Bad advice from your college’s career center

It is well known that higher education is the best path to a white-collar career. A college education can help hone your critical thinking abilities, expose you to a diverse body of scholarship on various subjects, and assist in making you a thoughtful citizen. All of these are crucial yet intangible qualities that employers and communities need. But bridging the gap between the university and the workforce can be difficult. Enter the college career center, where students can, ostensibly, get advice, and direction on how to market themselves to employers.

The problem with college career centers is that there is a significant disconnect between the advice they tend to dispense and the business climate's reality. In fact, most people who work in college career centers have never worked in a corporate environment. Without direct experience in the corporate workforce, how can they properly advise students, especially undergraduates, on transferring their skills and knowledge to that environment? Here is some of the bad advice regularly dispensed to students. You have my permission to ignore all of it.

You should use our resume template. I have a client whose daughter recently showed me the resume that the college’s career center helped write. It was task-focused and devoted nearly half of the real estate to her education, including the courses she took. We rewrote it to include a summary section that spoke to her skills and aspirations and highlighted her internships and other work experience instead. The feedback from career services on this was that although the headline and summary were well written, “these elements are typically for someone with a longer work history who needs to summarize their career story.” What?! Nonsense. Courses don’t demonstrate what you can do. 

Create a portfolio of class assignments/writing samples and bring it with you on interviews. This is terrible advice because outside of your classmates and your professor, no one cares what you did in your classes. Employers care about how you can apply what you learned to help them solve their business problems. Instead of bringing your research project with you, you should talk about how you conduct research, analyze data and results, and draw conclusions.

Point out that you are a detail-oriented, hard-working self-starter. Blah, blah, blah. None of this means anything. Besides, just saying how awesome you are is meaningless. You need to demonstrate that through concrete examples and confidence.

Call/email a prospective employer to schedule an interview. This is old, outdated advice that is given by both career centers and well-meaning parents. Doing this breaches business etiquette. It is presumptuous. It will annoy the potential employer. Instead, get involved with a networking group and find people who are open to talking with you and providing their perspectives. 

My advice to undergrads: build your network. Are there people in your family or community who do the type of work in which you are interested? Speak with them, find out what they do, and ask how they got to where they are today. Did you do any internships? You should have made contacts through your internships. Reach out to these people, keep in touch, grow your relationships. Also, look at online resources such as LinkedIn for advice on how best to secure your entry-level employment.