You’re enjoying the time of your life in college. Friends, teachers, lectures and loads of activities, everything looks so great!

But, will it be everlasting?

What after you complete your course?

That might have boggled your mind a bit, but it sure does require some serious consideration.

Securing your first job would be the most crucial step towards making a career in the field you desire. Hence, the section to follow will seek to build on the same line of thought and get you started on the path ahead of time.

 

• Build an efficient online profile

The first thing that an employer might do is google your name to see what you’ve been up to all this while. Hence, the easiest way to go about is to create a LinkedIn profile. More the connections you build initially, more effective will your online presence be.

This will act as a window to your career apart from the offline resume. Connect with people from the field you’re interested in, start following various employers, join groups pertaining to your area of interest, participate in discussions held on these and Voila!

Before you know, you’ll have an all-star LinkedIn profile.

 

• Career Services to Your Rescue

As you might have heard your professors saying, ‘college career centers are a wealthy source of information for final year students’, career services prove to be quite imperative in the job-search process during college.

Resources like list of alumni in various professions, internal job boards, tests for self-assessment, sample cover letters and resumes and personality development workshops, are provided by them in heaps.

If nothing, these will strengthen your candidature for any job you apply.

However, the most valuable things these provide are the essential one-to-one sessions with career experts, mock-interviews and guidance to prepare your 90 seconds intro-pitch.

 

• Networking is the Key

Everyone around you at present, is a potential networking source. Right from your classmates, your juniors and teachers to the alumni, every single person can connect you to a new professional network.

This will definitely be the most significant step towards increasing your employment prospects and will continue to be imperative throughout your career.

You might feel uncomfortable selling yourself professionally, but the people in your network will definitely prove to be quintessential references. Meeting new people during various networking events in your college and career fairs makes you reach out to a wide variety of job opportunities. It’s also a healthy practice to send notes to people you meet during these events. Keep them aware regarding the fact that you’re searching for a job. Something would surely come up.

 

• Get Some Internship Experience

According to an article on Forbes, 85% of college students believe that getting an internship is as important as anything else in their career.

It’s your chance to test-drive the career before committing for a full-time job and gain some substantial before-hand experience at the same time.

It sure does serve to be a major add-on. An internship experience will enable the employer to gain surety that you have ample working knowledge regarding the industry and deem fit for the company as a worker.

While going for an internship, your recruiter will gauge you on things like what you’ve been learning at college, your academic projects, course work and the extra-curricular activities you were a part of.

In this highly competitive job environment, the hiring manager would definitely want to see your hunger to succeed in the field, beyond the academic setting.

 

• An Open-mind Would Definitely Help

There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ jobs, only experiences of different sort. Limiting yourself to one company, job or industry might not be the best approach towards a bright career. You never know what opportunity you dodge by closing-off your options.

Hence, with an open mind, submit job applications on a regular basis. On an average 20-30 applications per week might better your employment prospects, but there’s no upper limit of course.

Yes, you’ll get the job you desire. It’s all about being persistent and professional in one’s approach. With these tips kept in mind, a workstation in your dream company surely awaits you.

Author Bio: Anshuman Kukreti is a professional writer and a keen follower of the global job market. An engineer by qualification and an artist at heart, he writes on various topics related to employment across the globe. Reach him @ LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.

 

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5 Ways of Landing in a Job You Desire Post-College