Salve Success: Career development tips to help with professional preparation

The Office of Career Development is offering weekly career tips to encourage all students to stay on top of their career planning as the semester moves ahead with Virtual Salve. We’ve got a couple more suggestions for things you may want to work on that will help you move forward in your professional preparation.

See our tips below, and as always please feel free to schedule an appointment with a career advisor through Handshake. We are happy to work with you remotely via phone or video.

Weekly Tips from Career Development

Tip #1: Take a career assessment

This week we are highlighting two career self-assessments designed to help you better understand your own natural strengths and interests and apply those in your career decision-making.

The first of which is AchieveWORKS, a brief personality type survey based on the Meyer’s Briggs that will help you better understand your personality type and how it influences career satisfaction in order to make informed decisions about your future. Click on the link above, go to Register a New Account, and use the following access key 4W8QV7V to take the assessment.

The second assessment we want to feature this week is O*Net’s Interest Profiler, based on the Strong Interest Inventory. This assessment will ask you to rate various work activities in order to narrow down what career fields might be a good fit for you based on your interests. Once you’ve taken the assessment, you’ll be able to explore careers that match your interests in the O*NET database which includes information on skills, abilities, work activities and interests associated with various occupations. This is a fantastic tool to explore career options and job outlook data.

After taking either of these assessments, we strongly recommend scheduling an appointment with a career advisor through Handshake to review your results and discuss how you might utilize that information in selecting a major and/or targeting a possible career path. Additionally, check out our other resources to help you explore majors and careers.

Tip #2: Send a thank you note

Now more than ever, it’s especially important to follow up with companies and organizations after interviews. Most hiring managers expect candidates to send a thank you note within 24 hours post-interview.

In a thoughtful thank you note, you can reaffirm your interest in the position, remind the employer of your qualifications, ask any additional questions you have, and/or highlight something you didn’t get a chance to discuss during the interview.

During your interview, make sure you get the names and email addresses of everyone you talk to so you can send each of them a personalized thank you. It is often helpful to take notes during your interview to capture key highlights or topics you discussed, and you may be able to include some of that information when writing your thank you notes.

Want someone to look it over before you send it? Email us at career@salve.edu, or schedule an appointment with one of our career advisors through  Handshake.

Each Thursday, SALVEtoday will provide tips for success as well as success stories of current students and alumni to encourage and uplift the University community during this time of remote living and learning. #salvesgotthis #salvesuccess