Having graduated from university it’s time to decide what’s next. It may be that you haven’t made up your mind yet and aren’t entirely sure what it is you want to spend the next few years doing or indeed where it will take you. So where do you start?

Devise a plan

Sit down and make a list of your best qualities, your strengths, your weaknesses, what you enjoy, what you don’t enjoy and what excites you the most. What skills and experience do you have? What gives you the greatest confidence – that one thing you can do really well. Once you have a list you need to bullet point it into positives and negatives. You should now be starting to see the things that tick the box for you and where your skills would be best suited. Work out the areas that you will be best suited to – sales & marketing, analytics, finance & accounting or perhaps customer service. For example if you don’t relish the thought of dealing with customers all day every day then you can discount sales and customer service. Perhaps you are happy to spend your day analysing data or computing accounts. Once you have narrowed it down to these choices you can use job engines to begin your search.

Start the job search

We are a long way from the days of sitting with your coffee circling the classifieds in a local paper and most jobs are now advertised and found online. Register with some of the job search engines for the jobs that you feel would suit you best. You should then receive daily updates as new jobs are advertised. You could also register with a recruitment agency although again most of this process is done online. The process involves registering your details and uploading your CV so make sure that this is up to date. You can find lots of useful information on how to write a CV on 10minuteswith.com – in fact you can find lots of useful information on all aspects of job hunting.

Prepare for interview

Once the interview invitations start to come in you will need to be prepared. Make sure you have a good interview attire – suit, shirt & tie, shiny shoes. Also make sure you keep a good diary. You don’t want to be booking yourself on one side of the city at 10am and then having to rush back over to the other side for 1pm. Work out travel times, distance between interviews, time to allow yourself to prepare for the next one. Interviews can be stressful enough without rushing around like a busy fool. Make sure you are prepared for questions you may be asked as well as preparing a list of your own questions to ask. There is a short window of opportunity for you to get across your personality, suitability for the job and also to ensure that you feel the job is right for you. Don’t forget – you are not the only person being interviewed – this is your choice as well so make sure you leave with ample information for you to make an informed decision.

Don’t give up

If at first…… don’t limit your options, make sure you apply for as many jobs as you can. If the first one is a train wreck move on and learn for it. Eventually you will get it right. Let’s be honest nothing worth having comes easy.