Get the inside scoop on jobs and careers with Vault career guides. High School Career Bible is your complete resource to jobs, careers, interviews and recruiting.
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High School Career Bible Get the inside scoop on jobs and careers with Vault career guides. High School Career Bible is your complete resource to jobs, careers, interviews and recruiting. |
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High School Career Bible Hey there, early bird! If you are reading this guide, you are way ahead of the game in terms of your career. Many people don't start thinking about what they want to do "when they grow up" until after college--according to studies by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), less than 60 percent of college students applied for a job before graduation. Getting a jumpstart on your career is a wise decision, as you will have a better idea of what's out there and how to get what you want. So, relax. As a high school student or recent graduate, the world will not end if you don't have a concrete career goal just yet. Almost everybody has difficulty figuring out what to do with the rest of their lives, and thinking about it now puts you in good standing when you start the process of finding that first "real" job.
This Vault guide will help you get a leg up on planning your future and will assist you in narrowing your career search by giving you an overview of popular professions. It also has some important advice for when you start applying for jobs. |
Where to Begin
Rule number one: Employers don?t really, truly care what you did at your last job. They care about what you can do for them. They wonder about your potential for future success working for them. And your resume must answer these questions. As Shannon Heidkamp, recruiting manager for a division of Allstate Insurance says, ?People need to ask themselves ?What value can I offer this prospective employer??? The before-and-after samples on the following page tell potential employers what skills each employee used, what tasks he/she accomplished and what honors he/she garnered?skills, tasks and honors that can be applied to future jobs. Specific job openings, whether advertised through newspaper ads, Internet sites or inter-office memos, come with specific job descriptions. If you find out about the job through a friend, ask for a copy of the job description. Your job is to meet those requirements by listing your qualifications that most closely meet these prerequisites.
Ten seconds
Studies show that regardless of how long you labor over your resume, most employers will spend 10 seconds looking at it. That?s it. Because of the masses of job searchers, most managers and human resource employees receive an enormous number of resumes. Faced with a pile of paper to wade through every morning, employers look for any deficiency possible to reduce the applicant pool to a manageable number. Thus, your resume must present your information quickly, clearly, and in a way that makes your experience relevant to the position in question. That means condensing your information down to its most powerful form. So distill, distill, distill. Long, dense paragraphs make information hard to find and require too much effort from the overworked reader. If that reader can?t figure out how your experience applies to the available position, your resume is not doing its job. Solve this problem by creating bulleted, indented, focused statements. Short, powerful lines show the reader, in a glance, exactly why he/she should keep reading. Think about how to write up your experience in targeted, clear, bulleted, detail-rich prose.
It?s what you did, not what your name tag said
Resumes should scream ability, not claim responsibility. Employers should be visualizing you in the new position, not remembering you as ?that intern from Chase.? While some former employers can promote your resume by their mere presence, you don?t want to be thought of as a cog from another machine. Instead, your resume should present you as an essential component of a company?s success.
