How To Land A Job You Really Want

Almost all of us have a dream job, but very few of us ever get a chance at it. Sometimes it’s our education holding us back, but more often than not it’s something else: professional experience, lack of a proper network, money. But if you’re young, there’s no reason not to chase after that dream gig, and while it might seem like mission impossible at first, it’s important to remember that you likely have a long road ahead of you, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The first step in landing your dream job is identifying it, which, among millennials, is a common problem. Part of the issue is that millennials want more than a good job, we want a new type of work itself. Still, according to a 2014 report from the White House, a growing number of college-bound millennials are studying subjects that “correspond more directly to specific careers” than traditional liberal arts majors. Since a relevant, career-driven education is the first logical step towards landing your dream job, fitting in with the crowd in this way is probably a smart bet. In that case, the best advice is the earliest: figure out what you want to do and then start studying to get an early edge and head-start. Higher education is almost a given for coming-of-age millennials, but college isn’t the only path to landing a job you really want, and it’s worth considering an alternative if your career path doesn’t require a four-year degree.

To be fair, plenty of us go through all four years of college—or more!—without a particular occupation in mind, and it seems like there is a growing population of floundering college grads popping up around the country, wondering, “What’s next?!” Not necessarily because we don’t know what we want to do, but because we don’t know how to get there. Before you ever get a call for your dream job, you should be pursuing—or at least trying to pursue—the same type of work in another capacity. If you want to be a staff writer at your favorite magazine, now is the time to start working on the type of stuff you’d imagine yourself doing once you finally arrive at the desk, and while the same might not hold true for other industries—you probably shouldn’t start practicing electric work or fighting fires in our free time—there are other ways of aiming at your goal.

We’ve all heard the painfully simple adages about the benefits of networking, but there’s a lot of truth behind the claims. In a lot of industries, the only post-internship entry-point is a solid network, a group of people you can hit up both casually and formally for advice, recommendations, or even to solicit a job offer. It takes some guts to speak up and ask for help, but leaning on our elders and taking cues from professional role models is one of the most obvious ways of eventually filling their shoes.

The mechanics of actually landing your dream job are more mundane than many of the success stories we hear from nostalgic CEOs and managers, which means you need to master the game of the job hunt first, and then worry about rising to the top second: obviously your resume needs to be attractive and digestible, your networking skills need to be top-notch, and, finally, your interview prowess needs to be on point. Most of all, you should get to know more about the job you want and type of people who generally fill the position. After all, knowing is half the battle.