Dealing with Your Lack of Experience

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Congratulations on your graduation! After approximately four years of burying your nose in books and endless hours of sitting in front of a computer screen writing paper after paper in order to earn your much-coveted college degree, now what? It's time to get a job, but you wonder who will hire you. You feel like you have nothing going for you! You have few skills and little experience. You have nothing!

Wait a minute. Stop being so hard on yourself. That's not true. You may not have as much experience as older job candidates, but you haven't been sitting around doing nothing for the last few years. There were summer jobs, part-time jobs during the school year, and extracurricular activities. And let's not forget that you have something many other people don't have � that piece of paper that tells the world you are ready to get your first real job.

If you are wondering if earning that college degree was worth it, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics assures you that it was. An article published in the Occupational Outlook Quarterly states, "data consistently show that workers who have a bachelor's or graduate degree have higher earnings and lower unemployment than workers who have less education."

If someone would just give you a chance, you can prove yourself. Someone will give you a chance, but you must make potential employers look beyond the date on your final transcript. You must make them realize that you are much more than a twenty-one-year-old or twenty-two-year-old with a piece of paper emblazoned with the name of a college on it.