“I thought I would start looking after the summer.”
I remember hearing this phrase about a decade and a half ago when one of Career Counseling Connecticut’s first clients came to our offices in Madison, Connecticut.
I was surprised because my first clients were mostly former students from The Learning Consultants
For the most part, my former students had met with me as striving high school students attempting to get into their first choice colleges.
I realized that the Great Recession had created a different framework or perhaps just correlated with that time frame. In the previous few decades, most college graduates came out of college with job offers in hand. Something had switched in the late 2000s, students were leaving college jobless.
This phenomenon is partly due to the tendency for graduates to take a “post-college summer” break, where they pause their job search efforts in favor of relaxation and reflection. While this downtime can be valuable, it often leads to a false sense of security.
Many graduates fall into the trap of assuming that change will come naturally, as it did in the structured environment of their school years. From kindergarten through college, September brought new beginnings automatically. However, in the real world, this automatic change does not occur. Graduates must proactively create their own opportunities.
Now what had been an anomaly – the post college unemployed grad – is commonplace.
Those that dig in vigorously – often working with career coaches – get jobs sooner.