Best Advice: 10 Tips for College Grads

As we approach graduation time, millions of seniors are asking this perennial question: How can I pick the right career and avoid making all the mistakes my parents made? Here are ten tips from Ed Brodow, author of Beating the Success Trap:

1. Stop listening to your college advisers, family, and friends. They have an agenda based on their own experience and prejudices. Only you have your own interests at heart.
2. Make an inventory of your strengths. What are the things you enjoy doing? Use your abilities and talents as the basis for creating an interesting, rewarding career.
3. Make a list of all the jobs that could make use of your skill set. Do research on job categories to determine if there is something you may have overlooked.
4. Make a list of all the jobs you ever thought would be fun. Cut loose and be as imaginative as you want. You may not even have heard of the career that is right for you. Maybe it doesn’t exist yet – you might have to create it.
5. Visualize the kind of job you would jump out of bed for. The human mind works with images much like a movie does. See yourself actually performing in various careers.
6. Interview people in the jobs from #3, #4, and #5. A career looks different in reality than it does on paper. You need to determine if the reality corresponds to the image in your mind.
7. Find out if you can intern in any of those jobs. You can eliminate a lot of heartache by trying a prospective career on for size before you make a full commitment.
8. Be flexible and open to change. Don’t assume that your first job will be the right one. The right career may be lurking out there somewhere; your current job may be a stepping-stone.
9. . Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is the catalyst for success. Except for Mozart and Picasso, every successful person had to fail at least once before they found their true calling.
10. Surround yourself with people who want you to be happy. They will support you when you have doubts about the rightness of your career quest.

by Ed Brodow, author of Beating the Success Trap

Ed Brodow is a motivational speaker and author of Beating the Success Trap: Negotiating for the Life You Really Want and the Rewards You Deserve (HarperResource, June 2003). www.beatingthesuccesstrap.com

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