The Job Skills Students Need That Colleges Don’t Teach

Every college student knows that, once they graduate, landing the job of their dreams isn’t going to just happen. Yet, students still downplay the difficulties they will face, either because they don’t understand the job market or because they put too much stock in their skills, thinking that the competition won’t stand a chance.

The reality is that in a world shaped by the internet, students must learn some basic self-marketing skills to stand out in their field. Ignoring the need to have a strong professional presence—on- and offline—won’t do you any favors.

So, the job for you, the enterprising student preparing for life after college, is to develop some job skills that colleges won’t give you.

Building a Personal Brand

Creating a lasting first impression is essential in any line of business. To do that online, you must develop and establish your personal brand. But first, you have to know what a personal brand is and what it isn’t.

Personal branding is the practice of marketing yourself and your career as a brand. It involves an ongoing process of developing and maintaining your image. Personal branding isn’t about creating a version of yourself, but about exploring your best qualities, passions, and work experience to develop your own unforgettable online image.

What are the skills you have acquired through life that make you stand out? Do you have any certifications or credentials that prepare you for your future? Have you explored anything outside the academic world that helped you uncover hidden talents? Is there something you know that would be a game-changer in your field? If so, does it provide a solution to potential employers or clients?

And ask yourself what you stand for. By knowing your values, you will be able to use those as career-guiding principles. You might even build a following by talking about how these principles help you be a better professional.

For example, artists should create portfolios to show off their work, writers should have an online blog or Medium account, and aspiring musicians should feature their best work on SoundCloud. No matter the field, there are creative ways to make it easy for potential employers to view your best work online.

Your Resume Matters More Than Your Grades

You did the hard work and got the praise you deserved, but are grades all that important once you’ve graduated?

Not really.

What you put on your resume will be more important for landing an internship or a job rather than being an A+ student. The best way to craft a resume that will catch a recruiter’s eye is to get work experience as early as possible. By the time you and your classmates are competing for internships, you need to be confident that you’ve worked and reworked your resume before submitting it. That means updating it with volunteer, part-time, seasonal, or temporary work.

While irrelevant details should be left out, employers want to know if you have experience as an employee—no matter the industry. Whatever you do, don’t draft one general resume for different positions. Tweak your resume by listing the experience that is relevant for a particular job first.

Base your resume content on what the employer wants. It might be hard to create a new resume every time a new opportunity arises, but the hard work will pay off. Although there are a ton of free templates online, no one likes reading a boring resume based on a bland template. Check out sites like Etsy for sleek, modern templates that can be customized. Resume templates are usually no more than $10, but they take the guesswork out of what information you should include.

You need two versions of your resume. The first, to share with recruiters and potential employers, should include your name, email address, phone number, work experience, and education. For privacy reasons, list your city and state but leave out your address. This resume should have the contact information for a handful of references. Be sure your references know that they may be contacted so they aren’t surprised.

The second version of your resume should be on your LinkedIn profile and online portfolio. include everything listed above except for your phone number and references; note that your references are available upon request. It’s important to keep your and your references’ personal information, personal.

Networking the Right Way on LinkedIn

Professionals know LinkedIn is an essential tool for networking. Unfortunately, many college students and graduates miss an opportunity to build their network by assuming that LinkedIn works like other social media platforms.

First, think of how your LinkedIn profile looks to a recruiter. Does your picture set the right tone? Does it build trust? Is it flattering without looking airbrushed?

Before getting a photo taken, keep in mind that you want to look like the dream candidate. Pick the appropriate attire and figure out how formal you should dress depending on the industry. If banking is your field, you might want to dress up, while if you’re in tech, a business-casual look may be best.

Once you have the killer image for your profile, take special care with your introduction. On LinkedIn, the intro is where someone gets a good idea of what you do without seeing all the specifics. Think of it as your full profile at a glance: Write it in the first person, keep it short, include keywords that are connected to your industry, and make sure it’s accurate. Adding any relevant accomplishments to this section is also important.

