Graduates entering the workforce should be proactive

Gayle Christensen offers some practical advice for graduating seniors.

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DOMINIQUE JOHNSON TTN Gayle Christensen advises graduating seniors.

As graduation is quickly approaching for seniors, many are anticipating finding their dream job in an effort to succeed in the ever-changing job market and fluctuating economy.

The Associated Press analysis of available government data, reported that about 53.6 percent of Americans who have bachelor’s degrees and are under the age of 25 are unemployed or hold lower wage jobs.

This is a bleak outlook for those who are preparing to enter the workforce. But, Gayle Christensen of Employment Entrepreneur Specialist at the Honickman Learning Center and Comcast Technology Labs offers some advice to graduating seniors.

“Well, I think it’s a little bit easier this year than maybe a couple of years ago, but I think we’re still under the recession so my advice would be to network as much as you can in many possible ways,” Christensen said. “Let people know that you are coming out of school and you’re job searching, or going to job fairs and different kinds of events.”

Christensen, a graduate of Kenyon College, advised students who are actually sophomores and juniors in college, to start looking for those job opportunities now.

After college, Christensen went right into education and teaching. By December of her senior year she knew what she wanted to do and the field she wanted to venture into.

“I wouldn’t even wait until the end of your senior year to start looking, it’s almost too late then,” Christensen said. “But when I graduated from graduate school I didn’t have a job lined up and I tried really hard, I had internships in the field I was interested in, I had networked a lot with people, I had done a lot of informational interviews.”

Christensen did a lot of talking to people when leaving graduate school, just to see if they could connect her with anybody and anything and then fell back on some previous experience by just looking for a job that she really wanted to do.

“Utilize your career centers at school and really meeting with them to make sure your résumé is good,” Christensen said. “I would suggest studying to go into the sciences and I would see if you can get into a healthcare field. They’re really good career ladders so once you kind of get your foot in the door, there’s a lot of times opportunities in the field with more education and more training to kind of move up in healthcare easier.”

Dominique Johnson can be reached at dominique.johnson@temple.edu.

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