<p>My son completed his studies at a large mid-atlantic university. He received a BS in Finance. During his 4 years at school running for the cross country and track team was his focus. He did not get any internships. He had minimal summer jobs at home. Now he doesn’t know what he wants to pursue. He doesn’t feel qualified for most finance jobs. He does not want to go into sales. If anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate hearing from you.</p>
<p>Without any internships, he has not had any exposure to different sorts of jobs in business. Any BS entry-level job will begin to educate him on the everyday realities of a huge or small company; whether he likes doing excel spreadsheets all day or prefers a lot of human interaction. </p>
<p>For now, encourage him to apply to many jobs, if he is lucky enough to land one, he can begin to hone his areas of interest on the job.</p>
<p>He may have trouble getting interviews in finance without internships. If that’s the case, I recommend that he take temp or contract jobs to gain experience and figure out what he likes. A benefit is that temp and contract jobs often lead to full-time employment. He can find these jobs through an employment agency.</p>
<p>Temp is good. He should go signup with Manpower Professional or Robert Half Professional or some temp service division that deals with professional staff as opposed to the labor employees. If he were my son, I’d advise him to target an industry and do the research to figure out what they call the entry level finance jobs in that industry and then start looking. Not feeling “qualified” is a common feeling. I sent several job listing to my son that I knew were entry level because I knew the company and the recruiter and he would always say he wasn’t qualified. It can be daunting to kids to associate their skills and abilities with qualifications on a job description and I would hazard a guess 90% of the entry level postings say 1-2 years experience, you’ll never see one that says “recent college graduate.” It will be alittle tough because he can’t say he’s been working since he was 16, but if those “minimal summer jobs” were valid job, they should be on the resume. I had to pound that into my son’s head because by the time he graduated from college he had literally been working 12 months a year for 7 years but he would discount all of it because he never equated that with “working” like “adult” work as he would call it. I told him to get over it and that he’d been punching a clock for seven years just like full grown “adults.” So help him connect his childhood/teens with his early adulthood is my best advice.</p>