How To Manage The Stress Of Finding Your Dream Job Immediately After Graduating
Stress is one of those things that can make or break you as a person, depending on how you handle it. If you’re a college student, you encounter stress on a daily basis. But hey, you finally graduated and now you have a whole new kind of stress! Searching for your dream job. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Take a look at these tips on how to handle that stress.
Focus on the skills you learned
During the course of your academic career, you’ve gained invaluable skills. Skills you might not realize you have until you read about them on a paper and realize that, hey, I can do that! Take a look at the course outline of your major or minor and read the description of what graduates of that degree should be able to do and you have your list of skills.
Learning new skills isn’t bad at all, but during these first few months and the first year, you should be focusing on capitalizing on the skills you currently own and upselling them to potential employers.
Internships help
You’ve heard it before many times, but internships really do help in your quest for getting a job after graduating. You might not get a paid one right away, though, so make sure you have a backup job for paying the bills until you are able to work your way up from unpaid to paid.
Internships are a great way to flex the skills you already learned in college while learning new ones with on-the-job training. They build up your experience and add credibility to your resume. This will help you get an edge above the others who will be applying for the same job as you.
If you are lucky enough, you might just get a position at the company you are interning for. But be aware that they might not have an open position available for you when your internship ends. Make sure to be in conversation with the supervisor of your internship. If you find out that there is no available positions near the end of your internship, then begin to search for other jobs and opportunities near the end so that you can have an easy transition from one job to the next.
Keywords
Keywords are a big part of the job searching both on your end and your employer’s end. You use specific keywords to find the job you want and they use specific ones to weed out candidates who don’t actually read the job description.
When you are searching for jobs, don’t be afraid to enter keywords that you think might not fit with the job you actually want. It can pop up in unlikely places so use your research skills and go through as many keywords as possible until you find the jobs you actually want to apply for.
The employers use a computer system that is programmed to find certain words in a cover letter and resume which will weed out the people who don’t know what they’re doing or who haven’t actually read the job description and requirements.
A good rule of thumb when writing your resumes is to find some of the requirements for the job and include them in your resume, but make sure those are skills you actually have.
Realize you might not get your dream job right away
One of the major things you need to come to realization of is that you might not get your dream job right away. Or what you thought would have been your dream job changes as you go through internships and jobs and gain experience in your field.
Never feel bad or guilty about changing what you want your future career path to be as you gain experience and grow as a person. Everyone’s interests change based on how their lives turn out. But you should never make yourself settle for anything. Realize your worth and potential and keep trying no matter what happens.
Stress might make you think that you need to do everything right away, but you don’t. Focus on building yourself and making yourself better every day and you will eventually become who you wanted to be.
Apply to everything
You might find yourself in a high amount of stress if you don’t find that one job you are looking for. An easy way to relieve this stress is to apply to everything, even if you don’t think you will get the job or that it doesn’t relate to your field of interest.
Many times employers are looking for people of different backgrounds so if you apply to something you feel like it might not fit, an employer might see differently and offer you an interview. If you feel like you don’t have enough qualifications for something, apply to it anyway. As long as it’s not outrageously out of your qualifying zone.
For example, if a job asks for two to five years of previous job experience, apply to it even though you might have no experience. Oftentimes employers will look at your other qualifications on your resume and cover letter. If you get an interview and show that you are eager to learn, then they might hire you over someone else who has more experience.
Stay healthy
Above all else, it’s important to take care of yourself both immediately after graduating and for the rest of your life.
Coming out of college, you will be getting used to normal life again and might forget to eat or workout or take care of yourself while you are full of stress looking for a job. Jobs will always be there, but you might not be so it’s important to take care of your mental and physical health.
It’s always important to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
