Finding a job after college can be a stressful task. Career directors at the BYU Careers and Experiential Learning office offered some words of advice.
Use your resources
For students looking for help with the job application process, the office in room 1134 of the Wilkinson Student Center has several resources.
The office’s Career Studio helps students with basic services, such as cover letters, LinkedIn profiles and resumes. The team of peer mentors can help students optimize these professional documents to be reflective of students’ strengths and competitive in the job application process.
The office also has specialized career directors, acting as bridges to connect on-campus stakeholders, faculty, departments and colleges with external partners, employers, internships and more. They help students tailor their resumes and cover letters for the specific jobs they are applying for, and then help students distribute them to the right people.
“The BYU experience is kind of this all-inclusive experience where you have services and resources built into every aspect of your success,” Michael Elrod, a career director, said. “When it comes to career decisions, we’re the people for that.”
Elrod is the career director for students majoring in education, secondary education, English, linguistics, and editing and publishing. There are career directors available for every department on campus.
The Careers and Experiential Learning office also hosts several career fairs throughout the year. Employers come from all over the country to present their companies and potentially recruit BYU students.
The Fall Semester Career Fair will take place on Thursday, October 3 from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. The office also offers specialized career fairs for certain departments and interests, such as the STEM Career Fair and the BioTech Career Fair. A calendar of all upcoming fairs and other events can be found on the website.
Other online resources can help students find and apply to jobs in their areas of interest. Handshake is an external job search network with employers who want to hire BYU students. BYU Connect is a mentoring and networking website for BYU students and alumni. Students are also encouraged to use LinkedIn to network with alumni and find more career opportunities.
Find a mentor
Elrod’s biggest piece of advice for students getting ready to find a job is to find a mentor.
“Try to identify a mentor and really start to lean on them to get the help that you’re going to need to land what you want to land,” he said. “A mentor makes a big difference.”
Mentors can be a professor, family friend, BYU alumnus, career director and more. The point of having a mentor, according to Elrod, is to have someone who can act as an advocate to boost a student’s self-esteem and give advice for their professional pursuits.
He also explained that a student usually cannot go knocking on a door and expect to get a job, but they need someone on the other side to let them in. Networking can make a significant difference when building a career.
Barbara Hunt, the career director for students in the Kennedy Center and College of Humanities, discussed the importance of having someone in a position or company you might want to work in.
“You can submit 500 applications, and you might get something, but by the time you submit even 30 job applications, your morale just goes down and your hope goes down,” Hunt said. “Having someone on the other side, I think it’s just better.”
Students can start interviewing and shadowing those mentors and other people in their lives to find potential career opportunities and areas of interest.
“It’s never too early to start prototyping and having those experiences that will act as affirmations that you’re on the right path,” Hunt said.
Sara Moore, the career director for psychology, family life and social work, explained that companies often use AI to search for specific keywords in an application. If a student’s application lacks those keywords, they might receive an automatic rejection.
“To combat this, focus on networking,” Moore said. “Build relationships with alumni and employers and get to know them personally and professionally. Think of networking as asking for directions — most people are willing to help you navigate your career path.”
Diversify your experience
For students looking to stand out to employers, they can start preparing during college by diversifying their experience. This means taking advantage of the countless available opportunities, including volunteering in the community, getting involved with BYUSA, participating in academic societies, serving in the Church and more.
“These days, employers care more about experience than they do about GPAs, unless you’re going to law school or medical school,” Hunt said.
Elrod explained that being involved in a variety of groups increases potential for success because a student never knows what activity in college might connect them to a future job opportunity.
“I think it’s really important to be open to not just two opportunities, but to be open to everything,” Hunt said. “The world is your oyster, but only if you’re willing to see it that way.”
Students should start preparing now, according to Elrod, and think of college as the beginning of their professional experience instead of the end of their academic experience.
“Start to cater your college experience to what you want the next professional step in your life to be,” Elrod said. “Take specific classes, volunteer specific places, take on specific roles that prepare you for what you want the next step to be.”
This will help students to stand out in the big pools of applicants.
“If it does come down to a resume and cover letter, you stand out and you’re not just one of another that has the baseline requirements for the job, but you’ve demonstrated you’re the type of person who goes above and beyond the minimum requirement,” Elrod said.
There is hope
Hunt discussed the pattern of a perfectionist mindset among students at BYU. She explained that this mindset often involves a student planning out how they must get an internship their junior year, graduate on time and get a job after their senior year. However, this is not necessarily everyone's recipe for success.
Act unconventionally, Hunt advised, and do not be afraid to take leaps of faith. You may need to make sacrifices, but Heavenly Father will reward you, she said.
“There is hope, there’s a position for everybody,” Hunt said. “Your first job will, in all likelihood, not be your dream job — it will be a steppingstone to get where you want to be. There’s work out there for you that is meaningful and that you’ll find satisfying and that fits what you’re looking for at this time of your life.”