Getting Started

When thinking about a career in college you might conceptualize your journey like this:

Pick a career→ Choose a major → Earn a degree/transfer → Employment

To some extent, your career pathway looks like this. However, career development is complex and will be filled with many predictable and unpredictable experiences - positive and negative. These experiences will shape your career journey with a cycle of reflection, exploration, implementation, then back to reflection, and the cycle continues. The Career Development wheel above reflects a cycle that you will likely experience throughout your career development.

Before beginning your career journey, you might want to ask yourself some of the following questions:

• What led to your decision to attend college?
• What activities make you lose track of the time?
• What problems do you want to solve? (a better alternative than “What do you want to be when you grow up?”)
• When having options of classes (electives), what is your thought process in choosing certain courses over others?
• What skills and knowledge do you want to learn?
• What kind of lifestyle do you want?
• What are your values?
• What does success look like to you?
• What can I do with my time that is important to me?
• What fulfills you?
• What gives you meaning and purpose?

By asking yourself these questions, you begin to reflect on what is motivating you to attend college and toward a certain career path.

Since career includes the action of building and utilizing your skills, your career doesn’t start after you graduate. Everything that has led you to this point, along with the experiences you will have at El Camino College, all are part of your journey; your career has already started.

 

The world is rapidly developing technologically, and careers are expanding globally. With that comes changing  how we may think about careers.

No longer are people regularly working in a single job for over 20 years until they retire. Instead, there is the expectation that new skills will be learned through your experiences. In your college experience, along with your specialized major knowledge and skill, you want to be learning transferable/21st-century skills (Source).

While we cannot predict what new industry specific skills may be needed, being a constant learner and seeker of new experiences will help you progress forward.

With this mindset, you may come to recognize that staying in the same job may not inspire growth and, therefore, you will have to seek new experiences.

 

You are probably not the only one who feels this way (trust us, we have heard it from many students).

Everyone is on their own journey. Ask anyone who is in their “career” if their journey was planned, and you might be surprised to find that everyone’s journey is likely different and not everything that happened was planned.

What you want to ask yourself now is what experiences are open to you right now to help you figure out what you want to do with regard to your career - volunteering, internships, network, employment, on-campus leadership, etc.

Beyond learning in the classes you may take and the research you will conduct to learn more about careers, you should be looking for experiences outside of class to clarify the kind of work you want to do after you graduate.

 

Although these two choices are related, choosing one doesn’t automatically mean you’ve chosen the other. (Some people assume that students who major in the arts, humanities, or social sciences are either not qualified for any jobs (“What can you do with a degree in philosophy?”) or qualified only for careers in those specific areas. Students who major in theatre, anthropology, history, psychology, and similar majors do find jobs in business, research, human resources, teaching, the military, and a variety of other occupations.

 

Students graduating from any one major could be employed in many different jobs; likewise, people who are employed in any one job could have graduated from many different majors. Choosing a major doesn't limit you to just one career; choosing a career doesn't limit you to just one major.

Courses listed are suggestions to help students explore their personal, major, and/or career interests at El Camino College.

Please consult with an academic counselor for information about major, general education (GE), degree, and transfer credits and  requirements as well as credit limitations.

Major and Career Exploration Courses at ECC

 

Meta-majors are groups of related majors with similar requirements, outcomes, or methodologies.

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The Community Education department aims to provide high-quality, engaging, community-driven and market-driven classes, workshops, and events that are responsive to the recreational and vocational needs of our diverse demographic of students while maintaining high levels of student-satisfaction ratings.

We provide fee-based, short-term, not-for-credit classes, workshops, career-training programs and events for professional and/or personal development with an emphasis on inspiring a sense of wonder and imagination for lifelong learning.

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This guide provides an overview of library resources that can help you explore careers and your interests, research how to write resumes and cover letters, prepare for the job interview process, and more.

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