Callie Zwart (00:06):

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Work Like a Laker podcast. Today is our second intern takeover episode and I'm your host Callie Zwart. I am the adult and alumni marketing and social media intern here at Grand Valley Career Center.

Sofia Pratt (00:24):

Hi, I'm Sofia Pratt and I'm the writing and communications intern.

Shea Hannigan (00:29):

Hello, I'm Shea Hannigan, I'm the outreach and promotions intern.

Denys Zamaraiev (00:33):

I'm Denys, I'm statistics and data analytics intern.

Brody Zondervan (00:36):

And then I'm Brody. I'm the marketing and social media intern.

Callie Zwart (00:40):

And we're excited to jump into our topic today, that a lot of students can probably relate to. With social media everywhere, it's really easy to just start forming ideas based on careers, based on what you see online when in reality it's just a bunch of highlight reels. Today we're going to be talking about how to tell what's real, what's exaggerated, and steps students should take before choosing their major or future career path.

Denys Zamaraiev (01:08):

Yeah, so no one really posts the stressful parts. The influencers don't like to talk about the 30 daily boring emails. They have to respond to, the long meetings, the deadlines, staying late to finish work, and they only really show the good parts of their job. So honestly, every single job has stuff that's like repetitive or stressful. There isn't really a career where you just have to enjoy every moment of your day. It kind of doesn't exist in this world. Especially students. It's really choose, it's really easy to choose something that's trending because everybody says it pays really good. It's easy to do. You get to do a lot of stuff outside of work, but then in a year of two you just start hating it because nobody talks about the boring parts about it. So instead of chasing what looks cool or trendy, it probably makes sense to try and find something that you enjoy personally and then make it your own dream job instead of following trends.

Callie Zwart (02:12):

Yeah, and to go off that thought, I've also noticed a trend going on right now in social media with the day in the life working a nine to five. These videos tend to only show the exciting parts and leave out the not so exciting aspects of the job. More specifically, something we've seen in our office is students choosing sonography because they hear all of the positives without always realizing how much work and commitment goes into it.

Denys Zamaraiev (02:39):

Yeah, I also have an example. A lot of people really tend to choose finance or tech because everybody says it pays well, it's a really good field to be in, but they really start to close their eyes on the actual interests and then they end up not enjoying what they actually do. I have a friend of mine who really enjoys sports, but he went into finance because everybody was saying that you need to go into finance to be successful, and now he's looking into ways how he can change his career.

Callie Zwart (03:08):

I think all of us can probably think of a career we've seen online or heard about that was really romanticized, sounded great in theory, but once you take a closer look it just really wasn't the right fit for your skills, interests, or long-term goals even.

Brody Zondervan (03:23):

Yeah, so me personally, I'm actually going into more of a sales role and I've seen a lot of people post like, "Hey, I'm in this sales role for this specific company. This is my role, this is my job. I work 20 hours a week and then I spend the rest of the week on a golf course".

Brody Zondervan (03:42):

And like thinking about it, yeah, that sounds awesome, but if you really think about it, like these guys have put in years they've been in, they've built up client lists. They aren't just fresh out of college, only working 20 hours a week and playing golf the rest of the time. These are guys who put in real hard work, but of course they're not going to go and show all that hard work because that's not interesting on social media. They're going to show the freedom that they have through their role, the hours of golf.

Brody Zondervan (04:10):

They play all the free time and the working in different environments, the travel and stuff like that. But there was one other sales guy that I actually really appreciated where he does talk about like the actual grind he puts into and he bases his content around that. I think that is really good because it's putting out like this is my role, this is some work and opportunities that you have to share, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Like there are some hours of hard work, there are like late nights stressful moments, and that's the reality. So I think some people do do do a good job of like posting their whole, this is actually what I do outside of the people who only show the highlights like you guys are talking about.

Shea Hannigan (04:57):

So with all that being said, after seeing a job online, it's really important to research it on your own time and do a deep dive because almost everything on social media is a highlight reel as we've said, and it's important to just remember that everyone is different with different skills and abilities. Just because a career is the best fit for someone else doesn't mean it will necessarily be the best fit for you. That's why it's so important to research the careers you see on social media before fully committing to anything. Make sure you like and align with the career and it's not just the aesthetic that you're falling for. With that being said, the career center does offer multiple resources on our website that can help with the career deep dive. One of the first ones is 'Career Guides by Major' and 'What Can I Do With This Major?'.

