources of help. Elsewhere, we have written about the challenges of career counseling from non-experts.

But, we’ll highlight the most common source of outside help: parents.

There are several problems emanating from getting career counseling from parents.

The emotional complexity of the parent-child dynamic is an enormous one.

Further, most every parent – like most every adult – is not an expert in either career issues or counseling. While they likely can tell you about their career path and maybe have some general knowledge about other paths, they have had no reason to spend hundreds of hours each year keeping on top of the latest trends in careers and in securing jobs. And, as for counseling, as noted in relation to the issue of emotional complexity, parents face a huge barrier that counselors do not. Parents are the unconditional provider of love and nurturing. When shifting to the role of guide, their career guidance is often misinterpreted as orders or judgment from the parent.

In comparison, we have well developed expertise in helping young adults chart their career path and we do not suffer from having parental baggage that clouds the career discussion.

This expertise emanates from a decade of college and career counseling thousands of young adults.

Our process is proprietary in nature but involves a combination of interviewing and personality profiling to help our clients figure out their path. After we understand our clients, we provide a strategic advisory plan to help our clients reach their path.

In terms of our interviewing process, there are aspects of personality profiling testing that cannot quite capture the values, background, and idiosyncratic outlooks of our career counseling clients. For that reason, services that only have computer generated profiling systems almost always provide advice that is too generic to be helpful.

To be clear, we find many of these tests both fun and somewhat helpful. Indeed, from our own business model, it would make far more sense to take the labor out of our work and rely purely on computer generated testing. From an effectiveness standpoint, however, we find the interview process critical to provide tailored, customized advice.

With that said, while we value our interviewing process and believe it differentiates us in effectiveness from the career sites that only provide testing, we definitely believe that career personality profiling tests are helpful in providing information and data points.

Sometimes the information can be extraordinarily insightful and our clients will have breakthrough moments of self-awareness. Strangely, unless questioned in ways that validated tests do, many people do not fully understand their own internal preferences.

The combination of advisory services, through interviewing and discussion, plus career personality profiling tests provides the most effective way to help our clients.

Upon helping our Connecticut clients with their career counseling needs, we provide concrete, direct advice on what fields best match; what should be done to move into the field; and, as needed, help with resume, interviewing, and job searching.

If our Connecticut career counseling clients are interested in graduate school, we help with all aspects of graduate school admission including LSAT, GRE, GMAT, MCAT prep and help with admissions essays for graduate school.