How To Launch The Career You Want

The following is an excerpt from the book Launchers: Don’t Just Take a Job, Launch Your Career! by Kerry K. Litzenberg and Codie J. Wright.

You are about to make the most exciting decision of your entire life: to launch your career.

Meet Sam, a twenty-two-year-old who majored in business at a top-tier university. Over the course of four years, Sam took a wide variety of marketing, management, and business classes geared toward a degree plan for his major. He was involved in several organizations and volunteer activities, earned a 3.2 GPA, and had a part-time job during school to earn a little extra income.

When he first entered college, Sam’s goal was to earn a degree in biomedical science and then attend medical school. After countless hours of study and poor test scores, he realized that chemistry and biology were not a good fit, so he decided to switch to a business degree. “A business degree will provide a wide range of opportunities,” he thought, “so why don’t I check out that option?”

Sam was an excellent candidate for a marketing or management position, but there was one problem: he didn’t know which industry or company was the best fit for his career. While meandering through the university’s business career fair one day, he stumbled upon a software company that seemed somewhat interesting, so he applied and was offered a position.

Sam took the job and worked for the company for several years, but decided it wasn’t a good cultural fit for him. He left for a “better” job in a different industry, where he stayed for several more years, before he decided it wasn’t better after all. This same vicious cycle continued for the next five years, until Sam eventually accepted a position in the medical industry. Will it finally be a good fit for him? Time will tell.

Does this cycle sound familiar? Does it remind you of anyone you know?

If this situation stresses you out, you’re not alone. Many people between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five are feeling anxious about the process of preparing for their career launch. You may be one of them. Maybe you feel like you don’t have enough time to prepare. Maybe no one has ever shared with you the process for launching yourself into the next three or four decades of your life.

Let us put your mind at ease. There’s no reason to worry. With the right plan in place, a clear sense of what you have to offer, and an understanding of the context of your career space, you can launch yourself into your career with clarity and purpose. However, it’s a major effort, so we encourage you to start your launch now. The last thing we want is for you to just take a job and wind up feeling miserable. Become a Launcher — that’s what we call people who have begun this process — and start preparing for a satisfying and fulfilling career now.

We work primarily with college students, and we’re always amazed to meet people who will work for four or five years in college learning about supporting subjects for their major, but then spend no time preparing for the actual career launch. In fact, many college students wait until they graduate and then simply start looking for a job with no plan in place. There seems to be an assumption that somehow the pieces will fall into place on their own, but it doesn’t work that way. If you don’t create a calculated career launch, you will end up job hunting and most likely take the first job that comes along. You might have four to five jobs in the next five years that you don’t like while you wait for the right one.

Think of your career launch like the space program. When NASA wants to launch the latest communications satellite into space, they discuss, test, and develop a plan for months, possibly years, before they finally push the launch button on the rocket that will take the satellite into space.

The launch itself lasts a matter of minutes, and getting the satellite into orbit might take two hours. It all happens so quickly that it can seem sudden to outside observers who don’t necessarily see the careful thought and planning that went into making sure the launch was a success, but it was the planning that made it possible. Remember, even though the launch happened quickly, that satellite is going to orbit the earth for many years, which is why all of the planning and preparation are well worth it.

That’s what a career launch is like under the best of circumstances. Plan, plan, plan, then push the launch button and hope for a successful launch.

A Changing Focus

In high school and the early college years, maybe you were like most students — focused on your studies and extracurricular activities. You worried about grades, your SAT, LSAT, GRE, or GMAT scores, and you just hoped your career would unfold naturally along the way.

Friends and family have asked you from a young age, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” That’s an easy question to ask, but maybe no one has ever shown you how to realize your best answer to that question.

When you applied to college, your immediate concern was selecting a major. However, we tend to find that students select a major based on how well they performed in a certain subject or extracurricular activity during high school. “I aced my English classes,” they might think, “so maybe I should major in English.” Sometimes, they choose a major based on a general interest in a subject: “I love animals, so maybe I’ll be a veterinarian.”

However, the selection of a college major might not match well with a long-term career plan. In fact, some of the majors that are frequently chosen don’t readily lend themselves to career options. Psychology is a common undergraduate major, but unless a student continues their education into the graduate level, a psychology degree won’t open up many doors other than clinical psychology.

In our experience, many college professors know very little about the relevance of their curriculum in finding a career. That’s not really their job anyway, but this is where many students falter. They spend a hundred thousand dollars learning English or chemistry or some other subject; by the end, they’ve learned almost nothing about how to use that knowledge and the skills they’ve gained to launch a career in a relevant industry that matters to them.

We’re not faulting the university system. A degree program promises to teach students particular subjects, and that’s what it does. When students come to the end of their degree program, they might be handed over to a career center, but career centers often have very few contacts or experience in specific industry career paths. If you go there as an English major, they will help you with your résumé but, more than likely, they won’t have industry connections to help you find a specific job opportunity.

Many graduates reach this point and are shocked to find out how ill-prepared they are to find an industry and company culture that suits them. The disconnect between academia and industry is substantial. To a college freshman, four years seems like a really long time, but in reality those four years go by very quickly. We suggest students identify the industries that interest them and start making plans by the beginning of their senior year, but we meet many students who are in their very last semester of college and still have absolutely no idea what they want to do with their lives.

If you are at that point now, or even if you’re already out of college, don’t worry. We’re here to help with your career launch.

