Gaining knowledge, skills, and expertise in your early life is absolutely imperative for your future career. You’ll have been told this by parents and teachers over the whole of your childhood and adolescence and, if you’ve paid attention to their encouragement, you’ll be in a position in your young adulthood to transform your knowledge into a rewarding career. This article aims to give some pointers to those who’re looking to cash in on the time and energy they invested in their studies, signposting driven individuals towards careers that make the most of their talent and learning.
Careers Advisors
One of the first steps on your journey should be to see a careers advisor. Often, these individuals are attached to a school, college or university that you might have attended. Elsewhere, you’ll be able to find these helpful individuals by searching online for advisors in your area. Advisors will help you understand:
- Where your strongest skillset lies
- Which careers best suit your passions, learning, and lifestyle
- How you can enter industries you are most interested in
- Which companies are seen as the most prestigious and exciting
- When you’ll have the requisite skills to apply for the job that you most desire
On top of this, these people will give you invaluable advice when it comes to job applications, cover letters, and resumes.
Applications
If you feel you’re already qualified for the jobs that you’re most interested in taking, it’s time to start working on your applications. First, you’re going to need a knock-out resume, with details of your worth and your knowledge highlighted so that it’ll catch the attention of hiring departments across the country. Search online for tips as to how to make your resume conclusive – and always try and make it stand out a little, too.
Your application should always go along with a cover letter that introduces you on a professional and personal level. It should be written in prose, making it a good opportunity to show off your written communication skills. It’s also a chance to hone in on your knowledge, showing off your ability to grapple with the ideas, concepts, and theories that’ll prove most useful in the job that you’re applying for. Give them a blast of your talent that they won’t be able to ignore.
Tick All Boxes
Even if you feel you’ve spent a good deal of your life trying to tick boxes, attain good grades, and gain knowledge and experience that’ll qualify you for the job of your dreams, sometimes you’ll find that your skills and experience don’t quite match the criteria listed on the job advertisements you’re most interested in. You should see this as an opportunity rather than a setback to further increase your knowledge and to make yourself more employable in the process.
There are two main areas that you’ll have gaps in. You may not have the required industry experience to be considered for the role that you’re applying for, or you may not have the requisite qualification to make the grade for the job advertised. It’s easy to remedy this situation – it just depends on how set on the job you are.
- Gaining Experience
Your mission to gain experience has to begin, unfortunately, lower down the pay grade than you might be happy with. Everyone starts at the lower rungs of the career ladder, though, and you should not expect preferential treatment above people who’ve done the years at the bottom. If you’re set on a particular career that requires two years in a more junior role, so be it. You’re going to have to get those two years, and use them to make you a far more skilled and learned person as well as an experienced one. It’s a part of the course when you’re ambitiously applying for the most rewarding jobs.
- Gaining Extra Qualifications
The other gap in your resume will be in qualifications or certifications. There are many ways in which you might find yourself coming up short in this department. You may, for instance, need to gain experience using a specific type of computing software. If that’s the case, download the software and begin playing with it, taking YouTube tutorials or paid-for courses to help you develop your skills. It shouldn’t take long, with the right application and dedication.
The other side is more significant: you might need a university qualification that can take between one and three years to achieve. It is a far more significant investment of time and money, and one that you’ll have to consider more mindfully before proceeding. Happily, online courses are there to cut some corners for you. If you’re excited by careers in engineering, for instance, you can take to the web. Qualify with an online Masters in civil engineering by working from your laptop, at your own pace, to get those all-important certifications telling your employer you’re up for the job. You can study these while working to gain experience, too.
Always Monitor Job Sites
The final tip in this article is to remain on top of new job postings in your area of expertise. You’ll be competing with a steadily growing number of qualified, experienced and knowledgeable people who all want your job too, so you have to be first to the table with the most glittering application possible to catch someone’s eye and get invited in to interview. Scouring the essential job sites for your career is a good way of staying on top of your own prospects, understand what different roles require, the expected wage you should be asking for, and the big players in your chosen industry.
Finally, don’t be afraid to send prospective applications to your favorite employers, even if they’re not currently advertising for new employees at present. You’ll get onto their radar early and, who knows, you might save them the costly and time-consuming process of onboarding new employees through recruitment drives by sending in a stellar application. You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by doing this.
The tips outlined above will be useful for any individual looking to transform their school and college learning into the best-possible careers – ensuring rewarding and stimulating outcomes for an early life spent in diligent study and skills acquisition.
