The Ascendence Group

“Going to a career fair is like looking for a soulmate at a singles bar.” ~ Seth Godin

Seth’s writing is 100% brilliance. Today’s post is no exception…

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Career fairs…

are neither.

Of course they don’t exist to help you plan or execute a career. Most of the organizations with booths are bottom fishing, looking for enough willing and able employees to fill established gaps in their companies. This is hiring on the hoof, wholesale filling of average jobs with people trying to be average. Planning a career at a career fair is a little like looking for a soulmate at a singles’ bar.

And fair? Hardly. Because there are no average people, right? There are average jobs, certainly, average in that they require people to fit in, do what they’re told and follow the manual. I’ll grant you that those jobs need to get done, but I’m not sure they have to get done by you.

By the time a job opening hits the career fair, it’s a job you don’t want. And by the time a job seeker is walking down the aisles, standardized resume in hand, it might be too late for her to find a job that’s worthy of her.

Here’s to a new, better sort of career fair, one that’s selective, interactive, long-term and both career and fair.

Authored by Seth Godin.

When you make the jump from college to career, one thing becomes blatantly obvious: the skills that are vital to your success in the real world are not the skills you learned in school.

In fact, these “success skills” are so different that it actually makes you angry to think about what else you could have done with that $100,000 you spent on college – like taking that 12 month world tour you’ve always dreamed about.

Think about it…was Advanced English useful? No, not if you’re a copywriter. In fact, many writers have to be re-trained to write at an 8^th grade level. That’s right…write dumber so people can understand your message! How about Finance…was that useful? Maybe a bit, but it’s nothing you couldn’t have picked up after reading a few decent books. Computer classes? Hell no. You can learn much more from surfing the net and educating yourself than going to class. The truth is, knowledge you acquired in school is not very useful in the real world, at least not on a day-to-day basis.

I became acutely aware of this during my first job at Goldman Sachs. Nothing I studied for the prior 4 years was even remotely useful in that job. It made me wonder what the point of college was. But I digress…

You see, it wasn’t until after I started working that my real education began. As I looked around me, I started to see a knowledge gap – there was a big difference between what it took to be successful in school and what it took to be successful in the real world.

And as my career progressed from Goldman Sachs to a hedge fund, I became more and more convinced about the presence of this knowledge gap. It was inescapable – those who deleted their mental hard drives and forgot all about “getting an A” and instead focused on acquiring “real world” skills were promoted faster, got higher pay, and were happier at work.

As I transitioned from hedge fund analyst to entrepreneur I thought to myself, “How can students benefit from this insight? How can we fill this knowledge gap so that recent graduates can become more successful, earlier in their career?”

And so began the construction of TAG’s Mentorship Program …

TAG’s Mentorship Program is a course in Real World Insight (notice the similarity with the name of this blog?). Not only do students get matched with a professional in their dream company (yes, whatever company they are interested in working for), but they are meeting and discussing topics that are essential to career success. It’s basically an entire relationship designed to help students conquer the “Knowledge Gap” and become more successful professionals.

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Great chart porn via Fast Company. This pretty much sums up college – at least from what I remember.

The economics (below) confirm the theory that college is indeed a bubble.

There’s no easy way to put this, so I’m just going to go right out and say it:

Your college career center can’t help you.

It’s not that career center employees don’t want to help you. Most do. But the truth is, they can’t help you.

You see, college career centers operate within a very flawed system – a system so poorly designed that it makes the guy that built this gem look like a genius. And until the system is fixed – until key structural issues get resolved (which I explain in detail below) - your career center will continue to be unhelpful, offering mediocre services and delivering mediocre results.

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Q: What will colleges and drug companies soon have in common?

A: Regulatory reform that puts the consumer first.

As Obama so powerfully says, “Change is coming to America.” And higher education institutions across the U.S. should be paying serious attention.

Today, Louis Soares and the Center for American Progress released a groundbreaking white paper on higher education. The idea:

Put the Student first in College.

Make no mistake: This is not a small change. This is a fundamentally new approach to the higher education market – a market plagued by 4,900 different suppliers, each with their own agenda, mission and performance record. Soares writes: …