What career and education advice would you like/have liked to get?

[callyna81]

I have a really cool new opportunity. I have just moved to a new city, and have started a job starting up a career / employment initiative in the centre of town (city pop is about 80,000) to provide career and education advice, as well as training and some job placement (which will run untraditionally - we will find jobs on the basis of people's career desires, not place them in jobs we've found). It's being funded totally by a community appeal, we have an eight-room facility to run the programme, it will be totally free and will have no real restrictions in regards to who can participate, except for the fact that the focus should sway towards "early career" participants.

Myself and my two colleagues (one will do training, one community and job links, and me everything else) are starting this up from scratch. My question is - if you had access to a free, community based career and education service, what kind of advice/training/support would you like/want? (at all stages of your career).

[vinsanity]

When I was looking for a job straight out of college, my biggest stumbling block was that I had no related work experience (the main reason I have my current job is that I've been with the company for 4 years prior). So what would have helped me at the time would maybe be access to more entry-level/internship programs to build experience from. Or maybe it was just a timing issue for me.

Right now, I'm debating on whether it would be worth it to go to grad school to advance my career, so maybe having a grad school fair with alumni to share their experience would be cool, if at all possible.

[wordsmith]

Being a clearinghouse/supporting some type of a network for job postings that's more specific and less cattle call-y would be good. Sites like Monster and Careerbuilder have always been worthless to me, they're so flooded. I've gotten all my job offers from more niche sites like idealist.org and my city's philanthropy.net. The same postings on the big sites get lost in the wash. People looking for careers in niche fields tend to have more of a hunt on their hands finding available jobs than more traditional, widely publicized lines of work.

[wordsmith]

Also, definitely agree on some type of graduate school counseling/resources. In my search, grad school info organized much more poorly than undergrad stuff.

[winneythepooh7]

It would be good to have a network of people who actually work in various careers who are willing to mentor, review resumes, offer advice of places to look for jobs, the do's/don't's they suggest in finding a job in their field, etc.

[winneythepooh7]

It would be good to have a network of people who actually work in various careers who are willing to mentor, review resumes, offer advice of places to look for jobs, the do's/don't's they suggest in finding a job in their field, etc.

[callyna81]

Winney, one of my ideas is to create a database of mentors we can work with within the city - I think it's a great idea.

As for grad school stuff, I'll certainly be pooling resources, but one of the HUGE issues in our city (and hence why we got such significant funding) that participation in UNDERGRAD is just 10% (despite several college campuses within a half hour train ride) within the college age group (and community college isn't much more). So we'll probably focus on working on those levels, too.

Work experience we have sorted. Our liason officer will look at doing placements (unpaid), volunteer work, paid work and working on putting people in courses, too.

[vinsanity]

Why do you suppose the college enrollment rate in your area is so low?

[gemma-dahl]

1. How to market yourself. (This is pretty much universally important.)

2. How to network effectively (everything my career counselor told me was wrong).

3. How to know when you're ready for grad school, how to get in, how to find schools that pay for you to go, and how to decide which program is best for you. (Been out of college for a while now, and I still wish I had a clue.)

4. Specific to my field, I'd like to see more resources for writers. Not job postings, but writing tips, especially genre- and format-specific tips. This year, I had to create "how to write" training materials for one client, and I was amazed at the dearth of quality tutorials out there. Moreover, I spend several hours a week learning more about my field, and I feel like I've reached a dead end lately in terms of learning materials.

[heymikey]

This might seem like common sense for most people but I would have liked some social skills training/sessions since interpersonal skills are really important in the workplace.

[callyna81]

Why do you suppose the college enrollment rate in your area is so low?

It's a fairly low socio-economic area (the history of which is quite complicated) traditionally (not so much now), and the biggest issue is actually just getting kids to finish high school. Truancy is high for the kids that stay. There has been a lot of state funding poured into dealing with this. Kids will need to finish high school (unless they do special entry programmes) to do undergrad in the first place.