Even a Bad Job in College May Be a Game Changer

Having a job in college can be of benefit to you when you are searching for employment after college graduation.  

If you advance in the job, it shows leadership.  Also, if the job has management aspects, these skills can be transferable to other management jobs.  This is something an employer knows about and often looks for because the best use of his or her money is to have someone else pay for parts of your training and then for your employer to use the skills you have acquired from this.

Another thing having a job in school shows is that you can multi-task.  If you can work a job and do school, your employer knows that you are capable of handling more than one assignment at a time. 

This also emphasizes to an employer that you can handle real job pressure.  Anyone who has been to school and then went into the market place can tell you that the pressures of school are not the same as that of a job no matter how difficult college pressures are.  Just as some jobs have worries that follow you home, or stay at the job and end when the shop closes up; the stress of college is different too.

College stress can almost seem surreal when compared to job stress.   Now let me add though that this doesn’t make the stress any less serious or life changing; especially with failure.  A vampire story is surreal too, but very deadly if you are a character trapped in the story.

Now at the personal level, a benefit for you in having a job while in college is the confidence having had that job gives you, more so if there were increasing responsibilities involved over time.  (One reason staying at the same job helps;  seniority for promotions and it shows loyalty).  In fact, though, after graduation, the job for which you will be hired will morph as you get more skilled and the tasks you assume will grow in importance; the early training you received will be valuable indeed because it will be the foundational platform that you build your work character on.

Finally, in life you never know what it is that will give you the edge.   We may never know what exactly it is that we do that puts us over the top and gets us hired.  But the job you work in college could very well come into play. 

You may manage a sporting goods store and the accounting company you apply for will have a huge customer that is a sporting goods chain.  Perhaps you were a waitress or waiter and the organization you apply to manage does a lot of work with restaurants.  

The irony is sometimes the reverse of all this is true too.

Gene Kelly, a famous actor and dancer earned an accounting degree before show business.  He was once asked if he ever regretted getting the degree because it had kept him from entering the world of Hollywood earlier. He said, no because on the other hand, no one ever cheated him out of money either because of his degree.