Introduction

My goal for this book is to provide a guide to help students prepare for their professional job search. This process should begin before college graduation. If you wait until after graduation to begin thinking about your professional job search, you will find that you are well behind your peers. Getting started early ensures that you are building the appropriate skills while in college and taking full advantage of the opportunities available to you on campus that will help make you an attractive candidate to employers. After graduation, these opportunities are no longer available, and it becomes much more difficult to build the necessary skills that employers are seeking, and more difficult to connect with potential employers through campus connections and job fairs. Thus, I also hope that this book will help you to get the most out of the opportunities that college has to offer beyond the classroom.

Getting started on your job search while you are still a student enables you to conduct a personal inventory and identify areas where you need to develop and/or grow in before you are thrown into the job search and in need of a job. It can help you choose the employment opportunity you want, rather than simply having a job choose you.

This book includes a text overview on each of the topics, along with FAQs, activities, opportunities to reflect and journal, checklists, and worksheets. It also includes suggestions for collaborating with generative AI on your job search and samples from other college students. To get the most out of this book, work through the chapters and items in order, and complete all the exercises.

The student work that is included are examples of students’ best efforts. It is my philosophy that writing is never done, there is always room for improvement. Do not look at the examples provided here as perfect. Instead, take what you like from each one and consider ways they could be improved. Use your ideas to create your own job search documents and make them the best they can be today, realizing that as you advance in your skills and gain new experiences, your job search materials will need to change along with you.