The Career Foundation

Developing Human Potential

career planning

The Honest, Panicked Thought Process of a Post-Secondary Student in 2019

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Post-Secondary Student Fears: Three black icons are set against a light blue background: in the centre is a paper with a large red sad face on it, on the left is a dollar bill, and on the right is a briefcase.
Not making enough money to be independent, having a lacklustre résumé, a sparse job market, and getting stuck in a bad career are all regular concerns for most post-secondary students — and I’m no exception.

Being a post-secondary student is terrible in many ways, but I think the worst part is stressing about life after graduation — isn’t that what all the painful study sessions and papers have been for? These are the three terrifying, career-related thoughts that run through my mind almost daily. To fight these fears, I’ve also laid out three student career ‘reality checks’ I typically use to calm myself down. Prepare for the darkness, but also a bit of hope? Maybe?

Do I have enough on my résumé?! I need more on my résumé!

Finding relevant work experience that’s flexible with full-time studies is hard, depending on the field you want to go into (if you even know what that is). Students who need a job to keep up with bills might be forced to sacrifice relevant extracurriculars for paying work that’s totally unrelated to their field. Even if they do manage to accumulate some experience through this minefield, it never feels like enough. So, maybe I should take on more to get that extra edge — but will I end up burning out? It kind of feels like I have to risk it, if only to increase my chances of getting a job in my field after graduating.

Sure, I have extracurriculars and volunteering, but I don’t have actual work experience. Sure, I have some relevant work experience, but it’s only one job. And sure, I’ve worked multiple jobs; however, they were all with the same employer. Nothing will ever be enough, and it all feels like an uphill, unwinnable battle.

Reality check:

Chances are, I (and you) have more experience than at least one or two friends or younger family members. At least I’m thinking about work experience, which is honestly more than I can say for some people around my age. If you’re thinking about your future, you’re a step in the right direction. However, there will always be someone who’s done more than me. But I also have some skills and characteristics that may give me the edge over someone else out there — which I should definitely play up.

What if my experience doesn’t matter and I’m a failure who lives on the couch forever?

Assuming I do have enough work experience that’s relevant, there will be no jobs for me. This kind of thinking is especially common among university graduates in non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields, who are consistently told the job market is set against them. Why should I be any different? I don’t have any crazy connections in the industry. There will be, like, five jobs that I’d be good for, and they’ll all be taken by people with connections or more experience or better experience. I’ll be stuck without a job, and I won’t be able to afford rent or food or bills. I’ll have to move back in with my mother — I hear it’s really common now — and I’ll live on her couch until the end of time.

Reality check:

There. Are. Jobs. Maybe not as many as in most STEM fields, and maybe they don’t pay as much, but they exist. The idea of non-STEM grads having pitiful employment opportunities is true to an extent, but it’s also been blown out of proportion by high school science teachers and anxious parents. Make no mistake, a lot of new graduates will struggle to find field-related work, but there aren’t enough coffee shops in the world for all of them to be baristas forever.

Post-Secondary Student Fears: A large pile of papers sit on a desk.
Look at all these résumés! Look at them all!! How can I possibly compete with all of these? Are they all better than me? Will I be a complete failure?!

I’m going to get stuck in an industry I hate right out of school and die miserable…

If I do find a job out of school, it’s going to suck. For those who need a full-time job immediately out of school, the future looks bleak because they don’t have the option to wait for a field-related opportunity. I can see it: I’ll get a degree in a field with few jobs and find a more attainable position in an industry where it’s easier to find work. The pay will be decent, it’ll be full-time, and maybe I’ll even get benefits. I’ll tell myself it’ll only last a few years while I pay down debt and get on my feet financially. I’ll be pretty good at the job and get promoted. Years will pass, and next thing I know everything on my résumé will be in this boring field that was supposed to be a starter job and somehow became my entire career.

My degree will have gone to waste, and I’ll have forgotten what my passions ever were in return for a steady job and financial security. I’ll end up trapped in this sad industry, never able to escape because all my experience will be in that one basket, and then I’ll retire and not have accomplished anything meaningful at all.

