Why?
Because you don’t yet have a perspective on the full universe of where you work or might want to work. You don’t know whether you are being given a good assignment or whether you are meeting the best clients. You don’t know whether you are being compensated fairly. You don’t know who makes the real decisions, what the upward track is, or who you need to impress with your efforts. You lack the learning wisdom that time and experience bring. You haven’t yet been tested. You need someone who has been there and can impart insights and good judgment gained from her or his journey. You can also have more than one mentor.
How Do You Get a Mentor?
Rarely, but occasionally, one will identify and seek you out to support. More often, you have to find your adviser(s). Be observant. See who is respected. See who has a work style and ethic you want to emulate. Pick someone with whom you want to spend time and find a way to work with them, or seek their opinion on an issue. Talk to them in social settings when the opportunities arise. Create a relationship; it could last a lifetime.One piece of advice: Don’t immediately go into the default position of seeking a female mentor just because she’s a woman. That’s reverse discrimination! Women mentors can be terrific, but there are fewer of them. I have also found, counter-intuitively, that sometimes certain women can be competitive. So look into their long-term track record with predecessors.
How Can You Best Use a Mentor?
Study and Learn From What Makes Your Mentor Admirable to You
It might be interpersonal skills; it might be technical expertise; it might be presentations and public speaking; it might be how he or she reacts under pressure; it might be good judgment; it might be her or his ethics and moral conscience; it might be decisiveness. If you have picked a great mentor, it is probably a combination of all these and more. A mentor is first and foremost a very special teacher.Seek Your Mentor’s Counsel
Bounce ideas off him or her about work. Let him or her know about what you are working on and with whom. Share your longer-term goals and objectives.Let Your Mentor Be Your Advocate
Mentors can help smooth the way through advice, and sometimes through action, to help you get the clients or assignments or promotions that you should.Establish a Lifetime Relationship
In the process of learning from your mentor, you also build a friendship based on trust and support—one that can help sustain you both as you start out in your career and as you advance. Who knows? She or he might end up one day as your business partner. I’m not kidding. It’s how I found mine.Read more from LearnVest online.
Giving
advice to college graduates is extremely important to me because I was
one of them and even though the economy was better back in 2006, it took
me eight months to find a marketing job. I succeeded because I started
six months before graduation, collected eight internships, seven
leadership positions on campus and graduated with honors. I failed
because I didn’t know how to build and leverage relationships. Either
way, I learned a lot about what it takes to build a successful career
over the years. Good career choices are extremely important early in
your career because you can set yourself up for success later on. Even
though you might end up in a completely different career, the skills you
acquire and the people you meet, are what will open the doors for you. I
dedicate this post to the class of 2013, a group of optimistic
millennials who have a lot to offer to the world!
The job market is still tough for more graduates, unless you’re an in-demand engineer or accountant. Two-thirds of college students have debt and 39 percent live with their parents. In 2012, 284,000 students graduated into minimum wage jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal. Companies only expect to hire 2.1 percent more graduates this year than they did in 2012 and 66 percent of recruiters believe that college graduates aren’t prepared for the working world. Although there are clear obstacles to finding work, there are also a lot of big opportunities that students can take advantage of. The following are ten things that new graduates should do to get ahead in their careers. Of course, older generations can benefit from these too.
1. Think of your career as a series of experiences. The most optimistic and intelligent way to look at your career isn’t how long you stay with one employer or that you focus on what you majored in at college. You need to collect experiences throughout your careers, whether that be with five employers or ten, with one business function or five or in one country or three. The idea is that you need to be a lifelong learner if you want to make an impact, succeed and feel accomplished. The experiences you have expand your world view, give you new perspectives and make you a more interesting person.
2. Don’t settle for a job you’re not passionate about. A lot of people are pushing college graduates to just get a job to pay the bills and that isn’t the greatest advice because research shows that you won’t last long there if you do. Furthermore, no smart company is going to have someone who is only there to make money because there’s always someone else who wants it more. When you’re passionate about your job, you’re excited, you work longer hours and end up accomplishing much more. Life is too short to settle for a career that you hate!
3. Focus on making a big impact immediately. The quicker you make an impact in a company the more attention and support you will get. Millennials understand this well because they won’t want to wait five years to get on a project where they can make this type of impact. Starting on day one, you have to learn as much as possible and start mastering your job so you can latch on to the bigger projects faster and prove yourself. By doing this, you will explode your career and become more valuable in your company, which will increase your pay, title and you’ll get to work on better projects.
4. Take risks early and often in your career. One of the important lessons this economy has taught us is that not taking risks is risky. There is so much out of our control and if we just keep doing what we did yesterday, we can’t get ahead. By taking a risk, you are putting yourself in a position to learn, whether you succeed or fail. You’re also showing to your management that you’re willing to put your reputation on the line to make things happen. As we become an ever more entrepreneurial society, those that take risks, both inside and outside of the corporate walls, will become more successful.
