#Kickstarter careers how to#
#Kickstarter careers professional#

#Kickstarter careers how to#

The first teaches self awareness, or how to know what you want from your work. The course is broken down into 12 sessions (kind of like coaching sessions): two parts with six sessions each. In 2012, I set out to do just that by building my first course, which we called Career Kickstarter.

Build the skills necessary to conduct a job search independent of career centers and job boards.

Understand what they want from their careers.

The solution to all of this craziness is to help upcoming college grads and young professionals do two things: It’s, “Hurry, get an internship before they’re all gone!” Instead of, “Who are you, what did you love growing up, and what problems exist in the world that you’d like to help solve through your work?”Īnd that’s how we end up disengaged in our first jobs, counting down the seconds until we can find a way to get the heck out of there and move on to a job that matters. One level deeper even than anything listed above is that we are not taught to build self awareness and consider what we actually want before jumping into our career search. We’re taught to rely on job boards and resumes instead of networking and portfolio-building. Instead, we’re simply told to go to the career center (and we all know where that leads). It turns out that nowhere in school are we taught the skills necessary to successfully conduct our own job search. In a working world where Millennials expect to stay in their current jobs less than three years, on average, career search becomes one of the essential skills to carving our own path in the world. So I asked myself: What is the problem that can be solved at the individual, grassroots level so that this problem goes away? The system is a problem, but the system is resistant to change so it’s futile to try to change it as a small group or individual.

When university grad employment rates go up, the university gets ranked higher in Businessweek rankings, etc. When company quotas get filled, graduate employment rates for the university in question go up. When grads follow the rules, company hiring quotas get filled. The system as it exists teaches college grads to follow the rules. The system appears to work well for college grads, but what it does instead is something quite different. To change the system would be to upset the balance that works so well for career centers, recruiters, and college grads. If you try to change any of the above, people will fight tooth and nail to resist you.This leads to Fortune 500s and major firms having a major advantage over small and medium sized companies in college recruiting. Because of their lack of resources, they can generally only spend time partnering with companies who will hire large numbers of grads at a time. They sell spots at career fairs and on job boards to companies. University career centers are profit centers for universities.(Their performance metrics and bonuses are based on that, after all.) Recruiters have quotas to hit for hiring, and they’re occasionally willing to stretch the truth to make those quotas happen. Recruiters love that we’re ushered down certain paths because it makes their job easier.Accounting majors go to accounting firms. We’re taught to follow an existing path based on our college major.What I found was not surprising, but it was disappointing: Seeing so many people experience the same thing made me wonder: what’s the problem? Why is this happening? They left school excited to enter the “real world,” got past the honeymoon period at work, and then realized how little they had learned about the business world, jobs, and what it means to show up to work everyday. The more I told the story of my first year of work, the more peers I found who experienced the same thing.

What I found on the job was distinctly different from that which I was pitched during recruiting season. Nine months later I turned in my letter of resignation and prepared to leave my highly coveted consulting job. I was ready to learn and excited to be there. The recruiters pitched me on the travel, breadth of industry experience, and valuable skillset I would build. Spots in the performance improvement practice at Ernst & Young were highly coveted amongst my peers and I thought I hit the jackpot as jobs go.

#Kickstarter careers professional#

I had just completed my 4.5 year college career and a lengthy career search, resulting in offers from multiple professional services firms and Fortune 500 companies. In January 2011, I walked into the Atlanta Ernst & Young office wide-eyed and bushy tailed.