It takes more than a diploma… and other college advice I'll share with my daughters.

"Late Bloomer" is probably the polite way to describe my college experience, but "early witherer" might be more accurate. When I was going through school, I never put a whole lot of thought into life after graduation. My goals as a student were simple: have fun, go to class, graduate, and then figure my career out later. As it turned out, I was an expert at having fun and even pretty good about attending class, but the whole figuring out my career after graduating piece wasn't nearly as simple as I hoped. Thankfully, it did happen... eventually, but not until I first learned a very valuable lesson about graduating college:

Your diploma won't get you very far.

Before diving straight into that reality, I think it's important I first provide full-disclosure that I have been blessed with the most amazing and incredibly generous parents. The type of parents who embody the American Dream: humble beginnings, hard work, success, all for the hope of giving their children more than they started with. The type of parents I hope to be. It was their hard work that paid my way through school, and sadly for me, I had no idea at the time what a gift they had given me or how lucky I was to receive it.

Unlike the majority of students, I was free to graduate college without having to worry about working my way through school or compiling massive debt along the way. And instead of using my college experience as a launching pad for the future, I got a little too caught up in maintaining the status quo inside my happy college bubble. In hindsight, I think I always had an underlying assumption that my diploma would work as some sort of magical career beacon, automatically drawing future employers towards me, even though I didn't take any time to develop tangible skills, quality experiences, or valuable connections while in school. Afterall, who wouldn't want to hire a new college grad with a résumé header like this:

Yes, that babbling stream of clichés is pulled directly from my original post-college résumé, and if you don't believe me, I can refer you to about a hundred different companies who surely still have a copy buried deep in their rejected candidate archives. And I don't blame them one bit, because quite frankly, my résumé sucked (a fact I can now state with a high degree of certainty after spending the past few years screening thousands of candidates as a Recruiting Manager). As you may expect, things did not go great when I tried to use that sad little résumé of mine to enter the equally sad labor market of the 'Great Recession'. After realizing the "spray and pray" mass application strategy would lead me nowhere, I eventually did what I should have done in college: started grinding. I walked into a real estate career fair advertised on craigslist and landed my first job as an apartment Leasing Specialist. A job which required me to work every weekend and paid little more than minimum wage. Ultimately, that job proved to be exactly what I needed to get my career moving, but needless to say, it wasn't quite what I had envisioned for myself on graduation day.

With stories like mine, it's not surprising economists are now writing books like The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, questioning the value of what students learn in the college classroom and how it applies to their future careers. I am not sure if I am personally ready to jump to that extreme just yet, but there are many leaders in Silicon Valley who are. In a recent conversation with the New York Times, Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, shared the following advice for new college grads:

"Do you really need to go to college?"

Judging by the net worths of famous college dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, (and on, and on...) the answer to that question is obviously "No". There are many paths to success that do not require a degree; however, for a place that has been pioneered by college dropouts, that diploma still seems to carry a whole lot of weight in Silicon Valley. For all the talk of "merit-based" hiring, the data tell a different story. According to the Wall Street Journal's article "Dropouts Need Not Apply: Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers With Degrees":

"Tech companies are more likely than other employers to require college degrees"

Our CEO here at LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, tackled this topic in an interview at the Code Enterprise Conference, where he discussed the historical challenge of balancing education requirements in favor of candidate skills and experience.

I think the consistent theme that Jeff, Alexis, and each of those other thought leaders are touching on is this: developing the right professional skills and experience is really important, regardless of your educational achievement. It takes much more than the right course load to get hired for that dream job out of college, but a diploma sure doesn't hurt either. In today's market, it's not about education or experience, it's about education AND experience. Unfortunately, for as great as most universities are at training students academically, they are equally poor at developing them professionally. This is why countless students, just like me, walk off the graduation stage holding that diploma they spent years workings towards, only to start sending out résumés which they have spent merely a matter of minutes thinking about and preparing.

Of course, not all students are like me and my late blooming friends. As Recruiting Manager for Prometheus Real Estate Group, I came across some of the brightest and most driven students and new grads, like Massimo Kaz, applying for internships or other opportunities that would put them on the fast track for success. And now, seemingly every day at LinkedIn, I encounter new young professionals, like Aliyah Morphis, that have worked their tails off to land great entry-level opportunities with us. Besides being jealous of their focus and drive at such an early age, I have been able to learn from them and reevaluate how I would change my college experience. Although I may not be able to go back in time and make those changes myself, you better believe my poor little daughters, Evie (3 years old) and Charlotte (10 months old), will be hearing all about them for years to come.

And if you happen to be at a point in your professional journey where the insight may be helpful, I will let you in on the advice I plan to share with my daughters about how they can leverage their college experience in ways that I never did:

1. Develop at least one technical skill. "Proficient in MS Office" does not cut it on your resume. Take classes or find opportunities that require you to not only learn a technical program or code (Excel, Salesforce, Adobe, SQL, Tableau, etc.) but actually make you apply it to a professional setting as well. Mastery of that skill will likely be your foot in the door to your first great opportunity.
2. Internships. Internships. Internships. I know, internships can be competitive (that's where your technical skill will come in handy). Even if you don't land your dream internship, that doesn't mean you need to settle for whatever summer job you can scrounge up at the moment. Pound the pavement and find an opportunity, any opportunity, that will let you break into your target industry. That's how you build a network that matters, and that's how you find the job opportunities that never get posted.
3. Don't list your "relevant coursework" or GPA on your resume. Unless it's required or truly a standard in your field of study, leave these off your resume. Instead, fill it with all sorts of cool details relating to the above two points just discussed. Otherwise, you are broadcasting to future employers that you too hope to be a late bloomer, just like me.
4. Master the art of telling your story. Maybe plans to attend your dream school fell through at the last minute. Maybe you changed majors multiples times. Maybe you completed 2 years of courses in your final 12 months to graduate in 4 years. Maybe your story captures all of these like me. The important part is you show future employers how you have grown and what you have learned in school, besides being able to write a 14-page term paper the night before it was due. Not that I would know anything about that...

Come along for the rest of my journey. My New Year's resolution was to write an article a month, covering topics like career development, recruiting/hiring trends, and other stories that seem to meet at the intersection of Professional & Personal. So if you enjoyed this article, please make sure to check out my others, send me a connection request, or simply click the "+ Follow" button by my name.