With a new class of graduates about to enter the full-time job market, a lot of them are seeking job search advice from their college career centers. Unfortunately, the advice that a lot of colleges are doling out is often outdated and frequently downright bad. In fact, as a workplace advice columnist, when I ask recipients of bad advice who told them to approach their job search that way, one of the most common answers is “my campus career center.”
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Here are six pieces of bad advice coming out of many — although thankfully not all — college career centers.
1. Getting a degree will make it easy to find a job in your field. If only this were true! A degree will certainly make it easier to find professional work, but most people will still need to invest a lot of time and energy in job searching, and new grads may not find it easy to get work in the exact field they were planning on. A degree has become more of a minimum qualification than an easy pass to a good job. But for grads who have been told for years that working hard in college was their ticket to any easy professional life, this can be a frustrating awakening.
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2. The most important thing during college is to focus on your studies — work can come later. Anyone giving this advice to college students is doing them a tremendous disservice (unless the student has unusual circumstances that make this truly necessary). It’s tough to find a job after graduating if you don’t have internships or other jobs on your resume. This work doesn’t have to be in your field, but you do need to have some kind of work history to show to prospective employers. You’re going to be competing against other grads who do have that experience.
Speaking of which …
3. Emphasize your education most of all on your resume. College career centers often encourage students to emphasize their schoolwork over all else — telling them to lead off with the degree, followed by details about coursework, honors and extracurriculars. Yet in most fields, your academic work is going to be a prerequisite for the job, but not your most compelling qualification; most hiring managers want to see details about your work experience, not a list of courses you took.
4. Employers want to see persistence and gumption, so you should go after jobs aggressively. This advice takes all sorts of forms: call and ask to talk to the hiring manager about open positions, follow up on your application weekly or show up in person and ask for an interview. These are all bad ideas that will annoy most employers! Employers want you to use the application process they’ve laid out in their job postings, which usually just means submitting a resume and a cover letter. Trying to circumvent that system comes across as pushy and overbearing.
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5. Bring a portfolio of your class work to job interviews. This advice seems to be on the rise for students, but the reality is that very few employers care about looking through a work portfolio (with the exceptions of fields like design). Expecting an employer to spend interview time leafing through a portfolio is likely to come across as naïve. Instead, put your energy into writing a strong resume and cover letter and practicing your interview skills.
6. Use subjective self-assessments on your resume, like declaring that you’re “detail-oriented” or “a self-starter” or that you have “excellent writing skills.” Self-assessments like this aren’t convincing. Since anyone could claim these things, hiring managers generally ignore them. Rather, your resume should focus on objective experience and accomplishments. If you’re an excellent writer, that’s great — but then show evidence of it by talking about how you’ve used that skill and what you’ve accomplished with it, not by just declaring it. A big one of these that has gained popularity in recent years is the claim that you “work well independently and in groups.” College career centers love to advise students to play up this skill — but the way to do it is, again, by showing evidence of it, not by simply announcing that you’re good at it.
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New Grads: 6 Examples of Bad Advice Your Career Center Told You originally appeared on usnews.com
