It can feel daunting jumping into the workforce after graduating. You just spent years doing everything you can to follow the guidance of counselors, meeting the expectations of your professors and magically balancing a social and academic jam-packed schedule.
This should be a moment of relief, pride and enthusiasm for what’s to come next. So why do so many millennials report feeling depressed post-graduation? In fact, a Happiness and Well-Being Study published in 2015 by the University of California, Berkely reported that over 47% of students admitted to struggling with depression after graduating. They cited that graduate students’ beliefs about their career prospects are overall the top predictor of their well-being, strongly predicting their satisfaction with life and depression.
Even some of the highest caliber universities fail to truly prepare their students to know how to enter the workforce and set themselves to be able to afford to cover the costs of making a living on their own. Some students may have the luck of having parents or family to help them ease into their careers, but many, if not most face a very uncertain chapter in their lives ripe with the anxiety of how they will make ends meet.
However, the future is not as bleak as it may appear for these soon to be professionals. If you are tackling this challenge yourself or helping someone who is, here are some tips to make the journey more exciting than it is scary.
Get managerial experience wherever you can. If making a living is your focus, it’s good to start early on getting job experience. You don’t need to work at a glamorous high rise building to develop your resume. In fact, working in the service industry can play in your favor. It can be a place that enables you to quickly take on a more managerial role if you demonstrate the ability to be reliable and handle pressure. It may not seem like the coolest job to have but being a shift lead at a fast food restaurant or team leader in a retail store can actually accelerate your earning potential later on when you can add management experience to your résumé.
Consider a college hiatus to attend a trade school. Many careers that require a bachelor’s degree or higher start their entry level associates at very low pay grades or it may prove very competitive to land that first job with the top firm or company you’ve been eyeing. To set yourself up for success, consider taking a few months off during college to attend a trade school. This will open the door for a higher paying job that can support you while completing college and working to land that first dream role.
This can range anywhere from becoming an esthetician to a professional welder. It never hurts to have a back up gig. The younger we are the longer time can feel to us. Don’t assume that five months invested in a trade school will derail your path. The time will fly faster than you realize and it can help offset the stress of post-graduate uncertainty.
Take advantage of high paying entry level positions and internships. Traditionally, when we think of an internship, we cringe at the idea of running around getting coffee for everyone, while get paid next to nothing or literally getting paid nothing. But that’s not necessarily the reality anymore. Glassdoor recently published a report listing the highest paying entry level jobs and internships. The fields of technology, finance and consulting are at the top of the pack with opportunities that pay above the U.S. median salary of $52,807 for many entry level positions or internships. Some paid internships and entry level jobs paid in the range of $80-90,000 annually.
Be open to being in exploratory mode. From a young age, we are groomed to shoot for certainty. We are asked what we want to do with our lives on the regular and the older we get the more certain people expect us to be. The truth is, life is a journey with all kinds of twists and turns. When you find yourself at a fork in the road and unsure of which option to go after, embrace the uncertainty. This just means you’re in what I like to call exploratory mode. What’s great about this time is you get to try things out, experiment, risk failure and get to know yourself.
Very few college graduates even know all the options available to them, much less how they feel about those options. Stop pressuring yourself to be so certain and embrace the adventure of discovery. This is the time to experiment with jobs, work environments and geography. Move around. Take that job that you aren’t sure is a match. Bottom-line, be open to experience and learn as you go. The certainty will come. It will also disappear at times in your career journey, spitting you right back into exploratory mode, so you might as well get good at navigating it.
Develop a business mindset. A misconception many graduates are under is that somehow the degree signifies an end to their educational journey. They assume that the academic experience qualifies them to jump into their selected field. Instead, the hard truth is that the degree is more like the cover fee you pay to get into the club. But you still have to make it past the bouncer to get in and once inside, there’s no guarantee anyone wants to dance with you. Don’t let that be discouraging. Instead, get your head and arms wrapped around the reality of business.
School set you up to engage from a place of, “If I do what they ask I’m guaranteed to progress and succeed.” In business, doing what people ask is not the ideal formula. First, people may not take the time to tell you anything. You need to get good and comfortable with carving out your own path. Second, doing what you're told in business may keep you employed but it won’t make you competitive for higher paying jobs. The higher up you go the more you’ll be expected to come to the table with a perspective, recommendations to improve things and an ability to generate solutions without having all the information available or needing a guarantee that things will work. But having a business mindset means you get to create the world you want to work in vs. solely following a pre-planned syllabus.
The great news is today’s job market is ripe with opportunities if you’re willing to take some untraditional approaches, be open to the adventure of uncertainty and shift your mindset from student thinking to business thinking.