In the intro, focus on how you’ve made a difference at work and can bring value to your employer. For example, my LinkedIn introduction is:

I am the publications manager for the American Institute for Economic Research, a professional writer, digital marketer, and consultant. I’m also the founder of Argo Strategy, a marketing and public relations consultancy.

My research has been published by The Advocates for Self-Government, America’s Future Foundation, the American Institute for Economic Research, the Foundation for Economic Education and has also appeared in The Epoch Times, National Review, ZeroHedge, Evie Magazine, Entrepreneur, and more.

I’ve worked with teams to develop winning digital campaigns for clients ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies and presidential campaigns.

I’m available to speak to groups and organizations about my work and a variety of topics including free-market principles, the sharing economy, women in technology, women in business, and the liberty movement.

Then, it’s time to add your connections. Add as many people from your email and phone contacts as possible. On LinkedIn, you want to add people you know first so you can write a couple of lines about their skills if they ask you. This strategy also helps you in the long run because they can later return the favor for your profile.

With a solid network of former colleagues, classmates, teachers, and others who can vouch for you, growing your network with people who might be interested in your skills will be an easier task. If you’re reaching out to industry professionals for an internship or job, check the “How You’re Connected” tool to see if you are connected to members of the industry first. Getting an introduction from your network generally goes better than a note and connection request.

Another area you might want to explore is your alumni community. The “alumni” tool shows where fellow alums live and work. Or, join your university’s alumni group once you graduate. That is easy to do because colleges usually have active groups in many cities. If your school has multiple groups, join the ones relevant to your location. Be sure to introduce yourself to the group manager.

Most of the time, alumni group administrators are representatives of the Alumni Association and well-connected. When interacting online or at an in-person event, make sure you behave professionally: People are watching and your potential employer might not like what he or she sees.

Take It a Step Further

Remember: Alumni love meeting current students and recent graduates. Don’t be afraid to be proactive. It shows potential employers traits that are useful in the workplace.

As an undergrad, check with your alumni center to see if there are any networking events on campus that are open for students. Homecoming is the perfect opportunity to meet alumni from all over the country.

As you approach graduation, connect with the alumni chapters in the cities where you’re job hunting. Scouting out local networking events for young professionals on Eventbrite or in the “Events” section of Facebook—and attending them—show potential employers that you’re willing to put yourself out there.

Follow up with each person you meet within 24 hours with 1) a connection request on LinkedIn and 2) a short email thanking each new acquaintance for the conversation.

Taking your personal branding into the real world will show potential employers and colleagues that you have the skills outside of a four-year degree to be a stellar employee.

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I Killed My Teenager’s Fancy College Dreams. You Should, Too

Forty-five million Americans owe a collective $1.6 trillion in student debt. Here’s why my daughter won’t be one of them.

A couple months ago, my 17-year-old daughter’s guidance counselor called her into his office to ask pretty much the only question that adults ask high school seniors: “What colleges are you applying to?” When Ella tossed off a handful of universities, he said, “Have you thought about going to art school?”

By that afternoon, Ella was having a full-blown crisis of faith, because yes, she had thought pretty hard about art school. When her oil paintings started winning awards freshman year, her AP art teacher more or less told her that art school was her destiny, the only way not to squander her prodigious talents. Ella didn’t need convincing. She was so ready to bolt out of our small southwest Virginia town into a big city where she could paint all day that she had basically become a Lifetime movie cliché.

But for months she’d been shoving down all those painterly college fantasies of art school in New York. My husband and I had told her, point blank, we couldn’t afford it.

Let me clarify: By “couldn’t afford it,” I mean that we’re like pretty much all the other middle-class parents we know—not poor by a long shot, but not loaded either, and chronically underinvested in our kids’ college accounts. We had not squirreled away every spare penny in a 529 account since the moment of conception the way the Suze Ormans of the world want us to. We hadn’t even opened a 529 till Ella was in fifth grade, because we’d been trying to get through my husband’s Ph.D.

