This process begins with an indentification of your values, interests, skills, accompolishments, experiences, and goals. You can not find a position for yourself if you don't know what you have to offer your future employers.
VALUES
Awareness of qualities that are important in the career that you would like to go into will help in exploring career goals and in getting greater satisfactons in your work. Read the list below and then check the qualities that are most important to you. After you have done this the rank the top five in order of priority.
-Job security
-Working as part of a team
-Working independently with little supervision
-Making contribution
-Professoinal status
-Mental challenge
-Pleasant surroundings
-Challenging, stimulation co-workers
-Different taks to accomplish dialy
-Financial rewards
-Creating something
-Ability to advance
INTERESTS
Interests which are aresa that arouse your attention are a lot like values. Indentifying intersts can be done by looking at enduring themes in your life- activities that persists over time, consistent choices, recurring dreams, or the way you spend you time. After identifying these you are still not clear about your intersts and cannot rank them, the best thing for you to do might be to meet with a Career Center consultant.
SKILLS
A skill refers to somethins you do well, including handling problems or tasks. The key to your successful job serch is recognizing these skills and communicating their usefulness verbally and in writing to a possible employer. Useing accomloshment statements to do this may help. They should:
-Describe you skills in concise, unambiguous terms.
-Refer to acutal expericnces to demonstrate your skill level.
-Connect your skills concisely to the needs of a possible employer.
The most marketable skill are those that are useful in a wide variety of work environments, transfer skills.
STEP 2: EXPLORING CAREER OPTIONS
The next step in the job search process is to explore the matches between all the characteristics in step 1 and the demands of career fields and organiztion.
STEP 3: CHOOSING A CAREER AREA AND TARGETING EMPLOYERS
After you have done some thorough reasearch on possible careers, several optoins will emerge as most realistic and most appealing. These options should become you career search goals. It is probable that no single career will have the potential to utilize all your skills, allow you to develop all you interests, and incorporate a value sustem completely compaitble with yours. So you will need to target a career field that will satisfiy some of your highest needs.
At this point, it is useful to get realistic feedback from experts in the field or career consultants to determine if your assesment is realistic. A meeting or two with a career consultant is a great idea to dicuss your analysis and decisions.
Good research on employers will not only give you the comtetive edge, but also help you decide which employers you want to reach and which strategies you will use to contact them.
STEP 4: PREPARE JOB SEARCH MATERIALS AND JOB SEARCH SKILLS
When you have targeted you goals, resumes and applicationletters can be tailored to reflict you qualifications as they relate to the interests of prospective employers.
STEP 5:PLAN AND CONDUCT JOB SEARCHCAMPAIGN
The next step in the job search process is setting a date for getting a job and deciding how much time you can take to search for a job. Some people think that that cannot take any time out of their studies or jobs, but others just procrastinate. Whatever your excuse is the result is always the same, you are going to miss out on some great job opportunities.
The more applications and job interviews that you do the better your chance.
SOURCES OF VACANCIES:
JOBTRAK/career center job listings
Campus interviews
Newsletters from trade or professional associates
Newspaper classified ads
Employment services and agencies run by government and for-profit
businesses
Personnel department postings and phone listings
The most popular way of job searching is to responding to advertised vacancies, but the thing that most people do not understand is that the most popular way is not always the most effective way. Eighty percent of job position available at any given time are not advertised this is the hidden job market.
To increase the odds of your success in responding to advertides vacancies, by telephone or letter, keep these tip in mind:
-do not waste time responding