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Accomplish September 7, 2017
There are ways you can stay competitive with other experienced candidates.
Photo by Pressmaste via ShutterstockIf you’re wondering how to get a job with no experience as a teenager or a recent graduate, look no further. We know things are tough in the current job market. College tuition rises about $50 every week, and courses are getting so hard it’s almost impossible to get long-term employment experience while enrolled.
Don’t stress, though. You still have a good chance of landing these jobs that ask for one to two years of experience.
Here’s a list of quick tips you can utilize to get the job that you deserve but may not have experience for just yet.
When thinking about how to get a job with no experience or education, you first have to think of other avenues you can take. One very common, alternate form of experience is mentorship. This entails finding someone with experience with success and connections in your field to put you under his or her wing.
Mentors teach you important skills and offer many situations that will give you the experience you need. Another huge aspect of mentorship comes from their capacity to guide you and give you personal and professional advice.
To learn more about the benefits of mentorship, visit our page that contains many first-hand accounts of the mentor-mentee relationship. We also offer an Entity Academy program every year to get you started on a productive and fulfilling path of mentorship.
A skills resume is most relevant for those who are figuring out how to get a job with no experience but they have a degree. A skills resume features three to five skills, and situations that thoroughly emphasize these skills.
For example:
Project Management
Essentially, it serves as a substitute for professional experience. It’s supposed to highlight what you can do, not where you have worked. There has to be a reason you feel like you can do the job, right? Well, just highlight the biggest reasons in this resume style. You can even add certain applicable courses from your degree program to the skills resume to emphasize skills learned in the respective classrooms.
For an example of a skills resume, view this page from Purdue Owl.
A key thing to know when trying to get a good job without experience is that sometimes the qualifications aren’t set in stone. Even if the job ad says “required,” we all know that job ads can be a bit overzealous in what they require for an entry-level position. So try submitting your application anyway. What can it hurt?
By utilizing little things like referencing company core values in your cover letter, they might decide to take a gamble on you anyway. When you apply for jobs like these that you aren’t really “qualified” for, make sure you do a follow-up phone call. This ensures that they at least look at your resume, whether or not they decide to call you for an interview or not. It also shows that you have initiative, which is a big plus for hiring managers.
High risk, high reward.
You may not have any experience, but you can flesh out what you do have. So instead of being concise in your skills resume, you can elaborate.
For example:
Short, concise and flat support:
Instead, you can pitch this same idea with more flare:
But of course, you should definitely never lie. And you also shouldn’t exaggerate. You don’t want your boss to give you an assignment on your first day and you miss the deadline because you spent the whole day trying to get the hang of the software you said you had “mastered.”
However, you spin it to give great detail and emphasis. Mirroring the way they explain the qualifications and requirements in the job ad is a great way to gauge how you should spin your resume.
If you don’t think any of the above tips will land you your target job, then you can always create your own experience. This isn’t just for people figuring out how to get a job without experience or a degree, it’s also for those who want more experience in something before applying.
When we say create your own experience, we mean find something small from family members or yourself that you can utilize as experience. For example, do you want to be a journalist? Try making your own website on Wix.com or a blog, and write the type of articles you’d like to write at your job. Are you applying to be a cashier? Being a part of collections at your church or running the concessions stand at a local game counts as experience because you’re handling money.
So, seek your own experience. There are tons of opportunities, just get creative and be ready to put in some work.
Remember to go for what you want and work hard to achieve it. There are always people out there working harder than you, so make sure you also give them some competition. Persistence and dedication always win out.
