College will be ”the best years of your life?”

How many times has someone told you that?  Imagine if that were true – when you walk across the stage at graduation, after spending all of that time, money, and effort to earn your degree, the rest is downhill.  3 words – that would suck.  Why would someone say that to you?  For a lot of  graduates who spend their lives working just to pay the bills and not doing something they enjoy, college probably was the best part of their life, and that’s pretty sad.  Do you think they planned it that way while they were in school?  Do you think they thought  “OK- the fun is over – now I get to face a reality, which everyone knows isn’t fun?” 

How many people who you know that have been working for 5 or 10 years are as energetic as a college student?  How many places have you visited that are as energetic as a college campus?  Don’t get me wrong, some companies are energetic (I’ve worked for them) and some graduates didn’t lose it – but they are unfortunately the exception. 

How do you get to be part of the exception?   First you have to make a conscious decision to contribute in a meaningful way (yes, you do have to work, and maybe do some things that you won’t want to) – while crafting the best career and lifestyle that you can.  What do you need to do that?

Transparency – Know your strenghts and likes

How you measure up (a combination of your own assessment in addition to other’s assessments) to each of the attributes that is important to your success is transparency.  Having a single place to do a spot check as to how you’re doing is the opposite of cluelessness and it gives you something very measurable to work with.  Understanding the personal meaning behind your work is a big part of transparency too.

Visibility  – know what they want

Whether you want to work for someone as an employee, or you want to let your clients be your boss (no one is only “their own boss”) as an entrepreneur you have to know what it takes to be successful in order to do the right things.  This is visibility into the qualities you have to possess, and how you can get them.

Gaps  – know what you don’t have yet

If you think all that stands between you and a great job is a piece of paper, think again.  If you aren’t different when you leave campus from when you entered as a freshman – in the right ways (see above) then you missed the boat.  Your degree requirements are some of the ingredients for success, but they aren’t the whole recipe.  Honestly identify your opportunities to be more marketable.

Planning – what are you going to do, specifically, to get there?

Here’s a bad idea – give you more work to do.  The school gives you plenty of that, plus if you’re not having fun in college you’re missing a lot of opportunities, so we’re not suggesting that.

Here’s a better idea - pick a few of the highest impact things and do just those.  You can probably come up with a list of 100 things that will make you more marketable when you graduate and will help you get a job that you love.  The problem is you don’t have time to do all of them.  So instead of doing nothing, which can really come back to bite you – just do a few things that will make the biggest difference.  What are those?  That’s for you to decide…..

Click here  http://careerforesight.com/?page_id=77 to get started.