Self-Awareness

• Evaluate your interests and explore how they connect to your career.
• Focus on defining your strengths and use them to help determine career options.
• Identify your values and use them to define your career goals. 

Career Awareness

• Learn to differentiate between careers and jobs. 
• Examine the career paths of those around you to understand how people turn their interests, skills, and/or education into careers.
• Develop your understanding of what a career genogram is by exploring the career paths of people around you. 
• Define your own career genogram, mapping out industries and roles.

Career Exploration

• Identify work interests and preferences using a work styles assessment. 
• Compile your interests, skills, potential career paths, and working preferences—to assess different career fields.

Personal Branding Basics

• Start building your professional persona and create your professional image by identifying and thinking about how you want others to view you. 
• Identify the priorities of your current and potential professional audience. 
• Focus on building and maintaining a network that will help you brand yourself as a professional.

Professional Relationship Basics

• Learn what effective networking looks like and create a plan for your own network. 
• Explore the functions of a LinkedIn page and the critical components of a profile.
• Familiarize yourself with the purpose of informational interviews. 
• Compose a list of potential networking connections and use this list to prioritize your networking prospects. 

Career Action Plan: Getting Started

• Learn all about how to craft solid goals and establish the next steps in an overall career action plan.
• Learn about the purpose of a career exploration action plan. 
• Develop SMART goals to implement your plan and use your goals to write an action plan.
• Identify both short- and long-term career exploration goals.

Professional Skills

• Develop professional skills and learn how to prioritize which ones to strengthen and emphasize.
• Explore both expected and unexpected career paths you could pursue. 
• Learn the differences between technical and professional skills, and identify the ones you already possess. 
• Examine required skills on current job postings and develop a plan to strengthen those skills.

Career Action Plan: Next Steps

• Formalize your career action plan, design goals and measure your progress.
• Create goals, both long and short-term, using the SMART approach to guide you.
• Generate a progress report with a to-do list format that will keep your plan on track.
• Identify opportunities for gaining work-related experience.

Short-Term Career Milestones

• Explore careers that match your interests and chart milestones to mark achievements.
• Reexamine what jobs or industries fit you well based on your interests. 
• Understand how to use milestones to reflect and assess your progress towards your larger goals.

Career Action Plan: Looking Forward

• Revisit your career action plan.
• Identify any factors that have impacted your progress towards prior goals
• Create new SMART goals, as needed.

Five-Year Forecast

• Examine how to anticipate trends in the job market.
• Explore how changes in industries can affect jobs. 
• Describe how to track industry trends and how those trends could impact your long-term plans. 
• Develop a plan to address skill gaps that might result from changes in your industry.

Informational Interviewing in Depth

• Learn how to plan for and handle interviewing situations that require you to adapt in the moment. 
• Anticipate ways the conversation might not go as planned and how to make the most of those situations.  
• Watch a mock interview and analyze what went well and what didn't.

Preparing for What’s Next

• Reexamine, reflect and reassess your progress in your career journey.
• Identify areas where your plans or goals have changed.
• Review how to make trade-offs when necessary.
• Define your own career genogram, mapping out industries and roles.

Events

• Explore different career fairs and events.
• Observe and analyze a mock career fair interview.
• Plan how you will present yourself in an interview and what questions you will ask.
• Prepare for unexpected challenges you might face career fairs or events.

Company Research

(company = organization, school, non-profit or other entity)

• Learn how to conduct more in-depth company research.
• Explore new areas to consider while researching.
• Find helpful resources to use for research.
• Understand how to adapt your research for different stages of your career journey.

Applications

• Create an application plan that prioritizes opportunities.
• Apply effectively, both in quantity and with quality.
• Prepare for interviews, and identify ways to portray your best features.
• Negotiate and choose an opportunity on your chosen career path.

Accomplishment Tracking and Sharing

• Develop, organize and prioritize a tracking system for your accomplishments.
• Explore the NACE skills and evaluate how well you meet them.
• Collect external feedback on your various accomplishments.
• Determine how to navigate applicant tracking systems.

Networking Tools

• Explore ways to use professional social media and how to create a compelling online profile.
• Learn how to craft an engaging professional social media presence.
• Adopt best practices for interacting with others on LinkedIn and Handshake.
• Determine how and when to update your profiles with new information.

Resumes and Cover Letters

• Explore the advantages of customizing application materials to each opportunity.
• Create a resume repository.
• Draft targeted resumes and targeted cover letters for your top three opportunities.
• Request feedback from the ELCS Career Success Team.

Gap Analysis

• Learn how to identify and address gaps in your skills, experience, or education.
• Explore why it isn’t necessary to meet all of the listed requirements for a position.
• Examine situations where it makes sense to still apply for the position.
• Conduct a personal gap analysis for a specific position.

Representing Yourself Professionally

• Create an effective resume and understand how to adjust it to recruiter needs.
• Design a cover letter that is both compelling and targeted.
• Learn how to prepare for and make the most out of career fairs.

Activating Professional Relationships

• Begin your preparation to apply to specific opportunities.
• Identify allies in your network who can assist you as you pursue opportunities.
• Examine ways your professional relationships will change and develop after graduation.
• Explore the ways the ELCS Career Success Team can assist you with your goals.