Are the students coming out of universities, colleges and trade schools really ready to find a job?  I’m finding a wide array of readiness among the institutions I’m meeting with lately measured by these schools’ career services initiatives.  They run the gamut from offering traditional placement services to offering career coaching within their highly evolved career planning & development departments.  As I meet with some of Michigan’s most prominent schools, I reflect back to my college placement experience.

It was 26 years ago when I first stepped into my university’s placement office. (Yikes!) And I’ll bet it was pretty representative of the placement offices found in other colleges during the 80’s. Our placement office was staffed by students who, like me, wanted to get some experience in their chosen field (probably personnel.)  These “staffers’” effectiveness was measured by their ability to point student job seekers in the direction of the right book of job postings for their particular major.  That’s right, in the 80’s, job openings were typed onto a standard posting form, inserted into a plastic page protector and bound in a 3-inch three-ring binder.  These binders were updated periodically and available for students to peruse during office hours.  To find a job during these times, you needed persistence, a little patience and a lot of luck, since the unemployment rate here in Michigan at the time was over 10%.

Beyond offering students the opportunity to do what I call “passive” searching – that is, offering them the chance to post for jobs that hundreds of other students were vying for, the placement office would periodically bring in companies that wanted to hire for a specific group of positions. For instance, Pepsi and Coke might be looking for marketing and sales trainees, Ford and Chrysler for engineers, and once, GM even sent a representative to interview students for personnel and purchasing.  I remember signing up to meet with that GM rep, and being granted a 15-minute interview.  I showed up inappropriately dressed and ill-prepared for the interviewer’s questions.  I didn’t get the job. But then, I lacked capability in the job search arena.

Back in the 1980’s, there wasn’t much focus on job search skills or if there was, I guess I missed that memo.  I, like many other students, didn’t see the importance of knowing how to land a job.  My parents taught me to show up on time, dress presentably and be honest about what I had done in the past.  (My parents, though, were blue collar workers who were unfamiliar with the rules of engagement in corporate America.)   My teachers taught me whatever they knew to be important – and that was normally driven by the subject matter they were teaching.  So students in the 80’s were less in tuned with HOW they got a job than IF they got a job.

Sound familiar?  Fast forward to 2009.  Today, we are at double digit unemployment.  The jobseekers who haven’t looked for a job since the 80’s are probably more tuned in to IF they get a job than HOW they get a job.  But so much has changed in the last 20 years.  It’s a whole new game.  And flipping through the page-protected binders of the job posting books is a thing of the past.  Rebranding “you” and taking “you, the product” to your network either online or in person is the new game.  Are you ready to play?