Hello, my name is Rahul Singh, I will be your host today, and I will be talking about the methodology and personal attack methods behind the career development model.
Discovering yourself involves trying to find your niche. The traits that best suit you, the steps you take towards developing a life plan, and lastly, the utilization of the resources around you which will build a better “you” when it is all set and done.
A self-assessment is a way to examine yourself by selecting which traits and characteristics truly apply to you (ex: self assessment exam). Do this by eliminating traits that do not apply to you, but also highlighting the ones that do. Next, understand your “ideal” working conditions (ex: would you work at a desk or in a hospital?). This plays a big factor in even finding a place to start. It is something that seems subtle, however, a majority of college students do not know the answer to this question.
Now, look to involve yourself, with the traits you find to suit yourself, try and use those towards the activities/opportunities you are looking to involve in. For example, if you seem to be a leading person try and look for clubs or organizations that go hand and hand with leadership opportunities. Use the tools around you to educate and develop yourself. Just as stated, try different clubs and organizations to see what you fit into and what can actually attain to your strengths. If you need help with certain traits, try and find opportunities to develop skills (ex: mentorship programs).
Lastly, if you want to excel in your career, try and assess the style of job you may want. Even though this is seemingly obvious, interest and desire matters a lot in the workplace. Initially find a career cluster that interests you, remember, specificity initially starts broad. Furthermore, find a career that you may be interested in, if not available at first glance, or you have no clue in general, be sure to experiment in your involvement and networking in order to find jobs you may like.
Take a career assessment exam offered online (ex: Princeton Review).
https://www.princetonreview.com/quiz/career-quiz
The main idea with S.M.A.R.T. goals is to make every action towards your career worthwhile. Being specific means you can’t be broad with your plan. Introduce real digits, real tasks, and real opportunities in order to make for a fluent goal. Be measurable and make a clear cut path for your success, this will help for easy progress evaluation according to the plan you have set forth. Being attainable is, in other words, being realistic, do not put broad goals in front of yourself, this will lead to barriers that you did not account for and will slow you down. Choose to be relevant; is your goal or plan of success worthwhile? Does it make sense to do? These questions will keep your progress on the correct path. Lastly, be timely and make target dates for your goals or steps, if you don’t achieve things in a timely fashion perhaps the end result will not follow as you planned.
-After all these assessments and realizations people may not want to stick with their major, and that is very common, do what suits you best. Only 27 percent of people work for their intended major completed in college (Washington Post). Hence, your major is just a start to the career hunts, through time you develop skills and interests in order to make a better fit between you and your career.
-The misconceptions of college also include not being able to create a professional network, make sure you build your network by attending career fairs, joining clubs or organizations, or even talking to anyone in the university who might be of help. Also, try to also involve yourself in new ways, the cliché clubs may not be as worthy as having research hours with your professor; even being mentored by people with experience and jobs may serve to be valuable.
This step in the career development model involves pushing to the next step. Taking advantage of opportunity is something that will be key, and showcasing talent is also something that will occur during this phase. This process involves the idea of getting a broad understanding of your future career. Using the newfound traits and interests found by self discovery, we can build to create matching professions based off the compatible tools found.
Diving into interests means using preference to make a career choice, even if it is involving a whole cluster, this is done by dividing the choice into multiple steps. As taken from the discovery process, utilizing traits found to be strengths can result in a better understanding of career choices. Also, the knowledge that may have been obtained without hands on experience, such as coursework, can result in some major fluency when applying to the position at hand.
Resume building is key to raise your chances of getting hired utilizing P.A.R. statements within a resume serve to be a quick method to describe how you went about problem solving within the environment you were in. Keeping a very organized uniform resume can also serve to be beneficial. However, one of the main concepts of resume building is relevancy; putting relevant coursework, involvement, and experience, serve the employer a showing of a fitting candidate.
After realizing and completing the previous two steps we can move towards hands on experience. The first thing about hands on experience is finding the right job, in addition to strength matching to find jobs, it is important to find the right people as well. The ideology is “Network early, often, and when you least need it” (2 BY 22 article). This means you should network early on in your career and even when your goal is not to, due to the opportunity that may be lurking within certain connections. Networking events typically take place at major/minor fairs, alumni meetings, and even within classes. The main purpose of hands on experience is to gain knowledge that can only be found in a potential future career for you. Hence, make it a knack to soak up information and knowledge when getting this certain experience in order to translate it in future tasks.
Lastly, it is key to comprehend the steps needed in order to find an accurate match regarding your interests. To start off, as stated earlier, try to match the strengths you have with the clusters that are available. Next, following your previous course work and knowledge, see the career areas with the most relevance to them and try to pursue it. Afterwards, using career cluster exams such as the one from Princeton stated earlier see if the match for your occupation is still on point and accurate. If all checks out, move to pursue a career in clusters of the matching variety.
Building skills involves a dive into what your environment around you has to offer. Joining organizations and clubs around the school or state can help develop interpersonal and hard skills at a very steep cliff.
It is important to sometimes do things that aren’t always seen. If skill development was a main concern in society then all employees would be hired based off skill mastery. This just does not hold true, it is almost as though you need to master what you’re already good at alongside skill development. A quote from Insider Higher ED states: “You may only ever have 70 percent of what a job ad is asking for in terms of skills and experiences, but that can be enough -- especially if you can demonstrate the potential you can bring” (Inside Higher ED article). It is important to master and build all parts of your persona as well as obtaining the skills required for the job in order to succeed.
Additionally, getting involved on campus is a great way to improve skills and knowledge. Organizations at Rutgers University such as the RUAA Scarlet Council serve to be a wonderful way to meet and interact with alumni from all around the country. With a plethora of members registered (including me) it serves to be a great meshing ground for people who seek knowledge about any form of education from those more experienced. Additionally, organizations such as LEx have great meetings to work on soft skills such as public speaking, confidence boosting, and leading that often times can push one candidate past another when applying for a job. These are mainly universal tools of involvement at Rutgers which means people of any major or background can benefit from these.
Experience is also very important when it comes to skill building. What better way is there to learn skills about your profession than working in the profession itself. Of course, it so happens that that is not always readily available at such young ages. However, coursework, projects, relevant events all serve as experience and taking away skills of any regard from those methods is uncanny at times.
The first topic that would be touched is the International Computer Science program which is a international network for any computer scientist. This is a great platform to build hard and soft skills, not to mention connections in periodic meetings.
Highlighting skill goes back to discovering yourself, the idea of highlighting the skills that lead to success is often times something that requires mastery, this year will serve as that middle ground for development.
Hard skill development typically comes from coursework in Computer Science, using the courses to my advantage in learning more programs and methods will lead to efficiency in future professions.
Soft skills are something I look to build a year from now. In organizations such as NBV male a-capella group, RUAA Scarlet Council, and FBLA-PBL, I look to use that in order to master some skills that might push me forward. This can also serve to complete the third bullet which discusses expanding my network. I typically have expanded my connections in a very peculiar way, more spontaneous than anything, but events from these clubs will surely help my cause.
Resume building as discussed earlier is a great way to strike best in the application process. The addition of tools such as PAR statements and experience additions can really boost the resume to become much more appealing.
The main idea in the years following my developmental phase is to utilize the knowledge to perform tasks in internships and job experience. I look to apply as soon as possible in order to get some hands on experience with the field I look to enter and the personnel on the job.
Success is the last hope for year 5. If all goes well, the experience, knowledge, and tools I obtained in years 1-4 should get me a place in a long term job relating to my industry and life. However, the ability to refresh knowledge is something I will abide by as the technology world is always advancing.
