May 4th, 2022 | by Ralph Jagodka
7 Questions to Help Guide Students Toward Their First—or Next—Job Opportunity
Ask any higher education instructor what questions they most commonly get from their students, and they’ll tell you that asks around careers and jobs top the list. Students want to know what types of positions they can get after graduation, and they expect faculty input to help steer them in the right direction. But as knowledgeable as we may be about the subjects we teach, we may not feel as prepared to provide career and job guidance to our students.
While there are valuable career services and resources on campus, I’ve found that most of my students do not take full advantage of them. Students say this career information is too overwhelming and confusing—accordingly, they opt out of devoting time or energy to this exploratory process. After seeing this scenario play out numerous times, I decided to do something about it.
First, I observed that no matter their starting point—whether they were looking for their first job or they were changing careers—my students wanted the same things: job data (salary, number of job openings, etc.); details on how to prepare for their career (what work-related duties, knowledge, and skills are required); and additional career-specific information from useful, reputable, and up-to-date websites (résumé guidance and networking techniques, for example).
Then, to better understand my students’ perspective, I began my own quest for free and easy-to-use online resources that provide this data and information. I discovered many great ones, but each delivered only a piece of the puzzle. For students to get all the information they were looking for, they’d have to spend time organizing their efforts and visiting multiple sources. And I suspected my students would find this work overwhelming.
So I decided to build my own online resources—each self-contained on a single webpage—to help guide students to the career information they were seeking and to keep the process simple and intuitive. I did as such, and have made these resources free and open to any educators and students to use.
Here I’ll share the guiding questions I used to build these resources, based on years of experience and feedback from students. I’ll also share an exercise that I weave into my teaching to better connect what we’re doing in the classroom to possible career opportunities.
Navigating Career Discussions with Students: 7 Guiding Questions
Since I often start class discussions by posing questions, I began my work by documenting the seven questions I’ve found helpful in initiating conversations with students regarding careers and jobs.
For each of the questions, I then created a webpage that offers focused advice and support, often through a guided step-by-step process. These career-specific pages utilize proprietary search algorithms I developed that interface directly with Google search query data that is updated in real time. I’ve offered links to those webpages here.
- Are you curious to know more about jobs related to your discipline or major?
This webpage allows students to select from a list of more than 100 college disciplines or academic majors. Each discipline page then links to specific job data (number of openings in that field, median annual salary, educational requirements, etc.) and guides students on how to dive more deeply into that particular field of interest. - Would you like to explore careers that you qualify for based on your current or planned level of academic achievement?
This webpage offers job searching based on degree levels, so students can clearly see what kinds of careers they might qualify for academically. Each level offers detailed job resources and information. - Would you like to explore new career ideas?
This webpage helps students discover careers they might never have considered by browsing occupational categories, from general to specific. - Are you interested in working remotely?
This webpage takes students through six steps to identify and find job listings for remote or work-from-home jobs. - Do you already know the job title or career you’d like to pursue and just want to learn more?
If students already have a good idea about the kind of career they seek, this webpage lets them search through 77,000 specific job titles and guides them to role-specific data, job listings, and career preparation resources. - Are you interested in seeing active job listings with no other clutter?
This webpage helps students who only want to see active job listings without any career preparation resources. Perhaps they are already working and simply seek related opportunities. This tool provides one step to search and find active job openings based on educational qualifications, experience required, or keyword(s) entered. - Would you like ongoing career and job assistance?
I also encourage students to use our college’s career resources and services in addition to these online tools. I created a webpage that briefly describes and links to our school’s numerous resources; it’s useful to have all these links in one place. You can easily modify this information to include resources and services specific to your college or university.
With these web tools, I felt I could provide a comprehensive starting point when students contact me for job and career help. Yet I quickly realized that, since these pages are so full of information, simply sending these links to my students would not be enough. I needed to allow space within my courses for my students to engage in more guided career exploration using these tools. Here’s how I did that.
Making Time for Career Exploration During Class
To give students the space to investigate their job options and interests, I created a career exploration assignment for my classes. In my Small Business Management classes, for example, I have students go to the discipline-specific management career page. They are then required to follow the page’s four-step process and, at each step, report their findings and what they learned.
I’ve found student feedback on this career exercise to be very positive. Several confided that, prior to completing the assignment, they had not given their career much thought. But after exploring career options, they were more excited about attending class and trying to build skills that related to their desired career.
Here is a sampling of some specific comments from my students:
- “I know more about my dream job, which is the supply chain manager, and now I am very clear how and where I can improve myself to become one.”
- “So helpful. It actually gave me a better understanding of what it takes to get the desired jobs we want, and oftentimes have no clue on where to start.”
- “This type of preparation is what can expand the knowledge of the workforce for the future.”
I’ve made these career resources available to all so it is easy for other educators to use them to create a career preparation activity or assignment for their classes as well. My advice is to simply guide your students to the webpage that corresponds to your discipline. Have them follow the step-by-step process specific to the careers they find and report on what they learn from each section. This will help them explore career opportunities in your discipline more fully and allow for more meaningful career-related dialogue in your classroom. (If your discipline is not listed on the page, please email me at rjagodka@mtsac.edu and I will create a page specific to your major.)
Connecting with Students Through Meaningful Career Discussions
Creating and sharing these career resources has changed the way I teach and communicate with my students for the better. After completing the aforementioned career exploration assignment, many of my students converse more freely with me about potential career and job issues—I’m grateful for that. My hope is you will also find these resources to be a meaningful way to spark conversations with your own students—no matter your discipline or experience with job searching and preparation.