Strategies for Career Advancement, Part 1

Earning a degree is a foundational step in building your career, but landing a job can often seem like the more formidable challenge. There are a number of established strategies for seeking out and positioning yourself for jobs within your field, but in many cases the best jobs—and the most painless search processes—are found through advantageous networking opportunities.

Industry connections are invaluable. If you’ve been casually listing references on your resume without considering—or developing—the value of those references, you could be throwing away one of your most valuable assets as a job-seeker. In this three-part series, we will look at how references are an essential arsenal in your quest to find a job. The first installment of this series focuses on how soon-to-be and recent graduates can use informational interviews to open doors to their most coveted positions.

Savvy job-seeking skills will help you extract more value from your business management degree and open doors in your most coveted industries. To help remember the focus of these informational interviews, adopt as your mantra the acronym AIR, which stands for advice, information and referrals.

Establishing targets

Before any informational interviews can commence, you need to decide where your job search efforts are going to be applied. You probably already have a basic sense of your desired industry, so take time to flesh out your interests, whittle down broad targets and come up with some specific industries and businesses where you’d like to focus your energy.

Once you’ve refined your goals, you can source your current network of professionals to see who might be of help in opening doors to those targets.

Creating new connections

Contacting connections without an introduction isn’t recommended as a means of networking. You’re much more likely to get results by having current professional connections introduce you to new ones working in your target areas. LinkedIn is one example of how you can identify sought-after connections and use shared relationships to bridge the gap.

Once that connection has been made, you need to seek out an informational interview. But don’t inflate your expectations and expect to produce a job offer out of this. An informational interview isn’t the ultimate goal, but it’s a necessary and valuable step in that direction.

Making informational interviews worthwhile

If you aren’t careful, you might fail to capitalize on the true value of an informational interview. Contrary to what many professionals think, referrals aren’t the long-term goal of these interviews, Instead, the focus should be on exactly what the name implies: gaining valuable information and insight. Remember the acronym AIR? Advice, information and referrals are precisely what you should be seeking through an informational interview.

In this face-to-face meeting, you have the chance to pick a professional’s brain about their place of work and/or the industry at large. Find out how happy they are in their position, whether they are actively looking for new positions, and what they think of their company’s long-term prospects. Seek out advice that could be useful in increasing your appeal to that business, either by focusing on certain strengths or by presenting your background in other ways.

In the end, your meeting might gain you a valuable referral within the business that could increase your chances of getting noticed. Be mindful of this opportunity throughout your interactions, but understand that a referral is only a small step toward securing a job offer. And no matter how any given job application process goes, try to maintain those new connections for later on down the road—they could be an entry point to another job in the future, or they might simply serve as a shared connection that helps you further expand your professional network.