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Many young people find the idea of choosing a career, let alone going to a job interview, intimidating. A charitable foundation and a human resources consulting group have joined forces to provide some practical advice.
"When people think of going to a job interview, it's a big, scary thing," says Jamie-Lee Kingi, a third-year design student at Unitec in Auckland.
She recently completed the day-long workshop "Dude, Where's My Job?" run by Grafton Consulting under the auspices of the First Foundation, a nationwide organisation which fosters future leaders from financially disadvantaged backgrounds through tertiary education.
"I learnt that an interview isn't as hard or difficult as you think it is and the interviewers are not big scary monsters," Kingi says.
Since Year 13 at Papakura High School, Kingi has been on a First Foundation scholarship. The course matched her with a sponsor, Television New Zealand, to fund her through her studies and provide paid holiday work-experience.
With another year to go in her Bachelor of Design, Kingi has graduated from the scholarship programme, but she took advantage of the workshop to help her pin down what she wants from her career.
"Before, I thought in an interview I should do what I could about making them like me. I learnt it was just as important for me to like the company as it was for them to like me. It taught me to ask myself the right questions about what I might do," she says.
And that is to work in interior design, an interest fostered by her work experience with TVNZ's production design department. Grafton Consulting Group's managing director Don Purdon says school-leavers are too young for advanced career thought. At that age they don't know enough about the job world to consider all the options.
So when choosing what to do for tertiary studies, he advises young people to go with the academic stream which they most enjoy, then consider career options when they have more experience.
"As many of us have found, even in our adult lives, we can take a lot of time stumbling around until we find the right career," Purdon says. "We may never take the time to sit down and work through what we are best suited for," he says.
"We go through a process of trial and error instead.
"Many careers have an element of serendipity about them. You are looking for something and you bump into someone."
Dude, Where's My Job? is designed to enable students to more quickly determine the best career track, "to give them a bit more control of the career process than is typically the case", Purdon says. It helps them work out what career they are suited for and teaches tools and techniques to find the right job and manage their longer-term career.
The topics include identifying transferable skills, work preferences and career values and drivers using career development and personality assessments. Writing CVs and preparing for interviews and psychometric testing is also covered.
Feedback from older people has commonly been "I wish I had had that when I was their age", Purdon says.
Some clients offer Dude, Where's My Job? to families of staff, while Grafton Consulting organises the workshop for First Foundation as a way of giving something back to the community.
The young people are invariably at different stages in their career process.
Some are refining or confirming where they are heading. "For others, it's like a kid in a candy store, opening up all sorts of possibilities. They leave with a process to help them whittle down the possibilities."
The First Foundation targets low decile schools in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch for its scholarship candidates, the foundation's scholarship manager Liz Wright says.
There are 69 students nationwide undergoing tertiary education with sponsors, mentors, paid holiday work-experience and the chance to go to the career workshop.
Typically, students are chosen for their academic skills, leadership abilities, community involvement, sport and cultural interests.
"The aim long term is for them to give back to their communities. Often, we find they are already doing that."
The career workshop empowers the students, Wright believes. "It gives them more self-belief and self-esteem ... and then they can pull together things for their CV that say fantastic things about them."
Dude, Where's My Job? gave Kingi insight into her personality, she says.
"If I know my likes and dislikes, I know what kind of job or what kind of company to go for."