5. Spend more time with people than with your laptop. Students are plugged in and don’t understand that he strongest relationship are formed in person, not online. I constantly see students looking down at their iPhones and iPad’s instead of at people’s faces and it’s a missed opportunity. Soft skills will always become more cherished in companies so it’s important to drop your technology and actually communicate with people. People hire you, not technology and you have to remember that!
- See more at: http://danschawbel.com/blog/my-10-best-pieces-of-career-advice-for-college-graduates/#sthash.DOGfgNS7.dpuf
The job market is still tough for more graduates, unless you’re an in-demand engineer or accountant. Two-thirds of college students have debt and 39 percent live with their parents. In 2012, 284,000 students graduated into minimum wage jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal. Companies only expect to hire 2.1 percent more graduates this year than they did in 2012 and 66 percent of recruiters believe that college graduates aren’t prepared for the working world. Although there are clear obstacles to finding work, there are also a lot of big opportunities that students can take advantage of. The following are ten things that new graduates should do to get ahead in their careers. Of course, older generations can benefit from these too.
1. Think of your career as a series of experiences. The most optimistic and intelligent way to look at your career isn’t how long you stay with one employer or that you focus on what you majored in at college. You need to collect experiences throughout your careers, whether that be with five employers or ten, with one business function or five or in one country or three. The idea is that you need to be a lifelong learner if you want to make an impact, succeed and feel accomplished. The experiences you have expand your world view, give you new perspectives and make you a more interesting person.
2. Don’t settle for a job you’re not passionate about. A lot of people are pushing college graduates to just get a job to pay the bills and that isn’t the greatest advice because research shows that you won’t last long there if you do. Furthermore, no smart company is going to have someone who is only there to make money because there’s always someone else who wants it more. When you’re passionate about your job, you’re excited, you work longer hours and end up accomplishing much more. Life is too short to settle for a career that you hate!
3. Focus on making a big impact immediately. The quicker you make an impact in a company the more attention and support you will get. Millennials understand this well because they won’t want to wait five years to get on a project where they can make this type of impact. Starting on day one, you have to learn as much as possible and start mastering your job so you can latch on to the bigger projects faster and prove yourself. By doing this, you will explode your career and become more valuable in your company, which will increase your pay, title and you’ll get to work on better projects.
4. Take risks early and often in your career. One of the important lessons this economy has taught us is that not taking risks is risky. There is so much out of our control and if we just keep doing what we did yesterday, we can’t get ahead. By taking a risk, you are putting yourself in a position to learn, whether you succeed or fail. You’re also showing to your management that you’re willing to put your reputation on the line to make things happen. As we become an ever more entrepreneurial society, those that take risks, both inside and outside of the corporate walls, will become more successful.
5. Spend more time with people than with your laptop. Students are plugged in and don’t understand that he strongest relationship are formed in person, not online. I constantly see students looking down at their iPhones and iPad’s instead of at people’s faces and it’s a missed opportunity. Soft skills will always become more cherished in companies so it’s important to drop your technology and actually communicate with people. People hire you, not technology and you have to remember that!
- See more at: http://danschawbel.com/blog/my-10-best-pieces-of-career-advice-for-college-graduates/#sthash.DOGfgNS7.dpuf
Giving
advice to college graduates is extremely important to me because I was
one of them and even though the economy was better back in 2006, it took
me eight months to find a marketing job. I succeeded because I started
six months before graduation, collected eight internships, seven
leadership positions on campus and graduated with honors. I failed
because I didn’t know how to build and leverage relationships. Either
way, I learned a lot about what it takes to build a successful career
over the years. Good career choices are extremely important early in
your career because you can set yourself up for success later on. Even
though you might end up in a completely different career, the skills you
acquire and the people you meet, are what will open the doors for you. I
dedicate this post to the class of 2013, a group of optimistic
millennials who have a lot to offer to the world!
The job market is still tough for more graduates, unless you’re an in-demand engineer or accountant. Two-thirds of college students have debt and 39 percent live with their parents. In 2012, 284,000 students graduated into minimum wage jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal. Companies only expect to hire 2.1 percent more graduates this year than they did in 2012 and 66 percent of recruiters believe that college graduates aren’t prepared for the working world. Although there are clear obstacles to finding work, there are also a lot of big opportunities that students can take advantage of. The following are ten things that new graduates should do to get ahead in their careers. Of course, older generations can benefit from these too.
