Read your way to graduate jobs

Unfortunately to a potential employer, you’re pretty green around the gills, not only in work terms but also in life as well. It’s not all bad news, employers do like the idea of somebody fresh with enthusiasm who can be moulded into a role. Here lies your opportunity. If you can find employers who have created graduate jobs in search of that fresh enthusiastic ‘go getter‘, but then at interview surprise them with how knowledgeable and experienced you appear, it’s a sure way to nailing your first job offer.

The key is in being well researched, and in particular well read. You can create a high level of artificial experience through reading. You can read a lifetime of experiences in an autobiography in just a couple of days. Do this a few times over and all of a sudden you can benefit the effects of accelerated learning in terms of your own personal knowledge base.

As people, one of the most limiting features is our own perception. We each view life through our own individual lens, and this lens is made up of our collective experiences through life. There are many famous experiments such as the ‘old lady/young lady picture’ which consists of an image which can be seen as either an old lady or a young lady.

Old Lady/young lady

If you’ve not seen it before, take a good look, do you see and old lady or a young lady. (see the end of the article for an explanation) Experiments have shown that older people tend to see the old lady first and young people see the young. Different people, perceiving exactly the same image differently due to their own personal make up.

As time goes by, we all experience more and more, and these experiences, more often than not, add depth to our judgement and decision making capacity as we are able to draw on more and more previous similar scenarios with which to compute cause and effect for future events. My theory here is that you can generate huge advances in your perceived life and work experience through the accelerated learning of reading about other’s experience. In particular here, reading about the experiences of other in the field in which you are interested in, as well as general reading.

To cite a couple of highly influential books for me

Richard Branson - Loosing my Virginity.

A fascinating book detailing the peaks and troughs of Branson’s career. For the first time it made me realise that highly successful people are successful not through lady luck, or extraordinary talent (although it helps) but through vision, shear hard work and above resilience to the inevitable failures on the way to success. There are lots of messages throughout this book with real life examples which back them up which I still draw upon today years later.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey.

Probably the most influential book I have ever read for both business and life. It talks about the need to follow the seven habits to maintain a ‘balance’ in life. People often perceive highly effective people as workaholics with no work life balance. This book describes how success is not sustainable without balance.

For a regular article which will give you many examples of the ways of successful people, buy the Sunday Times and read the ‘How I made it’ section each week. This details a success story of some one who has ‘made it‘, usually from a standing start to a highly successful business. They are intrinsically interesting but I find that each article will leave you with at least one key learning point from their experience that you may not have picked up in life from your own experience.

At interviews for graduate jobs, as well as benefiting a much broader knowledge of life’s experiences and the likely ‘cause and effect’ scenarios you will have picked up from your many experts, the very fact that you are well read and have apparently researched extensively is itself a highly attractive trait to a graduate employer. It automatically carries connotations of a conscientious individual who will be thorough in the work place.

(Old lady young lady. The chin and the ear of the young lady are the nose and the eye of the old lady…the necklace of the young lady is the mouth of the old lady…keep looking :o) )

Good luck