Shea Hannigan (05:37):

These resources can help to understand what certain majors connect with certain careers, which can help you to understand the kind of path that you would like to take. You can also go deeper and research the majors through GVSU's website to know the specific classes that are required. There's also ONet, this resource provides employment data such as salaries and job forecasts for different industries and careers. There's also 'Career One Stop'; This resource describes skills and job duties for multiple occupations and employment outlooks in regional and national context. There's also the 'Occupational Outlook handbook'; Through this you can research careers and learn about current employment trends and salary data. Lastly, if you have any career related questions or concerns or just want to talk through your career decision making process, schedule an appointment with the career advisor through Handshake.

Brody Zondervan (06:21):

Yeah, so Grand Valley has a ton of different resources that people can use, either students or alumni that they can take full advantage of searching for a career that's right for them. But I know not a lot of people, especially if you're listening to this and don't go to Grand Valley or you're just don't have ease of access to some of the things that we offer. There are a lot of different tools and resources that you can use outside of Grand Valley as well. Now Sofia and I had the opportunity to be part of a strengths and conditioning training through the Career Center where we got to take certain quizzes and learn about our personality types. The reason why I thought this was like super interesting was because at the very end, after going through all of our personality types, everyone who was part of like the training that went through it, we all shared like what our top strengths and skills were; And surprisingly enough, all of the strengths and skills not only fit within our roles at the career center, but also fit into like the major and career paths that we were choosing down the line. For instance, I'm a social media marketing sales like student and my top traits were communication and extroversion and creativity and getting out and like doing stuff like that. Like Sofia, I don't know if you remember your top personality traits.

Sofia Pratt (07:46):

Yeah, I do remember. So I'm a writing major and my current position is writing and, and my career goal is all I have to do with writing. And my top strengths were a lot of empathy and relationship building, like people building ones, which does make sense because if you're familiar with writing, you know how important an audience is and knowing your audience. And so it seems that my strengths rely a lot in knowing an audience and I definitely bring that into writing. So knowing that and figuring it out during the strengths training I thought was really valuable.

Denys Zamaraiev (08:15):

Yeah, also me being part of the tennis team, we've taken this assessment and surprisingly enough my number one strengths was analytical and number two was responsibility, which really relates to what my position here is and also to my major, which is statistics.

Brody Zondervan (08:35):

Yeah. So if anyone's like actually curious about, "I'm struggling to figure out like what kind of career I want to go into, what kind of path to go down". This isn't exactly like this is going to tell you the answer of what to pick, but it's definitely a great place to start; If you really truly understand like your personality, your characteristics and stuff like that should really give you a good kind of path to start down a direction, of like, these might be some cool areas to check out these some areas and if you end up checking out those areas and they don't work out, then that's okay too. It just gives you a sense of where to start. I know there are a ton of different resources like PathwayU, they have a free kind of off brandish, like if you're looking for a free, very basic personality test, that's a really great resource.

Brody Zondervan (09:29):

Another huge personality test that was actually really popular for a while was like the Myers-Briggs personality test and just kind of knowing that and not really starting to understand like yourself and your interests and stuff like that. It's all very important. I actually found a resource on Indeed. So if those of you that don't know Indeed is a platform that you can use to search for jobs, like they list job posting and stuff like that, they actually recognize the importance of realizing your personality traits. And they posted this and they posted this website that linked the big five personality traits and how it can relate to your career of choice. I thought that was really interesting because this is not the first time I've found out or heard about these big five personality traits of a lot of the management courses; Even some of the sales courses I've taken, we have learned about these big five personality traits.

Brody Zondervan (10:27):

So these five are agreeableness, neuroticism's, openness, conscientiousness and extroversion. So of course those aren't the only big personality traits, but knowing like in that list where you fit even that of itself is a great place to start and it gives you kind of a sense of direction of what to look and all these resources I've looking at that talked about personality traits and knowing that they said that aligning your personality with your career actually greatly helps with job satisfaction, motivation and engagement, natural aptitude. So your skills and your talents in your job work-life balance and long-term commitment. Now imagine with me you're a really creative person. You like to go out, you like to do all these things, you hate numbers and you heard online- because you heard it was a really cool thing- that all these people are going into a cool trend that finance and accounting that is like the go-to job.

Brody Zondervan (11:29):

That's where you're going to find the most success. Me as a creative knowing if I got into that job I would hate every single day. Yes, great money, but I'm not going to find any job satisfaction in that. So why would I even attempt to try and look for something in that area? So like I said, because I know my personality traits, my characters and stuff like that; I know maybe the numbers, the data, the analytics, just the math and the science, that's not really my path that I'm going to go down and look for because why would ? I'm not going to find as much satisfaction in that. So that eliminates some things and makes it narrows down my career choice options, which is very helpful. Another thing is a lot of the day-to-day things that you do in your job, a lot of things is actually stuff you can learn through your job.

