Every year, naive college graduates eagerly start applying for their first professional job positions. Then, students quickly realize that employers are looking for candidates with experience. The students don’t have any meaningful experience, because they were under the impression that they needed to finish their degree program before working in their desired career field. What a conundrum!

If you are college student, please do not make this mistake. From the moment you start your post-secondary studies you should begin exploring various career options. Furthermore, you should gain practical experience in that field to determine if that career path is the right fit for your personality and skill set. You can quickly build experience without making a lifelong career commitment in a variety of ways:

1. Find an adviser/mentor that works in the field you would like to investigate. Ask your adviser about their experience, and see if they would be willing to let you shadow them at work.

2. Attend an industry specific event or training. You can extrapolate quite a bit from workshops designed for the career you are exploring.

3. Internships are probably the best way to delve into a possible career option. Attempting to find an internship that gives you the ability to evaluate multiple aspects of the career is always helpful.

At the New Prospect Academic Incubator we place a major emphasis on students developing “marketable” skills. Our Incubator requires that students have at least a part-time job or internship to maintain their membership in our program, but we don’t stop there. At minimum, every month one of our Academic Incubator team members will sit down one-to-one with a student, and go through a career coaching session. The session helps students explore what type of work they would like to pursue after college. Also, the coach is able to aid students in identifying the key skills and experiences needed to successfully obtain the desired career. Then, the student and coach collaborate to find industry mentors, industry events, or internship programs that will help the student to evaluate the potential career path on a deeper level. Our Academic Incubator firmly believes that students need to perpetually apply their “book knowledge” in the “real world”.

Here’s an image of our career coaching form: