Graduation to Employment - A Road Map

Congratulations, graduate! You've accomplished a lot over your student career and you're ready to reap the rewards of a hot-off-the-press degree. The studying and homework are over, right? Wrong! You'll need to use your same dedication and hard work to identify and land the job that will pay the bills and ideally launch your career.

Most people would advise you to start by writing your resume. I disagree based on the assumption that you don't have any professional experience. Working part time at Starbucks or Denny's doesn't count as professional experience in my book and I highly recommend leaving those kinds of job descriptions off of your resume entirely, if possible. You can simply list them as employment with the name of the company, the dates you worked there and your title. This gives the reader credit for being able to deduce what your duties were and it shows that you recognize that experience as being unrelated to the business world you are attempting to enter.

Start by reading as many job descriptions as you can get your eyes in front of to get a feel for how employers address their needs and how they word the requirements for each job. To find descriptions to review, use any of the job boards such as CareerBuilder, Monster, HotJobs, etc.

Be sure to also do web searches based on the types of jobs you think you're going to apply for and include the word "resume" in your search. The search engine will return results for resumes of people doing the job(s) you want and you should read at least a few of them to get a sense of how these folks represent themselves and which responsibilities they feel are worth presenting on a resume.

To put you in the correct frame of mind for job searching, let me start by bursting your bubble a bit: employers don't care about your degree unless you are qualified to fill the position you are applying for. Put another way, if you don't have professional experience getting paid for doing a job similar to what the employer is looking for, then your resume will not be considered, regardless of your education. I know it's hard to accept, but it's the truth so the sooner you embrace the search as the challenge that it is, the quicker you will find a position that will satisfy your expectations.

Let's visit the topic of expectations for a moment so that you can know what to expect and prepare yourself accordingly. Odds are you can expect the following to be true when potential employers consider your resume:
• You will not be considered for positions that manage people outside of the fast food or retail industries
• You will not be considered for senior level positions within a team that has multiple levels of positions (i.e. junior, associate, senior, etc.)
• You will be considered for junior level positions
• It will be assumed that you will accept less money because you are a recent graduate
• It will be assumed that you will work harder than the rest of the team because you are a recent graduate looking to prove yourself
• It will be assumed that you will offer more value in the areas of computer and information skills to offset your lack of professional experience

Now that you know what employers see in a recent graduate and you've taken a look at the available jobs and resumes of people actually qualified to do those jobs, you're ready to start putting together your resume. Be sure to have your contact information prominently displayed so that recruiters and managers don't have to hunt it down (Go ahead and put it at the top where we all expect it to be; you won't lose creativity points for it). I recommend not doing an "Objective" section because there's no good way to phrase your desire to be compensated for working and contributing in a fun, creative environment without sounding like you're registering at some store for your graduation gifts. Instead, create a "Qualifications Summary" section where you'll list the skills you possess that will be attractive to an employer such as leading brainstorming sessions, creating processes/procedures, delivering a completed product or project, etc. You can create this section as a bulleted list or in paragraph form. Since you're focusing on your value as opposed to your experience, you'll want to use key phrases gleaned from job descriptions and other resumes (not plagiarized) to present your attributes and knowledge in a like manner.

Search the job sites mentioned above as well as the employment office of your college and search the web for local/regional job boards in your specific geographical area. Get creative with your search words and leave no stone unturned. Make sure your social media sites are clean – no profanity or nudity, and definitely keep your messages grammatically correct whenever possible. Stay focused on your search and before you know it you'll be off to your first day of work.

Good luck!