Brody Zondervan (12:24):

It's the important things that you bring in. So actually your soft skills that actually really makes a difference. So if you are not the most organized or anything like that, yeah, you can learn how to organize different cells and data on computers and stuff, but you can learn that, but it's not going to be like, you're not going to be the best person for that role. But if you are organized and don't really know any software of like how to file things excel or anything like that, that's all stuff that you can learn in your job. Employers are much more likely to hire you because based off your organizational ability than they are based off your aptitude of Excel because they know you can learn that.

Callie Zwart (13:09):

Yeah, and to go off that, I would say, especially when it comes to being outgoing or introverted, like Brody here is a very extroverted human being. So sales and marketing and going out and talking to different people is a big strength for him. Whereas someone more introverted, it's not as easy to learn how to walk up to people and have conversations as it is, like you said, the technical skills like Excel.

Brody Zondervan (13:36):

Yeah. And that ranges beyond, I know were, I'm a business major so I'm only really going to talk about the business major stuff, but that aligns with really any field. So your sciences, your health, anything like that, the core soft strengths that you have are going to give you a leg up in whatever position you pick.

Sofia Pratt (13:55):

I can speak for the creative careers and creative majors as a writing major, that creativity and how you think through things is going to be so much more important than format or specific technical skills. It's really going to be about knowing your personality is going to help you a lot. So another great way to find out if the job you're interested in is going to be actually the job for you is to see how that job is looking in real life. The best way to see that is to meet with people and to hear from people who actually have that job and can give you real examples of how they got that job, how they feel about that job, everything like that. So the two best ways to find these people and to learn more are informational interviews and job shadowing. So informational interviews, those are formal or informal discussions with the professional who works in that job or field that interests you.

Sofia Pratt (14:42):

So they're going to have great insight at what it's really like in that field, how they got in that field. And you can hear it straight from them. So you can have, it's a natural conversation. You can ask follow up questions. It's also cementing a connection in that field, which is always helpful. So now when you're in that field, you have someone you can turn to, someone that can help you, a mentor, which yeah, I mean that's always great job shadowing. That's when you're able to observe a professional as they're working. So again, that's a really great way to gain some firsthand experience without having or committing to the job. But you can see it all go down. You can see what the day-to-day life looks like and you decide if you can actually see yourself in that job. So with informational interviews and job shadowing, it's not something you can really apply for.

Sofia Pratt (15:21):

So to really get these, I mean it depends on your department, but to get these opportunities, you have to make connections and reach out to these connections and yeah, making connections are easier said than done, but there are some things you can do and it is not as hard as it seems. The first thing, connections in person career fairs, you can meet with your professor, any guest speakers in your classes, anyone that you come across that has a job you're interested in is an industry, then just reach out. And then also making connections online. So then on LinkedIn or Handshake platforms like that, if you're interested in a specific job or industry, you can go to that page and you can look through alumni, you can look through people who you might know, who might be mutual connections, who might know of somebody who you know, who knows somebody else. I mean you can really find just a thread of connection and reach out with that. From what I've seen and what I've heard, what I've witnessed people love being reached out to for advice. So even though it can be really intimidating to reach out, it really can work. And if it doesn't work, the worst thing that happens is you're ignored, which really isn't that bad. I mean, on the other side of the spectrum, you could get a really great opportunity.

Denys Zamaraiev (16:27):

Yeah. Another thing I know personally that I've been advised by our advisors is to use the platform called RAIN Careers. I'm not aware if it's available for everybody or just students at GVSU, I would assume everybody. So, there's a really nice feature on this platform where when you're applying to jobs when you see a job posting on it, it's automatically going to show you the connections on LinkedIn of people who have gone to the same school as you, and then you can simply do everything from one platform. You see a job posting, you can click on people who already work there, connect to them, reach out, and then it also stores all of that information in your account and then you can go back and see if you've connected to some people to get some insight or just get whichever information you're looking for.

Brody Zondervan (17:23):

I know for me personally, I reached out when I was in my search for an internship. I reached out to a couple people on LinkedIn and they were always very down to go grab coffee. I know 'coffee chats', that's a really kind of buzzword you hear, but it's true. It actually is very helpful, and in those coffee chats, like a couple of them even said like the internship I got, they said, look, you reaching out to me, that actually like separated you from a lot of the other like people who applied. So like you reaching out, wanting to go grab coffee, wanting to chat, that actually put you way ahead of the competition. But there are also some other people that I met with coffee and when I told them to tell me a little bit about like their day-to-day, like what they do at work, I really wasn't into it.

Brody Zondervan (18:18):

So it helped save a lot of time on the application process, the just reaching out for interviews and stuff like that because of course I'm not going to apply or interview with a company that I'm personally not interested in. So even meeting and just having a simple conversation, even if you're not trying to set up a interview the next day, even if it's just to gain a little more information, that goes a long way both from looking impressive to your possible future employer, but also in the time saving aspect of weeding out any of any companies or jobs that you realize, "hey, I might not be the best fit for this" or "I might not enjoy it".

Sofia Pratt (19:01):

Yeah. So for anyone that wants to learn more about what we've been talking about, I would recommend two Work Like a Laker podcast episodes. There's "How and why to do an informational interview" and "How to Network when you have no Network". So both are going to be linked in the show notes. There's also a page on the Career Center website that has a lot more information and goes into depth on informational interviews and job shadowing. It even involves things like messaging templates. So when you're reaching out, it has a really great template for you to fill in the blanks without the added stress of creating a message from scratch. So if you want to check that out, that page will be linked as well. Then I'd also recommend another great source being career advisors. They might have connections where companies that they can recommend to you if you're interested in a certain job or field and you're not sure where to start.

Sofia Pratt (19:45):

They can also help you when creating those messages for reaching out or following up with an employer and it can be tailored to the exact position you're looking for. So great sources for you to check out. Yeah, I think hopefully these will serve as a great way for you to get a good idea of the job without going through and getting the job. Then once you have all this information and experience, you can make the decision of whether this job is for you and you'll also be on a great path to actually getting the job.

Callie Zwart (20:12):

Okay. With all of this being said, we also want to talk about how we kind of bashed on influencers earlier and how they tend to romanticize their lives. Now more than ever, influencer role is becoming more and more popular for just anyone in their day-to-day life. However, that also comes with a lot of added commitment and work that might not be exactly what you're envisioning.

Brody Zondervan (20:39):

Yeah, just like we talked about earlier of people who are in, who aren't necessarily influencers, but they still post about their day-to-day jobs. They're going to post about the highlight reel of their jobs like we talked about earlier. Influencers, they're going to do the exact same thing. It's not waking up and immediately getting a hundred thousand followers like the day you start, there's a grind, if you now that more than ever, actually a lot of influencers are becoming more and more transparent about this because they know that it took them a lot of hard work, a lot of dedication, a lot of like just putting they're all into this job in order to get be successful. So like Callie said, especially now with the growth of like everyone has a cell phone, everyone's on social media, being an influencer is not a crazy dream job.

Brody Zondervan (21:34):

That's actually a very attainable job to have. You just have to realize that just like every other job that we talked about, there is a grind to it there. Of course there are good days, there are days where you have a lot of followers and a lot of likes, but there are also other days where maybe you just feel like you want to throw in the towel and give up. That is the reality of literally every single job that's out there. You just don't want to walk into this having a false expectation of like what you're going to get out of this. Because yeah, you're not going to be famous from day one, just like you're not going to be a manager of a company day one, you got to work your way up. You got to put in that hard work and all those hours.

Shea Hannigan (22:19):

Yeah, and I feel like nowadays influencers and being an influencer is the most romanticized career because people just think that you pick up a camera and you film your day, but they don't know, like Brody said, you're not going to post a video and now have a life salary and brand, brand deals and managers and things like that. So I just definitely think that goes to show that every career has a backstory and a grind and takes time. You won't just wake up with a career.

Callie Zwart (22:57):

Yeah, and to go off that, influencers are pretty much just entrepreneurs. They have their own business, they're marketing their own business, they're selling their own business. A lot goes into that behind the scenes than just posting a few videos. They're selling their product, which is maybe their videos, maybe it's a actual brand deal product that they're trying to sell to make money from.

Brody Zondervan (23:21):

I think that's a great point because you hear like all these entrepreneurs and they're like, yeah, it took me 27 tries to get this business model right and that's how I found success. Same thing actually goes in for influencers. Some of the big names, especially like the streamers, the YouTubers and stuff that are out now, if you talk to them, they said, yeah, I've been doing this for 15, 20 years and there's a reason you've just heard of me in the last two years because I still was posting even at zero likes. I was still posting even at zero followers. I just had a passion for it. I wasn't in it for the money, I wasn't in it for the fame. I truly had the passion for it and you need to have that same mindset to whatever job you're going into.

Callie Zwart (24:08):

That concludes today's episode of the Work Like a Laker Podcast. Thank you guys so much for listening! Make sure to check out those links that we talked about down below and catch us on the next one.