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Parents
By Terese Corey Blanck and Peter Vogt There’s a rampant career myth out there that college students can (and, some folks believe, “should”) wait until their junior year to begin obtaining hands-on work experience through internships, co-ops, community service activities, volunteering, and the like. Bad idea. In today’s crowded entry-level job market, your college student is going to be competing with other students and recent graduates who began building their experience starting sophomore or, in a few cases, even freshman year. That’s reason enough to encourage your son/daughter to get started sooner vs. later where obtaining experience is concerned. But that’s not the only reason. Here are three more—three that are frequently overlooked by students and parents alike: 1) Through experience, your student can explore career options thoroughly. If your student is like most, he has no true grasp on what careers exist in the world of work. Many college students, for example, think that healthcare careers are limited to doctors and nurses. But there are literally hundreds of career options in healthcare—jobs your student likely won’t discover unless and until he seeks out relevant experience in the healthcare field. Once that hands-on exploration begins, another benefit unfolds: Your student will be able to try a career on and see how it fits. You wouldn’t buy a house until you’d toured through it and had it inspected, right? Well, the same idea holds true with your college student and careers. By getting a little experience in a field of interest, your student will have the necessary confidence to know whether he should buy into that career—or not—because he will have done his due diligence! 2) Experience allows your student to show prospective employers the skills she’s acquired. Today’s employers want the new college grads they hire to bring something tangible to the table, starting on their very first day of work. As importantly, hiring managers demand to see proof of what a new college grad can do—the kind of proof that emerges from what the new grad has done in the past through internships and other experiential activities. All employers have been burned at least once by a college student or recent grad who claimed to have skills and traits she didn’t really possess. Remember, too, that hiring managers aren’t looking solely for technical skills in their entry-level employees. They also seek out the college students and recent grads who shine in the area of soft skills—such as communication (written and verbal), problem solving, working well on teams, and demonstrating self-motivation and initiative. There’s no better
way for your college student to demonstrate both her technical skills
and her soft skills than through the accumulation of hands-on experience.
Many of today’s employers use a technique called behavioral interviewing to assess job candidates. In a nutshell, the interviewer who is using a behavioral interviewing strategy will ask the candidate for examples of what he has done in the past—instead of asking him what he would do in a hypothetical situation. For example, if the interviewer wants to assess a candidate’s problem-solving skills, a traditional interview question might go something like this:
But a behavioral approach to that same question would look like this:
The idea behind behavioral interviewing is that past behavior predicts future behavior. And so the typical interviewer will grill your student about real situations from his past and ask for concrete examples of how he handled those situations. If your student has a variety of experiences to pull from, his examples are going to be much richer—and have much more impact—than those of the student or recent grad who has little or no experience. Think of it this way: The more experience your student accumulates during college, the more evidence he’ll have to back up his claims in future interviews. And these days, evidence is everything to employers. They’re just not interested in—let alone swayed by—what your student (thinks he) can do. So encourage your college student to start looking—now—for ways to build experience. The best, and easiest, way to begin is for your student to head for the campus career center or internship office. There, she can talk with an advisor who can help her discover how to explore career options firsthand and gain the skills she’ll need to become gainfully employed after graduation.
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