Fear Of Failure

Parents and other loved ones might start pestering you as you approach graduation. “What are you going to do for a living? Where are you going to work?” If you haven’t put a lot of thought into it, these questions can make you start to feel very overwhelmed.

Adding to the problem, your parents and other adults in your life have been telling you since you were a child that you can be anything you want to be when you grow up. From their perspective, since they have provided vague encouragement and motivation, they feel as if you should already know what you want to do; in reality, this can intensify your fear of failure.

In order to allay the fear and get your parents off your back, you might be tempted to just take a job. If you haven’t planned and chosen the right career, the job won’t resonate with you. It will just be mindless work. After a few months or a year, you will find yourself struggling with anxiety and depression, feeling stuck and wishing you were back in college — the good old days. Whenever we hear people tell college students, “Stay in school, the real world is hard,” we know that’s a person who probably didn’t launch their career well and didn’t enjoy the position they selected.

Unfortunately, it’s much harder to get another job once you’re working fifty hours a week. You no longer have as much time for research or interviews, so the job can feel like a dead-end street. We believe this is a major cause of the current widespread dissatisfaction that twenty-one to thirty-five-year-olds feel at work.

Here’s the good news: whether you’re approaching graduation or already struggling with an unsatisfying job postgraduation, you can get on the right path. You don’t have to take the first thing that comes along, and you don’t have to keep slogging away in an unsatisfying job.

You get to determine what you want out of your career, so why waste the next thirty years at a job that you dread or despise? When you pursue your passion, you will increase your own sense of engagement and fulfillment.

Put Your Career Launch Into Action

In this book, we present a plan for successfully launching or relaunching your career. We know your future is important to you, so we’re going to help you plan for the next thirty or forty years by getting off on the right foot. We want to come along with you on the journey. You don’t have to do this all by yourself.

However, the plan isn’t instantaneous. You can’t press the launch button and suddenly have an amazing career, and it won’t happen over a weekend. However, it might not be as time-consuming as you imagine. In the following chapters, you will begin to gain a clear sense of what you bring to the table — your skills and personality and the knowledge you’ve acquired in college — and learn how all of those things fit together to provide the fuel for your launch. We’ll help you determine your launch criteria so you can identify and select an industry and company that resonate with you. Finally, we will help you understand the culture of your ideal workplace so you can make the transition successfully.

Our Story And Our Vision

Now, you might ask yourself, “Who are you, and why should I listen to you?” That’s a great question, so let us introduce ourselves. We are Codie Wright and Dr. Kerry Litzenberg, and we help students and young adults prepare for and implement their career launches through the Weston AgriFood Sales Program at Texas A&M University.

Dr. Litzenberg has forty years of university experience helping Launchers just like you to make the transition from graduation to full-time employment. To fulfill that vision, he has done much research on how students can use the knowledge they acquire in college to enjoy a successful career.

To help students identify the skills they have to offer for their career launch, he published the Agribusiness Management and Aptitude Skills Survey (AgriMASS) in 1987. However, it was the book Emotional Intelligence, written by psychologist Daniel Goleman in 1995, that finally explained something Dr. Litzenberg had been trying to articulate for twenty years. What became clear through Goleman’s theory was that, rather than simply figuring out their skills, students must come to know themselves first.

Emotional intelligence is the human side of your career launch — the ability to understand your emotions (self-awareness) and how you act or react to emotional triggers (self-management). That’s why, when we help Launchers like you with your career launch, we first teach you to know yourself. Only then do we help you find your desired industry and company culture and determine if you are a good fit.

Codie Wright, as a student in Dr. Litzenberg’s sales class in 2013, saw firsthand how many of her peers became overwhelmed with the prospect of getting a job. She shared their anxiety as they approached graduation with little preparation or planning about their impending career launches. She also saw friends struggling postgraduation, simply taking jobs instead of successfully launching careers and dealing with the ensuing unhappiness.

She decided she wanted to be part of the solution, so while earning her master’s degree, she reached out to Dr. Litzenberg. “I’m passionate about sales,” she said. “I love the industry, and your class really resonated with me. How can we work together to help students?” As it turned out, he had an open position, and that’s how our professional partnership began.

Working together, we now help students understand the career launch space so they can make the transition from university to their professional lives. Our advice isn’t limited to college students, however. We’ve met many young people between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five who can benefit from proper career planning and preparation. Some are launching into their first career, and others are relaunching after an unsuccessful transition.

Deliverables to Self

This book isn’t meant to be simply a self-help book full of encouragement and positivity. Rather, it provides a clear-cut set of directions, creating a useful guide for launching or relaunching a career. Think of it as a handbook for the journey.

While the information provided in the coming chapters can be useful for older people looking to change careers, our advice is geared primarily for twenty-one to thirty-five-year-olds. To that end, we will discuss ways to navigate the differing generational expectations that are inevitable in a professional environment.

Many of the chapters include “Deliverables to Self” because we believe you must give our concepts time to percolate in your thinking. It’s too easy to get so busy living life that you forget to think about how you want to live life.

These deliverables are practical activities for which you are responsible to yourself. Complete them over the next few months, and you will be on your way to a great career launch.

We also intend to give you the resources you need all the way through your career selection process and even as you integrate into the workplace. Before we get there, however, we will begin by answering the most important question:

“How do I get started?”

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To keep reading, pick up your copy of Launchers: Don’t Just Take a Job, Launch Your Career! by Kerry K. Litzenberg and Codie J. Wright on Amazon.