After that, we saved fairly aggressively, but you know how it goes. Two daughters. Clothes. Braces. Class trips. Like most parents, who save on average $18,000 for their kids’ education, we’d failed to sock away anything close to the $75,000 annual sticker price it would take for Ella to go to, say, Pratt in New York City. Our privilege was such that we slipped into a financial aid gap, where our daughter won’t qualify for grants, but we can’t pay cash up front.

That left two options: Let her join the 69 percent of U.S. college graduates who take out loans to finance their schooling. Or scare the hell out of her about taking on student debt.

According to our daughter, most of her friends are completely meh about student loans. They’re applying to places like NYU ($53,310 tuition) and Boston College ($56,780 tuition). Some of them have parents who can probably bankroll that. The others see it as inevitable that, in exchange for a nice bachelor’s degree, they’ll be working off grinding debt for the next 20 years.

Their parents don’t seem to mind either. According to a Sallie Mae survey, 70 percent of parents say that, even though they’re worried about paying for their kids’ college, they’re not limiting their children’s college choices based on price. One friend recently told me that her son has his heart set on a pricey out-of-state engineering program, despite the fact that a fantastic engineering program exists at the public university in our town. “It’s a reach school, but if he gets in he’ll probably go there—and I guess deal with a lot of student loan debt afterward,” she said with a laugh.

Why are we parents so loath to set financial limits on our kids’ college ambitions? Maybe because it seems crass to bring money into their reach-for-the-stars dreams. Maybe because we cling to the hope of generous scholarships and lavish financial aid packages that will make our money worries moot. Maybe because we deeply believe the destiny of smart teenagers is to attend their dream school, and ours is to finance it. To do otherwise is to fail at middle-class parenting.

So we finance it, or our kids do, 45 million of us owing a collective $1.6 trillion in student debt that not even Bernie Sanders could make disappear. You know what makes it disappear? Death. A friend whose husband died unexpectedly of a heart attack a few years ago told me that the major upside of being a widow in her 40s was that his death canceled out his more than $100,000 in student loans. “I thought we’d be paying that off forever, and then it was just gone,” she said with a breath of relief. When death is the bright spot in your financial life, things are bad.

So my husband and I decided to go ahead and become the villains in a John Hughes movie. One day when Ella was a sophomore, we laid out our financial situation. We told her we’d saved about $40,000 in a 529 to pay for her college. Between that, a part-time job, and some serious scrimping (“You like ramen, right?”), we could probably afford to send her to an in-state university, or maybe a really cut-rate private college with two years of community college first. Art school in New York? Not going to happen.

I’ve continued my scared-straight campaign ever since, periodically texting Ella links to articles about twentysomethings with $100,000 in debt, describing how massive student loans would hamstring her future. While there may be a few good reasons to opt for a fancy college and suck up the student loan debt (you need a really specific program, for instance, or statistics show you’ll earn far more money after you graduate), those didn’t apply to Ella’s situation. “If you want to be an artist and you graduate with a ton of student loan debt, you can’t afford to be an artist, anymore,” I told her, explaining that you become a creatively stymied wage slave instead.

To give my daughter a hard no on something she really, really wants—and that I in theory want for her!—makes me feel like a monster. While other parents cheerfully promise that “if you get in, we’ll figure out the money part,” I’m over here sounding a Greek chorus of caution and lament. Sometimes I long to just say yes. Saying yes feels good. Yes makes people happy.

On the other hand, saying no is part of my job as a parent. Hasn’t it been my role all along to steer my kid toward smarter but seemingly less desirable choices? Carrots instead of Kit Kats, an early bedtime instead of an all-night YouTube binge? Children naturally hate those kinds of limits. They may temporarily hate us. But they’re too young and myopic to see how this one decision could make their lives harder for a long, long time. We can.

