Ying

Personality and Your Approach to Career Planning

The 4 Ways to Successfully Adopt New Habits:

Are you the person who resists all the rules? Are you a person who often questions what you need to do? Are you a ‘people pleaser’ but fail to fulfill obligations to yourself? Gretchen Rubin, author of ‘The Happiness Project’ outlines four personality categories – Questioners, Upholders, Rebels, and Obligers. Rubin argues that the better know your own personality, the easier it will be for you to adopt new habits.

To me, these four personality types also play an important role in approaching our career research and decision making. For example, I identify myself as an Obliger who always commits to ‘what is expected of me today’. I would make sure I act on the promises for everyone around me, since I feel really bad if I let them down. However, I tend to take on too many responsibilities, resulting in some things slipping through the cracks. Understanding myself in this way has provided insight into how I can plan and act on my career-related activities more effectively. For instance, if I skip a networking event, I will hold myself accountable by signing up with my friends. I used to miss job application deadlines so often convincing myself I didn’t have enough time to apply. Now, whenever I encounter the job postings that are of interest me, I will let my family or my friends know and ask them to keep checking on my applications.

If you are interested in digging deeper into how your personality can affect your career planning, I strongly encourage you to check out the Typefocus personality assessment at the Career Centre. It will open your eyes to how your personality has been, and will continue to affect your approach to career planning.

A New Spin on the ‘Same Old’

“Although we perform The Nutcracker many times in our career, there is usually something new each season. For me this year I have new Icicles to my Snow Queen.” – Tanya Howard, National Ballet of Canada.

Tanya has played the characters of Mother, Snow Queen and Bee in The Nutcracker numerous times. Although she keeps playing these roles repetitively every season, she still finds something new for her performance each year. Recently, I’ve been seeking for magic power to boost up my motivation in this ever-so clockwork, job-searching season. Along with increasingly busy course work, I am feeling overwhelmed with the repetitive job applications during this typical job-hunting season. Unlike Tanya, the exhaustion and lack of motivation seem to make us forget to dig into “something new”, resulting in approaching things the same way, year after year. It’s important to stay motivated and to tackle seemingly old events in life, with new breathe. Maybe join a new club this year, master a new software, consider volunteering abroad, or initiating informational interviews with professionals in fields you are interested in. Taking a fresh approach, to an old exercise (job searching) will help you discover new avenues and ideas. While you are working on your resumės and cover letters, try to brainstorm “something new” and relate them to the jobs you are applying for. It will definitely be more refreshing than simply doing ‘the same old’, year after year.

Slow Down the Time

Coming towards the end of the year, it is the time to create some New Year’s resolutions while reflecting back on the past year. Going through a busy semester, I have an ambitious goal for next year, which is to slow down the time. I know it is actually possible, especially after I read an interesting article, ‘Time Flies: Here’s How to Slow Down Time’, written by Jessica Stillman (http://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/how-to-make-your-days-feel-longer.html).

Jessica says, “in order to slow down the time, the key is to keep adding newness to our brains or bring in new stimulus to our lives.” Does it sound quite counter-intuitive for you? To make a day feel longer, in our common sense, it would be doing nothing during a day; but actually it is the opposite. Jessica points out five tricks to make us feel we have more time in our days: keep learning, visit new places, meet new people, try new activities, and be spontaneous – with all of these tips leading us to have a more productive and meaningful day. Some of these tricks can really work well with job searching where you can always get something new out of it.

– Keep learning
Check out the Career Centre’s online and in-centre resources, you will learn something new related to career fields of interest. As you process all this information, the conscious learning process will make you feel more fulfilled.

– Visit new places & meet new people
What can be a better opportunity than Job Fair on February 5th, 2014 for you to visit a new place and meet new people? The Job Fair will bring in new stimulus to our daily life, since we will have the opportunities to network with people from all different industries.

– Try new activities
I always regard volunteering as an incredible way to try out new activities and build up new skills. Paying attention to the new training and skills from different tasks, you will realize how not only longer your days will become – but they will be all the more meaningful.

“Unofficial” Job Searching

Stepping into November, the stress of midterms and assignments began to fade away. With some time freed up, I began searching various job posting websites – but not for the purpose of finding a job. Instead, I wanted to discern what my dream job would look like in different industries and what it may take to approach that type of job. A well-written job posting is equivalent to a sophisticated career guideline for us. From a company’s perspective, it clearly describes the role responsibilities, requirements and can even sketch out a typical day of our dream job.

As we are exploring these free “career guidelines”, we may even detect our likes and dislikes so we can re-evaluate our dream jobs in time and not stress out at the last minute.

Starting this “unofficial” job searching early, will put you in a better position to qualify for a role when it comes time to graduate because you will have had a chance to act on the information. How many of us have been hesitant to apply for a job because we lack that “must have” skill or that certain type of experience? So why not take some time to pick out some well-written job descriptions in your area of interest, analyze them, and fully utilize the resources around us to brush up the necessary skills and build experiences? Take some courses to become an expert in Excel or web design; or volunteer to gain office support experience. Even more important than the skills and experiences, we are demonstrating a valuable soft skill that every employer is looking for – initiative! Therefore, by the time you start your “official” job searching, you are well-equipped and ready to go!

To begin your “unofficial” job search, Navigator provides us with access to numerous job postings and the Career Development Centre website lists a collection of diversified job posting websites: http://navigator.wlu.ca/career/student/job/postings/websites.htm.

My Networking ‘Trick’

As students, we may all know having an effective networking strategy will boost our chances at landing a job. Personally, I have a little ‘trick’, in that I regard “networking” simply as listening to other people’s stories and learning from them.

This past summer I went to a company’s open house event. During the lunch break, I spoke with one event attendee who works at a university co-op department. At the beginning, I introduced myself to her – spoke about my academic studies and mentioned my career interest in the HR field. And guess what? She used to work as a HR Manager! All the sudden, I felt like I was having a live informational interview with someone in my field of interest. Later on, she mentioned that she made a career transition from a corporate setting to an educational institution because she always felt emotionally overwhelmed when she had to lay off people. This conversation and information made me start to critically evaluate my HR career aspiration since I’m a very sentimental person. At the end of the day, through hearing her story, I have grabbed a number of tips in HR to evaluate whether it’s the right fit for me and have earned more insights into networking.

First of all, take the initiative to attend networking events. I would never have met that HR contact if I just stayed at home. I would never have gained a new perspective of HR if I didn’t initiate the conversation. In the Career Centre, you can always sign up for networking events to connect with real world professionals. If you find one interesting – go for it! You will never know what you might encounter.

Networking is a lifelong skill and one that you should start practicing early on in your academic career!