Main Feature: 15 Quick Tips for Getting Accepted into College
Special Feature: Another Option After High School: Trade/Vocational Schools
Bonus Feature: Teen Job-Search Tutorial: Tools for High School Students
Quintessential Site: Featured Career Web Site of this Issue
Q TIPS: Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search and Work Life
Editor's Note: About this Issue...
As high-school seniors all over the nation start working on their college
applications, we at QuintZine step in, as we usually do in October, to lend a hand.
Continuing our series of 15 tips on college and career topics to mark Quint Careers'
15th anniversary, Dr. Randall Hansen offers 15 tips for getting accepted into college.
But maybe college isn't for you. Dr. Hansen also explores the idea that, for some students,
trade/vocational school is a better option.
If you want to get a job to help save for college or while you're enrolled in higher education, you'll want to
check out our Teen Job-Search Tutorial, introduced in this issue.
Our next issue of QuintZine (Nov. 7) marks the fourth annual Job Action Day. Contact us
if you'd like to contribute to the special issue of QuintZine that focuses on
proactive responses to the jobs crisis.
--Katharine Hansen, Ph.D., Master Resume Writer, Credentialed Career Master,
Certified Electronic Career Coach, and editor at
kathy(at)quintcareers.com
Feature Article: Tips for College Acceptance
15 Quick Tips for Getting Accepted into College
by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.
As part of the celebration of Quintessential Careers's
15th anniversary, we're presenting lists of 15 tips on
some of the most essential topics in college, job search, and career.
More and more, attending college is a necessity to living the life you seek. Yet as you work yourself
through your 9th or 10th consecutive year of education, attending at least four more years of college may be a
hard concept to get excited about -- but you should! Having made it through your primary education
and middle-school years, it's time to look to high school and beyond. How can you improve
your chances for getting accepted into your top-choice colleges and universities?
Have Your Resume Ready in Case of Job Loss in the Current Economic Climate.
QUINTESSENTIAL RESUMES AND COVER LETTERS, powered by About Jobs Resume Writing Service, provides solutions
with unmatched quality in the areas of professional resume writing. In fact, in 2009, during one of
the worst recessions in history, they still achieved a 98.7% effectiveness rate!
Another Option After High School: Trade/Vocational Schools
by Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.
Why college? Unless you are one of the lucky few who receive a full scholarship to college, is a college education
-- and tens of thousands of dollars in debt for you or your family -- always the right path after high school?
As a former college professor, my first response is yes, of course a college education is worth the investment. More
and more jobs and careers are professional, white-collar jobs in which an undergraduate degree is the minimum educational
requirement. Taking a broader perspective, however, provides a different answer.
Depending on your situation -- your aptitude, career interests, high-school record, and life goals -- learning a trade by
attending a career or vocational school might make much more sense for you. Besides, if you later decide
a college degree is appropriate, you can find many alternatives for obtaining it.
Find Your Career Future. Learn More About Yourself
Career Maze is designed to help every job seeker, at every level, make smarter
career choices. Individualized to reflect your unique personality and written in
"plain English," it is thorough and easy to complete.
Once completing the assessmemt, your 2-part report includes:
A specific, career-relevant discussion of your workplace personality
A list of job types compatible with your personality
Career Maze encourages you to think about tapping your full potential to find your future.
Teen Job-Search Tutorial: Tools for High School Students
Whether it's to gain work experience, contribute to the household, or save for something special,
finding and landing a part-time or summer job while in high school is a rite of passage for many teens.
The goal of our Teen Job-Search Tutorial is to provide you with a
quick overview -- including the five things you need to know about resumes, preparing
for job interviews, and succeeding in job interviews -- as well as some other
general job-search advice.
Ad: Increase Your Marketability with More Education
Increase Your Marketability by Obtaining Additional
Education, Training, Certifications
The number people enrolling in online education programs to advance their knowledge and their career
is increasing enormously.
Should you be one of them?
Programs range from business to management to computer
information systems and students can choose from accelerated
courses and full or part-time programs.
Find programs from all the best schools in the country
-- to best fit your personal, educational, and career needs.
The Vocational Information Center Website is an education directory that provides
links to online resources for career exploration, technical education, workforce development,
technical schools, and related vocational learning resources.
In the site's Career Exploration section, each career pathway listed will take you to a new
page that has resource links to job descriptions of various careers, online learning resources,
tutorials, directories, organizations, related academics, lesson plans, technical schools,
and other resources related to that specific career path.
The site also offers additional career resources, as well as sections on skills, schools, and
the job market. Resources for educators also are offered.
Find a Job, Post Your Resume -- on our Job Portal!
Even in a bad economy, there are still job postings and career opportunities!!
Go now to search for jobs, post your resume, build an online portfolio, receive career consultation,
and learn about continuing education opportunities.
Q TIPS:
Quick and Quintessential Tips to Guide Your Job Search and Work Life
Your personal statement brings your college application to life, notes Duane Bailey in a blog post. "Done right,
it’s an effective form of business storytelling. It helps make you unforgettable…. Through the power of
storytelling, [personal statements] help you form an emotional connection with your reader," Bailey writes.
Bailey tells a story of his friend Mike, who efficiently raised a large sum of money for school supplies for needy children
and related that story on this college application. "While his application certainly spoke to Mike’s commitment to
helping others," Bailey writes, "the story he shared in his personal statement helped bring his application to life.
It showed his initiative, creativity and drive for success in a way that made him unforgettable to the readers
considering his application."
It's well known that employers check out candidates' online presence when deciding to interview or hire a
job-seeker, but did you know that college admissions officers also scrutinize social-media profiles of prospective
students? According to Kaplan Test Prep’s 2011 survey of admissions officers at 359 top schools across
the United States, nearly a quarter (24 percent) of respondents from the schools surveyed have gone
to an applicant’s Facebook profile or other social-networking site to learn more about them, while 20 percent
have Googled them. You may want to clean up your profiles if you're actively applying to colleges.
Feeling anxiety about the college-application process? You are far from alone, and the times we live
in may be making the process even more stressful than usual, reports the Huffington Post. Issues on
prospective students' minds include "the economy, crippling debt, violence on campuses, falling
admissions rates, and applications that require everything from a parent's educational background
to the hours spent outside of the classroom on personal hobbies. And financial-aid packages
require their own, separate, multiple pages of hoops to jump through," the blog notes.
When Huffington Post asked its 200+ teen bloggers to write about whatever subjects they felt most passionate,
the teens' anxiety about college -- "questioning whether the payoff is worth the heavy burden,
both financially and emotionally" -- bubbled to the surface.
You can read some of their stories here.
If your school, organization, business or other
entity has a Website, we welcome you to link to Quintessential Careers.
If you already have a link from your site, we want you to know we
appreciate it. If you don't have a link to us, please
send a request to your site's Webmaster to establish a
link to Quintessential Careers. Thanks so much!
For more details (including sample HTML copy), see our
Link to Us page.
Quintessential Careers Career Masterminds
We are honoring our 15 favorite career gurus with the title of Quintessential Careers Career Mastermind.
In turn, they are honoring our readers in a number of ways throughout the rest of the year ... with articles,
tips, and a special feature in our 15th anniversary issue of QuintZine in November.
Quintessential Careers Press Announces Our Latest Book: The Quintessential Guide to
Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media.
The
Quintessential Guide to Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media,
by Katharine Hansen, Ph.D., and Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D., provides six chapters to guide you
through the next revolution in online job search. Since job boards, vestiges of the first
revolution in online job search, should still be part of the job-seeker's toolkit, this
book helps you navigate those while also considering the future of job boards. The book
looks at building your personal brand, teaches you to make the most of social-media venues
in the job search, guides you in creating a digital presence, suggests you consider blogging,
and discusses ways to integrate multimedia elements into your job search.
Ad: Does Your Organization Have Positions to Fill?
Find Qualified Candidates Today!
The Quintessential Careers Job-Hunting Portal is a great place for organizations that have job
openings to post those openings and review job-seeker resumes.
Our national resume database contains more than 500,000 active resumes of candidates seeking employment.
Numerous job-posting packages are available.
If your organization is looking to hire, use the power behind our
portal! Learn more today!
Follow QuintCareers; Read the Latest Advice
Follow QuintCareers Latest Job Tips and Career News on Twitter
Also follow @KatCareerGal for regular career-related tweets.
QuintCareers Network of Empowering Blogs
What are QuintCareers empowering blogs?
The Career Doctor Blog:
Especially for those who miss our former regular feature, Ask the Career Doctor, this blog each day features a question and answer from The
Career Doctor, Randall S. Hansen, PhD.
Need a career expert for a story or article you're working on? Searching for college,
career, and job news? Interested in learning more about Quintessential Careers?
Our Press Room
is your one-stop location for getting the information and resources you need.
QuintZine: Topics in Upcoming Issues
WATCH FOR feature articles on these topics in upcoming issues of QuintZine:
* Fourth Annual Job Action Day
* 15 Quick Tips for Career Branding Success
* Career Branding Checklist
* Special Quint Careers 15th Anniversary Issue
* 15 Career Gurus
* 15 Indispensable Career Books
* 15 tips, samples, tools, and more.
* 15 Quick Tips Strengthening Your Career Network
* 15 Quick Tips for Working with Headhunters
* Warning Signs You Won't Like Your Next Employer
* New Grads: Roadmap to Work and Play
* Working Night Shifts/Odd Shifts
* De-Stressing Before an Interview
* More Cover-Letter Components
* Crafting Transferable Skills Stories
* Empty Nest Job-seekers
* Quintessential Career Profiles of YOU, our readers
* Q&As with well-known career experts
* Book reviews
. . . and much, much more...
Your personal statement brings your college application to life, notes Duane Bailey in a blog post. "Done right,
it’s an effective form of business storytelling. It helps make you unforgettable…. Through the power of
storytelling, [personal statements] help you form an emotional connection with your reader," Bailey writes.
