14 The Journey Begins

Discovering what you want and having a plan to get there will help you succeed in college. Many students quit school simply because they are unsure about what they want from it. With well-defined goals in mind, you can look for connections between what you want and what you study. The more connections, the more likely you’ll stay in school—and get what you want in every area of life.

By design, you are a learning machine. As an infant, you learned to walk. As a toddler, you learned to talk. By the time you reached age 5, you had mastered many skills needed to thrive in the world. And you learned all these things without formal instruction, without lectures, without books, without conscious effort, and without fear.

Shortly after we start school, however, something happens to us. Somehow, we start forgetting about the successful student inside us. Even under the best teachers, we experience the discomfort that sometimes accompanies learning. We start avoiding situations that might lead to embarrassment. We turn away from experiences that could lead to mistakes. We accumulate a growing list of ideas to defend, a catalog of familiar experiences that discourage us from learning anything new. Slowly, we restrict our possibilities and potentials.

However, don’t let this become your journey. You can take a new path in your life, starting today. You can rediscover the natural learner within you. Each chapter in this course is about a step you can take on your journey to becoming a successful student with a career direction.

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Taking the time to ensure that your personality is compatible with your career choice is extremely important. If you do not invest the time now to figure out what makes you happy and keeps you motivated every day, you could be very unhappy in the future. But why is personality so important? Learning about your personality allows you to think about your emotions, behaviors, and ways of thinking on a day to day basis. For example, do you prefer to work alone or do you prefer to work with others? Would you be content in a career that requires that you are extremely organized and have a set schedule? Or are you the type of person that likes to have an open, flexible schedule that allows you to be spontaneous? This information will assist you in deciding which career(s) match with your personality preferences.

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” This popular saying attributed to Yogi Berra, an American professional baseball catcher, suggests that we should have a pretty clear picture of where we are headed. And college, for most of us, is an important step toward a fulfilling and exciting career. But the fact is that the employment market and job-seeking techniques have changed significantly over the past ten years and will continue to change; it is not as easy as it once was to map out a clear career path.  However, a clear direction can still provide enough flexibility to respond to the changing needs of today’s job market. In fact, building flexibility into your career plans is a requirement for achieving a  successful career.

Consider the ways in which the job market has changed—and what it may mean to your planning:

• You will likely be employed by many organizations in your lifetime. The idea of working for a single employer is no longer the rule but rather the exception. In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor found that on average, people hold close to eleven jobs between the ages of eighteen and forty-two. This trend means today’s graduates need to be very flexible in their career plans and that they should make an effort to identify and develop transferable skills in order to navigate the changing employment market.

• Five years from now, you may be working in a job that does not even exist in the present. As new technology accelerates and national and global priorities (such as going green or national security) take on a new sense of urgency, new needs are identified and new jobs will be created to fill those needs. Think about this: five years ago, a search engine optimization (SEO) specialist was a job in only a handful of Web-centric companies. With the meteoric growth of Google, SEO is now a common role in many marketing departments—and a job in relatively high demand. In the same way, the aging population has created new opportunities in elder care, the events of 9/11 has created a whole new category of jobs in homeland security, and new discoveries and approaches in science have created fields like biotechnology and nanotechnology. Today’s students and job hunters must become lifetime learners to keep up with new trends.

• The physical location of a job is no longer as important as it once was. Other than jobs that require you to serve customers in a specific location or region or jobs that require specialized equipment (as in manufacturing facilities), companies increasingly have off-site employees who stay connected via the internet. This means that students and job hunters should be able to demonstrate the ability to work independently and produce results without consistent, direct personal supervision.

• You have access to millions of job opportunities via the web, but so do hundreds or thousands of other job seekers. Each employer must go through hundreds of resumes received for each job posted on the web. Strategies for standing out in this crowded field become very important.

These factors combine to create a job environment that is different from what most people might expect. The way you prepare for a career needs to be more flexible and more personalized. Technology will play an important role in your career development. Linking your demonstrable and transferable skills to the needs of a job will be the key to your success.

With the job marketing changing and evolving it is ever so important to understand your skills, abilities, and knowledge. To embrace your interests and discover where they can lead you will be a great asset on your journey. Allow yourself to be curious and investigate the unknown and unheard of, go out beyond the expected, and find your path – the path that you alone choose to follow. You are unique, and your career path can only be developed by you.