Here’s my best career story, in the making. I got laid off in Jan 2006 and began my very first job search (I had always networked into jobs and never “had to” look). After a few weeks I realized that personal, job seeker CRM was something needed and I couldn’t find it anywhere.

So I set out to make it (JibberJobber.com) and it is being recommended by career experts across the globe. I always knew I wanted to own my own business but didn’t know that ugly unemployment would be the thing that finally took me to business ownership.

It’s been gratifying and vindicating at the same time.

Jason Alba
CEO – http://www.JibberJobber.com

Interesting. Id like to know what the stats are for people getting interviews with one page resumes.

3 pages is probably more appropriate.

Junior year rolls along, and I realize 2 things – 1. that i have enough time to get a second major, and 2. that this marketing degree is teaching me little except for a lot of vocabulary words.

I had really liked my intro Finance class and, being more of a math oriented person, I thought it would be a good choice, knowing i could actually ‘learn’ something besides vocab words. Well it was a great decision. Not only did i get to meet more like-minded people, i also got to be in a special graduate class (as an undergrad) where we managed part of the university’s endowment.

However, during senior year, i was still undecided as to what i wanted to do post-college. This and a hesitancy to ‘grow up’ lead me to not really try to get a job, telling myself ‘i’ll do that after college’.

May rolls around and i’ve been lazily sending in a resume or two to jobs that i find interesting, mainly at ad agencies. At the few interviews i was granted, i find out there’s no real job description for ‘ideas guy’, at least not a job for a kid fresh out of college. You really have to be an art person or an English major, or else you end up as a ‘media buyer’ or something like that. And being a numbers guy, i was frustrated by the lack of measuable results typical of ad agencies.

So I started looking for finance jobs. The problem with that is that all the good finance jobs are gone by late fall or early spring of senior year, so you’re left pecking at leftovers…absolutely no jobs at investment firms (they have hiring freezes so you can’t even get an interview).

Long story short, I ended up being a bum for about 5 months and then having to go work an old college job for $8 an hour. I still pursued the occasional job, but there were slim pickings. My saving grace was my buddy’s dad, who’s company was in need of some financial analysts and took me on despite no financial experience (though i did graduate with honors).

So lessons to college kids – no, you don’t have to figure out what you are going to do for the rest of your life, but figure out SOMETHING to do for the next year or two before you graduate college, because it can be tough landing a good job after you walk the stage.

You get discouraged, and people tell you to just take any ol’ job so you have some experience, but that could be a bad decision if you are not highly motivated and end up working in a ‘temp’ spot too long. Figure things out while you are getting paid decent enough to be able to quit and not work for a few months if you need a career switch 2 years out. The end!

Without it, I wouldn’t be where I am today and it’s hard to imagine I’d be able to recount the amazing opportunities I’ve come across over the past year.

Half-way through college I took a photography class to fulfill part of my major’s requirements. I started the class not really knowing or caring and by the end of the semester it was 3am during finals week and there I was in the Fine Arts building perfecting and mounting my prints.

When you’re passionate about something, everything else is 10x easier. All that “hard work” is worth it, you wake up eager and refreshed and the challenge of doing something new with whatever you’re really interested in doesn’t really seem like a challenge at all but really one of those joy-ride, elementary school field trips that you coveted when you were a kid.

I was passionate about my photography. I wanted to show the world and people I knew how I saw them and my world. I created a web site and put some of my photos up there. As I traveled through life and tried to figure out what to do with my career, I jumped at opportunities and made the best of them. I put the building blocks in place for something, even if i wasn’t sure what it was just yet.

Then, one summer day, I struck gold. A former colleague at an internship came across my small corner of the Internet and shot me an e-mail asking if I’d come in and talk to him about what has turned out to be, essentially, the best possible job I could be working at this point in my life. Maybe not the “dream job” but very well close to it.

How did it all happen? Well, if I hadn’t found something I was passionate about then I can honestly say I wouldn’t be typing this story.

Who cares if you don’t know what you want to do? Just do something. Enjoy it. Live it. Breathe it. Life is all about being passionate about things you love and the best way to make your career enjoyable is to find that passion.

Here’s a quick run down of my life in the real world as of today. I am currently a graduating senior in my 5th year of college. I took the “average” college student’s path through switching majors several times through college and finally landing in Accounting. I was originally an Economics major that decided Communication was really my thing. I entered the school of communications for a year and a half and built up my transferable skills. However, I didn’t believe that this would be my career path. So I decided to switch over to the business school and chose Accounting because it was a specialty skill while keeping the ability to switch around different areas of business.

As I am approaching graduation, I have gained many different job experiences under my belt as a waiter, salesman, cashier, auditor, accounting intern. I went into about 5 interviews and received 3 offers over a 2 month period. I have started my first job training during the spring semester as an auditor. In this job, I’ve picked up a lot of skills on the importance of internal controls and accuracy of reports. During the same time, it was by chance that a friend from college had called me up one day remembering a conversation we had a year ago. I had told him I was working at an upscale restaurant and gained a lot of experience in the field of hospitality and had extensive training through management there. We had a few lunches together discussing training of servers because he had problems that he wanted to solve with the restaurant he was managing. In the end, it turns out his family owns a few hotels and restaurants and offered to make me a partner in owning/managing his restaurant. Now I am developing the internal controls for his restaurant, developing the training for managers and servers, and doing the bookkeeping and forecasting budget statistics. In addition, I decided to leave the audit job after 2.5 months working there and take upon another full time job doing financial accounting that starts a few months down the road. These are the first few steps to my career but it started with a bang. In just two more weeks, I will be entering my new life career starting my own business as well as working in a corporate setting. Now that you have the overview of my past, I’d love to read the Brazen Careerist to walk into the real world with some more transferable knowledge under my belt!