What Color Is Your Parachute? (23 page)

PARACHUTE TIP

Although being a team builder, good listener, and great communicator will make you a good employee, if you want to be a CEO, different traits are preferred. When it comes to leading successful companies, executive and organizational skills are most important. The traits that lead to corporate success are attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytic thoroughness, and the ability to work long hours.

Shut off your cell phones, cover your body, turn off the video poker, unplug your iPod, stop text messaging your friends, and get to work.

—Young Silicon Valley executive

Let’s say you want to be a software developer. In your personal work ethic, you’re committed to working hard and conscientiously, but you also want time to relax, be with your family and friends, and pursue other interests. You wouldn’t fit in well at a company where you’re expected to work eighty hours a week, never take a vacation, and spend any free time you might have talking with colleagues about work.

Your commitment to your college education is an indicator of your work ethic. (This is one area where your
GPA may reveal qualities an employer considers valuable.) In general, if you’re serious about getting as good an education as possible, you’ll study hard and be dependable, responsible, and punctual (that is, you’ll meet course requirements and won’t cut classes or show up late). You’ll take your academic work seriously and do your work as well as you possibly can.

If you need help with study skills, see if your college has a learning resource center. Utilize department assistants or tutors if you need them. If you’re having difficulty with a particular class, talk with the professor or teaching assistant to see if you can get some additional help. Your initiative in getting help indicates a strong work ethic.

Contacts

In addition to developing the qualities and skills that employers want most, it’s important to use your college years to gain work experience and develop contacts that will be useful to you when you interview for jobs. Information interviews, job shadowing, and internships (sound familiar?) are good ways to gain experience and develop contacts.

Information Interviews and Job Shadowing

Continue doing information interviews as you did in high school, but now do them in more depth. (To review information interviewing and job-shadowing techniques, see
chapters 4
,
5
, and
8
.) Ask to meet with people for thirty minutes and ask for more detail about the day-to-day realities of their jobs and the direction they see their career field taking, including what opportunities or obstacles that might present for you.

Chapter 5
offered some basic information about
job shadowing. You can use the same technique in college to learn more about particular jobs. With additional life, academic, and possibly work experience, you’ll be better able to use the experience to assess whether a particular job is suitable for you.

Ask the staff at your college career center for help in finding people (perhaps alumni) for you to job-shadow or interview. Faculty members in the area of your major, as well as your college roommates and friends (and their parents), may also provide important contacts. Get in touch with your college’s office of alumni relations. Most schools have databases about their grads that include employment information. And don’t forget those people you job-shadowed or did information interviews with when you were in high school. If your interests still lie in the same area, contact them again to see whether they might be willing to be shadowed or interviewed again—this time in more depth.

Internships

Employers prefer to hire college students who have done multiple internships. They weigh internship experience higher than grades, the college you attended, and even your professional recommendations. Many companies and businesses offer internships to college students. Some are paid and some are not; some take place during the summer, others during the school year. Internships are designed to introduce you to working in a particular field or job and to give you practical work experience. For example, let’s say you want to be a magazine staff writer. A magazine may offer a summer internship program that introduces you to the publishing world, allows you to work with a staff writer, and gives you a writing assignment to complete before the end of your internship.

GET IT IN WRITING

When you finish an internship, volunteer project, or job in which you have done well, ask for a letter of recommendation before you leave. Even if your supervisor or professor likes and remembers you, he or she may have trouble remembering the details of your work after even six months. These letters can be important as recommendations for both jobs and graduate school.

Internships are a great way to check out a job or field that you’re very interested in, and they look good on your resume. The quality of internships varies wildly. Some students report being active members of a team; others say that
they just warmed a chair. Find students who have already done the internships that interest you. Avoid internships that are a waste of time. Make sure you do your part; show up on time, professionally dressed and open to new assignments. If your experience is a good one, after you graduate you may be offered a full-time position at the business where you interned, or people you worked with may offer to write professional references for you or provide contacts with potential employers.

Check with the career center at your college for information on internships. (Also see the
resources section
.) If you’re unable to find an internship that fits your particular needs, try contacting a company that you’re interested in working for to see whether you can set up an internship.

You As a Business

Young adults are sometimes referred to as “start-up adults.” It’s an interesting metaphor, as it alludes to a person in the first phase of business, just starting up. It’s also a helpful metaphor. No business would spend $80,000 to $120,000 (what getting a bachelor’s degree may cost you) on a new piece of equipment or a service without knowing what it would do for them. Smart college-goers won’t either. The goal of your business plan is to leave college with a job you’ll like and one that needs your college education. From recent studies, here’s what those who achieve this goal do during college:

Summer of freshman year (or earlier):
Complete your parachute and do enough information interviews to learn about three fields or industries that interest you. Find out what internships are available through your university. Keep a list of names and contact information of all the people you meet who work in the field you also want to work in.

ARE YOU BACKABLE?

Venture capitalists look for new businesses (called start-ups) that are likely to succeed. Explore and increase your backability with these two books: