It's almost Halloween! Be a Super Hero in your next interview!

In honor of Halloween, we've tied interviewing to super heroes. Be a Super Hero in Interviews: AN INFOGRAPHIC. Trick or Treat! This one's not a trick!

Cook Counseling Center - To Time Management Strategies and Beyond

In the blink of an eye, we're already over halfway through the semester.  With a little over a month left to go, we're getting to that dreadfully busy time - end of the semester projects.

Maybe you've known the assignment since day one, or maybe you're just starting to hear about it for the first time.  Chances are that you're at the point where you're deciding if it's worth beginning any of those projects now or if you'll wait until you finish just one more mission or side quest in that game you've been playing.  Or two more.  Oh, but this next one shouldn't take too long...

By this point, you probably have an idea of how well you've been able to manage your time.  For those of you with time management troubles and are looking for some help, I've got some good news for you.

Meet Virginia Tech's Cook Counseling Center.  While most may know that Cook Counseling Center is where students can go for psychiatric care and counseling, the center also has a number of other services to provide.  Not only do they have various seminars and programs
for students looking for some extra help with their academics, but they have some great online resources on their site.

Right now we're going to focus on their time management strategies.  If you have trouble with procrastination and time management, you are definitely not alone.  This issue is so prominent among students, Cook Counseling Center has a whole page dedicated to strategies to help you.

Their time management strategies page gives step-by-step instructions on great ways to both schedule your time and keep yourself from getting distracted from you work.  There's even a small quiz to "grade" how effectively you use your time.

Of course, every person has their own way of working.  If you find that the strategies and suggestions explained on their website don't work for you, Cook Counseling Center is always welcoming if you want to contact them directly.

And don't forget- there are plenty of other great opportunities to be found on their website.  From concentration help, to note taking, to improving test performance, you have a lot to gain by taking a few minutes to check their website out.

Good luck with your end of the semester projects.  I promise your game will still be there when you're done.

It’s Columbus Day: Do your own exploring of your career options

As course request for Spring 2014 approaches, some of you may be wondering if you are in the right major. If you are questioning your choice, taking steps to do some self and career exploration can help. And after all, today is Columbus Day, a perfect time for you to set sail exploring your career options.

Explore YOURSELF

There are a number of ways you can do some exploring of yourself. See these prior blog posts for information on self-assessment tools and on finding your major out of chaos.

To get started with self exploration, call 540-231-6241 and make an appointment with one of our career advisors.

Explore CAREERS

Here are 7 recommended “ports of call” as you map your voyage to research careers:

NEW!!! CandidCareer.com: Click on CandidCareer via the Career Services web site. This site has over 3700 videos on careers. You can search for careers, view Popular Tags, click on Explore where people talk about different aspects of their jobs or check out their Channels where you can research different industries.

VT Post Grad Report: If you are wondering what VT graduates do after they finish their bachelor’s degrees in a particular major, this is the site for you. In this report, you can see where graduates went to work including job titles, employers and locations or where they pursued an advanced degree where schools, degrees and locations are shared.  And, you can see trends where more than 5 years’ worth of data is available.

What can I do with a major sites: similar to our report mentioned above, many other career centers have great data that we have linked to here. My favorite sites that we are linked to include UT-Knoxville, UNCW, University of Delaware and Florida State University. On these sites you can see popular job titles by major, key skills you develop in a major, typical employers and links to places to go for more information.

Wetfeet.com: A publisher of many career books, Wetfeet’s site has 2 key resources that are really helpful for career exploration: over 25 Industry Profiles and 40 different Careers. Want to know more about Sports and Entertainment or Advertising and PR? How about Internet and New Media or Computer Hardware of Software? They have industry profiles for all of those and more.

MyPlan.com: If you click on Careers in MyPlan.com, you can search for detailed information about careers in which you are interested. Almost 500 of the careers in MyPlan have short video clips you can watch as well. And check out their Top Ten Lists that are linked on the Careers Page. Come see us if you want to do the Assessments in MyPlan – you can do them for FREE if you visit us first.

ONET: I really like ONET because when you look up an occupation, you can see if the skills, values and interests you learned about in your MyPlan self-assessment fit any of those for a career you are considering. You can also look for jobs that have a Bright Outlook, relate to the Green Economy, or a STEM Discipline under Find Occupations.

Visit our career library: We still have 100’s of books about different careers in our Career Resource Center. We are open 8 – 5, M-F, where you can read our books, but you can also check out most of our books. And, you can see if we have a book on a particular career using our online catalog, Library Thing. Let us know if we don’t have a book you think we should have. We are always looking for suggestions.

Meet with our Captains of Careers

Still feel like a sinking ship after visiting these ports of call as you decide your career direction? Make your final port of call Career Services where you can meet with one of our experienced Captains of Careers aka career advisors. Call 540-231-6241 to make an appointment.

Start the journey to your career on this day we celebrate Columbus’ voyage!

Feelin' the "California Love?" 5 Ways to Find a Job in CA (or wherever you want to be)

California Love - Does 2Pac's song have you itchin' to move to sunny California? If you plan to leave these Southwest Virginia mountains and go work out West, Career Services can help you reach your destination, wherever it may be. These five resources should have you feelin' the California Love by your graduation.

1. With Career Shift, you can target your job search for exactly what you are seeking exactly where you want to be. For example, in a recent search, I found 64 marketing jobs at one company, Google, in California. You can also use this resource to find contacts. Using the same example, I found over 1500 contacts for Google in the Golden State.

2. Going Global has over 40 US City Guides, where the CA lover could tap into four guides for Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. Each of these city guides provides information on top employers, professional and social networking groups, job listing resources, and a city overview. If you are an international student, each city guide also provides a list of H1B employers that is pulled from data provided by the US Department of Labor. Going Global also has a database called H1B Plus, which is a helpful resource for international students seeking to stay in the US to work.

3. In LinkedIn, if you click on Network on the menu bar, you can then access Find Alumni, to look for alumni by location, employer or function. As a Pamplin graduate, I found 188 alums in the San Francisco Bay area and 135 in the Los Angeles area. Going along with the example in #1 above, I also found 7 alums who work for Google and 776 alums in marketing. Hokies love helping Hokies, so this is a great tool to use.

4. Another way to reach out to alumni is through Alumni Chapters where these groups of alumni exist all over the world. Some chapters have their own career fairs, and most have regularly scheduled networking events. In CA, there are 5 chapters. You can't hope for a better person to help you with your job search than another Hokie.

5. Visit career center web sites at colleges or universities in CA or near a location where you want to live. Also be sure to visit the web site for a major similar to your major at those schools as well. I visited UC-Berkeley's site and found 5 top job listings mentioned for each week. Even though I couldn't get into their Callisto site like our Hokies4Hire site to get more specific information about those jobs, I could search for a job that was mentioned on a company's web site.

Using these tools should help you get to California by graduation with a job nailed down, ready to feel the "California Love." What questions do you still have about finding a job in a specific location? Share your questions with us, or make an appointment with a Career Advisor by calling 540-231-6241.