Eventually, our prolonged brainwashing attempts seemed to succeed with Ella. She started talking about how reluctant she was to go into debt for college, like it had been her idea all along. She even thanked us for being upfront about the financial consequences of college. This fall she applied to exactly two universities, in the Venn diagram overlap between “schools we can pay for” and “schools where she actually wants to go.” They’re not art schools, but both have stellar art programs. Her guidance counselor, whose only focus is getting in and not paying up, thinks she’s crazy to limit her options like that, but we’re thrilled that the highest tuition at either is around $16,000. Not chump change, but probably doable.

Her applications are in, and she won’t know what happens for a while. Just one thing is certain: When Ella graduates, her future will be her own. For that, it’s worth keeping a short leash on her present.

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Help me close down Australia's illegal kangaroo courts

An update from Bettina Arndt:

A very sad start to the New Year with so much of Australia being destroyed by bushfires. I’m very conscious my little causes are trivial compared to what so many people are facing.

But we need to press on. I’m hopeful this is the year when Quiet Australians will get very noisy, reclaiming the public agenda to ensure a fair deal for men and boys.

So now I am launching what I hope will be a real splash to start 2020.

It’s a very important cause. As most of you know, we had some big wins towards the end of last year. The evil system of campus kangaroo courts was dealt a mighty blow. For years now, many Australian universities have had secret committees investigating and adjudicating rape. In a landmark Brisbane Supreme Court decision last November these were declared illegal. And then Education Minister Dan Tehan instructed the university regulator, TEQSA, that universities should leave these crimes to the criminal courts.

This is a huge break-through, but I need every one of you now to step up and help me ensure that the universities take notice. I’m starting a big campaign enlisting graduates of Australian universities, students, academic staff, parents and grandparents of young people planning to attend university. I want everyone with a university connection to write to the relevant Vice Chancellors and Chancellors alerting them to what has happened and putting them on notice that we are expect them to comply with the law. If you have no tertiary association, you can just write to your local universities. 

It's easy – just use my draft letter.

Various lawyers have helped me put together a draft letter you can use – which is on my website. We need to seize the moment, enlist heaps of people to do this across the country to make sure universities have the courage to stand up to the feminist lobbying.

Feminist activists will be appalled if their carefully manufactured campaign is derailed and will put immense pressure on universities to ignore the legal judgement and continue with business as usual. They have put years of effort into promoting the fake rape crisis and bullying universities into establishing these illegal courts. They are not going to give up easily.

Sadly, they have most of the mainstream media right behind them. I find it absolutely shocking the ABC reported the lurid accusations that in the University of Queensland case which led to the Supreme Court decision but mentioned not one word about the judgement. Ditto, the SMH, The Age, The Guardian - all those journalists who have been actively promoting the rape crisis have becomes strangely silent now that the crowning achievement of this activism has been found to be illegal. How about some of you complain to the ABC and Media Watch about this turn of events?

We are watching them

A clever friend in advertising has helped me put together a short social media video, designed to tell universities we are watching them. Here it is:

https://www.facebook.com/thebettinaarndt/videos/483879372510196/

Watch it now. It’s only just over a minute long. I hope you agree it really hits the mark.

We’re using this for what I hope will be a major social media campaign. Please help me circulate it in every way you can, retweeting, sending out to people in the media.

Contact me if you have ideas about how to get it to go viral – I need smart young social media experts to help with this one.

We are also going to spend some of the funds people contribute to me to promote it widely. You are very welcome to donate.

Closing down Australia’s illegal campus kangaroo courts.

I have put also together a proper video. It’s been a long time since I released something new and we realised that we hadn’t told my YouTube and thinkspot audiences about all these exciting developments.

Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg0Vp0qph6Q

Remember it really helps if you like the video, comment and subscribe.

When I was researching all the events I wanted to cover, I made an amazing discovery. We knew that the university regulator, TEQSA, had sent out advice to the universities telling them that they should “take disciplinary action against perpetrators of sexual assault” – advice which led to our kangaroo courts.

I stumbled across footage, now included in this video, of TEQSA CEO Anthony McClaran, proudly announcing he has told universities to “hold perpetrators to account.” Well, now it turns out he was advising them to do something quite illegal.

By email from Bettina -- Bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au