The English/CW Major’s Guide to Surviving the Holidays, 2016 Edition

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The holidays? They can be stressful, particularly when they give your family members opportunities to quiz you about your plans after graduation. This year, your career plans (or lack thereof) may be a welcome distraction from politics, so all the more reason to brace yourself for those conversations.

Some tips:

  1. Be prepared.  These conversations often stem from loving concern. Look for ways to reassure the people who care about you that you’re on your way to a stable, self-supporting adult life. Some things that will demonstrate that you are headed towards a career path:
  2. Save this link to your phone.  The odds may or may not be ever in your favor, but the data certainly is, so you can be ready when a relative trots out some canard about English majors being unemployable.
  3. Seriously, it’s a tough labor market, but you are no less employable than anyone else. Keep this table from the Illini Success survey handy, in case you have a relative telling you to switch your major.
  4. Need more talking points?  Try this, this, this, or this.
  5. Learn more.  Take some time to browse this very blog for additional information on jobs that English majors do (including human resources, advancement and development, communication, business consulting, science journalism, running small businesses, legal writingproject managementbook publishing, video editing, science editing, project operations, librarianship, B2B publishing).
  6. Stay true to yourself. Spend time with a book you want to read but don’t HAVE to read to remind yourself why you got into this major in the first place. Write a poem. Watch a movie with some intellectual heft to it. Make a trip to the nearest independent or used bookstore.

2017 Winter/Spring Career Fairs

The fall and winter breaks are a good time to start thinking about the winter and spring career fairs.

  • Start getting your resume ready. Yes, you will need one–come talk to Kirstin Wilcox, kwilcox@illinois.edu, if you’d like help.
  • Learn more about how to find success at a career fair by reading our English//CW Majors’ Guide to Career Fairs.
  • Sign up for ENGL 199-MMM: Career and Internship Fair Preparation (online, first eight weeks of spring semester).

Here’s the Winter/Spring Lineup

Business Career Fair, Feb. 1 and 2, 2pm to 6pm at the ARC. It’s not just for College of Business students! At the fall fair, nearly a third of the employers were recruiting majors from the LAS. It’s huge, so that means a lot of employers. The key to success is using I-Link to identify the recruiters that interest you. Go on I-Link and click “Events” in the lefthand tab. It will be in “Career Fairs.” Click on the number of employers to bring up a search screen. Use the pull-down menu under “Advanced Search” to isolate the employers seeking “all majors.” A few that caught my eye were Cambridge Publishing, Huron Consulting, Signature Consulting, Teach for America, and Wells Fargo.  They provide links to give you information about the positions they’re specifically recruiting for at the career fair, as well as other openings in the company. Note that the fair runs for two days and companies only attend for one of those, so make note of when the companies you want to talk to will be there.

Illini Career and Internship Fair, Apr. 5, noon to 4pm at the ARC. This career fair .has a number of employers coming who are specifically interested in liberal arts majors with strong communications skills. You can find information about the employers who are coming on I-Link (find “Career Fairs” under “Events” in the left-hand tab). You should review all the entries and click through to find out specifically the positions they seek to fill, but some companies of particular interest to English and Creative Writing majors are Cintas, City Year, Epic, Hartford, Jellyvision, Mindshare, and the Peace Corps.

At both fairs, the kinds of positions that English and CW majors should look out for:

  • Education. Nonprofit organizations like City Year, Teach for America, the Peace Corps, College Possible, and various school districts often come and are looking to fulfill a variety of roles–not just teaching, but also program administration and support.
  • Recruiting. These jobs involve helping companies seek out, interview, and hire talented workers–it’s a great first step to a career in HR. Requires excellent people skills and sometimes requires a lot of travel.
  • Management training programs (sometimes called rotational programs or leadership programs). These positions are often 1- to 2-year gigs that involve getting experience in all parts of a company’s operations, prior to getting placed in a permanent position. It’s a good opportunity for people who have a lot of skills and potential–including leadership experience–but aren’t really sure what they want to do with it.
  • Marketing and communications These positions vary widely, so it’s good to read job description carefully! Some positions are market research positions (which require fairly intensive technical/quantitative skills for data analysis) but some are not. Event planning, PR, content development and strategy, are all jobs that can come under this heading.
  • Claims analyst, client management, customer support.  Many industries, from insurance companies to software developers, need good communicators who can be the face of the company, the first point of contact when clients draw on their services or customers need help. These jobs take many different forms and involve a wide range of skills, but they generally require people who are comfortable with ambiguity and can negotiate conflicts.
  • Sales. Every business needs more customers. Even if a career in sales isn’t your dream, these positions are often a point of entry into a business or an industry that interests you.