1. Think of your career as a series of experiences. The most optimistic and intelligent way to look at your career isn’t how long you stay with one employer or that you focus on what you majored in at college. You need to collect experiences throughout your careers, whether that be with five employers or ten, with one business function or five or in one country or three. The idea is that you need to be a lifelong learner if you want to make an impact, succeed and feel accomplished. The experiences you have expand your world view, give you new perspectives and make you a more interesting person.
2. Don’t settle for a job you’re not passionate about. A lot of people are pushing college graduates to just get a job to pay the bills and that isn’t the greatest advice because research shows that you won’t last long there if you do. Furthermore, no smart company is going to have someone who is only there to make money because there’s always someone else who wants it more. When you’re passionate about your job, you’re excited, you work longer hours and end up accomplishing much more. Life is too short to settle for a career that you hate!
3. Focus on making a big impact immediately. The quicker you make an impact in a company the more attention and support you will get. Millennials understand this well because they won’t want to wait five years to get on a project where they can make this type of impact. Starting on day one, you have to learn as much as possible and start mastering your job so you can latch on to the bigger projects faster and prove yourself. By doing this, you will explode your career and become more valuable in your company, which will increase your pay, title and you’ll get to work on better projects.
4. Take risks early and often in your career. One of the important lessons this economy has taught us is that not taking risks is risky. There is so much out of our control and if we just keep doing what we did yesterday, we can’t get ahead. By taking a risk, you are putting yourself in a position to learn, whether you succeed or fail. You’re also showing to your management that you’re willing to put your reputation on the line to make things happen. As we become an ever more entrepreneurial society, those that take risks, both inside and outside of the corporate walls, will become more successful.
5. Spend more time with people than with your laptop. Students are plugged in and don’t understand that he strongest relationship are formed in person, not online. I constantly see students looking down at their iPhones and iPad’s instead of at people’s faces and it’s a missed opportunity. Soft skills will always become more cherished in companies so it’s important to drop your technology and actually communicate with people. People hire you, not technology and you have to remember that!
- See more at: http://danschawbel.com/blog/my-10-best-pieces-of-career-advice-for-college-graduates/#sthash.DOGfgNS7.dpuf
The job market is still tough for more graduates, unless you’re an in-demand engineer or accountant. Two-thirds of college students have debt and 39 percent live with their parents. In 2012, 284,000 students graduated into minimum wage jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal. Companies only expect to hire 2.1 percent more graduates this year than they did in 2012 and 66 percent of recruiters believe that college graduates aren’t prepared for the working world. Although there are clear obstacles to finding work, there are also a lot of big opportunities that students can take advantage of. The following are ten things that new graduates should do to get ahead in their careers. Of course, older generations can benefit from these too.
1. Think of your career as a series of experiences. The most optimistic and intelligent way to look at your career isn’t how long you stay with one employer or that you focus on what you majored in at college. You need to collect experiences throughout your careers, whether that be with five employers or ten, with one business function or five or in one country or three. The idea is that you need to be a lifelong learner if you want to make an impact, succeed and feel accomplished. The experiences you have expand your world view, give you new perspectives and make you a more interesting person.
2. Don’t settle for a job you’re not passionate about. A lot of people are pushing college graduates to just get a job to pay the bills and that isn’t the greatest advice because research shows that you won’t last long there if you do. Furthermore, no smart company is going to have someone who is only there to make money because there’s always someone else who wants it more. When you’re passionate about your job, you’re excited, you work longer hours and end up accomplishing much more. Life is too short to settle for a career that you hate!
3. Focus on making a big impact immediately. The quicker you make an impact in a company the more attention and support you will get. Millennials understand this well because they won’t want to wait five years to get on a project where they can make this type of impact. Starting on day one, you have to learn as much as possible and start mastering your job so you can latch on to the bigger projects faster and prove yourself. By doing this, you will explode your career and become more valuable in your company, which will increase your pay, title and you’ll get to work on better projects.
4. Take risks early and often in your career. One of the important lessons this economy has taught us is that not taking risks is risky. There is so much out of our control and if we just keep doing what we did yesterday, we can’t get ahead. By taking a risk, you are putting yourself in a position to learn, whether you succeed or fail. You’re also showing to your management that you’re willing to put your reputation on the line to make things happen. As we become an ever more entrepreneurial society, those that take risks, both inside and outside of the corporate walls, will become more successful.
5. Spend more time with people than with your laptop. Students are plugged in and don’t understand that he strongest relationship are formed in person, not online. I constantly see students looking down at their iPhones and iPad’s instead of at people’s faces and it’s a missed opportunity. Soft skills will always become more cherished in companies so it’s important to drop your technology and actually communicate with people. People hire you, not technology and you have to remember that!
- See more at: http://danschawbel.com/blog/my-10-best-pieces-of-career-advice-for-college-graduates/#sthash.DOGfgNS7.dpuf
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