Reality check:

I’m still young! (And it’s shocking how many students forget that). Is it possible that I’ll trap myself in a career I don’t like just to pay bills? Yes. Has this happened to people before me? Yes. But that doesn’t mean I have to resign myself to that fate without ever trying. I could also get hit by a bus tomorrow, and people have been hit by buses in the past, but I can’t assume that this is my inevitable future. It’s also possible I’ll stumble into a career I never imagined but love doing. I just have to give myself a chance.

Blythe Hunter is a volunteer with The Career Foundation. 

From Another Perspective: The Case Against Five-Year Plans

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Five-year plans can quickly lead to stress for young people. Pictured is a young male closely examining his dream board, featuring various timelines, circled images, to-do items, and so on.

Five-year plans are the trendy things that blogs tell young professionals to make while plotting out their futures. Yet, they can also land a crushing blow to your soul before you even get a chance to enter the labour market. That deflated feeling you get when you look at your schedule and realize almost every hour of every day is mapped out for the next week? Five-year plans are the life-sized version of that.  

The whole point of a five-year plan is to help you define and achieve your goals—be they personal or professional—but there’s still something sinister about them. It has to do with seeing everything you’re supposed to accomplish in the foreseeable future (the ideal path your life would follow in a perfect world) laid out in front of you. It also has to do with sealing and accepting your fate from the get-go, without ever giving spontaneity a chance. 

Confusion, confusion, confusion 

In theory, five-year plans should be most useful to young people; they’re the ones who are supposed to be the most ambitious with the most ground to gain. However, it could be argued that they do more harm than good. Few young people coming out of high school or even post-secondary education have a concrete idea of what they truly want their future to look like. And the ideas they do have are subject to change, whether they want to admit it or not. Creating a plan in such a precarious stage of life is a surefire way to end up confused and stuck to a path that may not be right for you. 

For context, let’s give a real-life example. Ellie is approaching her mid-twenties and is currently in university part-time. She had previously been full-time but switched three years ago because, in her words, life got in the way. “While planning is important, you can never plan for life to happen,” says Ellie.   

Ellie had a five-year plan when she graduated high school. According to that plan, she should have earned her degree, entered teacher’s college, and started supply teaching in a high school by now. Instead, she’s still in school and is working five part-time jobs. 

While some may contest that your five-year plan can change and grow with you, simply having that plan in mind can keep you in a specific mindset for too long. Ellie slowly realized that the goals outlined in her plan were not what she actually wanted to do, but not before wasting a lot of time pursuing them. “No one had this plan other than me,” she laments. “I was putting this stress on myself to achieve things I should have known I didn’t want anymore.” 

No idea what’s happening? No problem. 

Young people should be allowed to be young. They shouldn’t feel the need to funnel themselves into a specific field with specific goals right off the bat. They shouldn’t be living the formative years of their adult lives on a set, self-imposed schedule that spells out the remainder of their youth. Make a handful of five-year plans and you’ll have your life planned out until retirement, and that’s really the last thing you want when your whole life is ahead of you. 

People stumble into their careers all the time, simply by exploring what they like or by pursuing the various opportunities that come their way. That’s what Ellie did in the end. “Five-year plans are pretty limiting,” she says. “They close you off to opportunities that you are unaware of, and in my opinion, you should never close yourself off. Just be ready for whatever comes at you.”  

When planning for the future, Ellie believes having a flexible, less exclusive goal is better because it “allows room for you to change and grow rather than locking you into a fake thing in your mind.” 

For some, five-year plans will certainly provide a welcome sense of direction and purpose. Maybe they’re supposed to be a way of reigning in the chaos or finding some order where there usually isn’t any. If you’re one of those people, that’s great! But if you don’t know exactly what you want to do, don’t feel like you need to set out a five-year plan right now. Direction isn’t a bad thing, but a long-term plan meticulously explaining how you should be living your life isn’t always the way to find it. 

Sure, you can have an idea of what you want to do, but you don’t have to write it out in painful detail. That can just end up looming over you, stressing you out, and keeping you on a set path with blinders on. Allow opportunities to present themselves. Look for them, even. You’ll get to where you’re supposed to be going.

Blythe Hunter is a volunteer with The Career Foundation.