Stay tuned for news of two additional specialized career fairs of interest to English and CW majors: The Arts and Culture Career Fair in Chicago and the Educators Career Fair.

 

Jobs for Those with People Skills

First Job: Human Resources

Consider the following list of qualifications:hr-jobThis is an entry-level position in human resources, a field for which English and creative writing are always “related majors.”

Human resources is the work of recruiting potential employees, hiring them, getting them started in their jobs, and then resolving problems that arise. If you’ve helped a friend get hired at your work, if you’ve trained a new employee, if you’ve helped someone in trouble keep their job–you’ve already done work in this area.

Alumnus Theo Long, the Associate Director of Talent Management (“a fancy way of saying human resources”) for the U of I Office of Advancemtheodore_longent was in the English department yesterday to talk about his own experience. It was a field he stumbled into, but the point where it became a career path, rather than simply a way to pay the bills, was the point where he realized he could make a difference in the lives of other people. Having seen on-the-job conflicts be mismanaged (“some managers just love to fire people”), he sought out a managerial role where he could help resolve conflicts supportively and constructively.

There are a lot of entry-level roles in HR that do NOT require a graduate degree, particularly recruiting new employees. For those who want to advance in the field without committing to a graduate program, the Society of Human Resource Managers (SHRM) offers a certification program, which involves self-study, an exam, and a fee.

Theo also noted that an entry-level HR job can be a point of entry into an organization or an industry in which you may ultimately pursue other career paths: project management, communications, public relations.

Second Job: Advancement/Development/Fundraising

Higher education, not-for-profit organizations, philanthropy, social justice and political activism…all these kinds of organizations require donations to stay afloat. The work of of obtaining and managing those donations goes by many names.  Theo Long’s HR job falls within the University of Illinois’s Office of Advancement which works with donors. Theo offered insight into the kinds of skills that are key for jobs in this area: not just the ability to ask people for money (though that is important) but also–a strong commitment to the mission of the organization that you’re raising money for, excellent listening skills, and curiosity. He also noted that advancement takes a lot of different forms: there is need for event planners, project managers, and researchers. A background in sales, customer service, organizing events for your RSO, and helping with fundraising in any capacity can make you eligible for an entry level job in this area. Theo also noted that the University of Illinois Foundation regularly seeks student employees to call alumni and seek donations. It’s not work that everyone takes to, but for anyone thinking about a career in the non-profit realm, it’s valuable experience.

Theo is a member of the Alumni Mentoring program, so feel free to contact him using your Alumni Mentoring Directory (and if you haven’t yet signed up for the Alumni Mentoring program, please set up an appointment with Kirstin Wilcox by emailing kwilcox@illinois.edu or calling 333-4346).

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How to Get a Job in Publishing

Last week Dawn Durante and James Engelhardt, acquisitions editors at the University of Illinois Press, came to the Department of English to offer their advice and experience on working in the publishing industry.

Some specific suggestions they had:

  1. Understand the publishing process and recognize that there are a lot of different points of entry.life-cycle-of-a-book
  2. Recognize that the publishing industry has many different dimensions: not just the well-known large trade publishers in New York, but also regional presses, university presses, specialty publishers.
  3. The path to a stable full-time job in the business can be long and winding. It is, said Durante, “very apprenticelike.”
  4. Look for ways to get relevant experience working: internships, volunteer work, paid employment. Note that experience doesn’t have to be directly in the publishing industry to be relevant.
  5. Follow publishing houses that interest you on Twitter.
  6. Get familiar with the range of publishers out there and the wide variety of jobs in the industry by keeping up with relevant professional and trade websites: