In this episode, we’re not just unraveling the mysteries of job applications in Germany. We are arming you with tools, with strategies for planning your career, no matter where you’re from. Get ready for some insights into the German job market – we are covering aspects you might not have even considered.

Highlights

„Anything that you are doing in your life is, is experience and it’s just that you need to be able to connect the thing that you that you want to do to something that you’ve done.“

„I’ve never worked with anyone who has zero hands-on experience. You all have so much experience and what we tend to underestimate is, all of the work that you’ve done in your PhD, in your master’s, even in your bachelor’s, you have worked with other people to do things…“

„I think it’s really, really important that you sit down as early as you can. Give yourself the gift of the time that you will invest in your own career planning.“

from our interview with Amanda Wichert

Audio

Download or listen to the audio version of the podcast here.

Links

• Dahlem Research School
• Berlin University Alliance Events
• Humboldt University Career Day 2023
• Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz (in German)
• Amanda’s Resources at careerberlin.de

transcript

Marlies: Hello and a warm welcome to the DRS podcast brought to you by the Dahlem research school. I’m your host, Dr. Marlies Klamt and today’s episode is extra special because I’m joined by someone you probably already know: Amanda Wichert. Amanda is not only a fellow host of this podcast but also an expert in cross-cultural carriers.
And guess what? We here to talk about cracking the German job market as an international doctoral student. In this episode, we’re not just unraveling the mysteries of job applications in Germany. We are arming you with tools, with strategies for planning your career, no matter where you’re from.
Here’s a sneak peek of what’s on the menu for today. Get ready for Amanda`s insights into the German job market covering aspects you might not even have thought about. We are diving deep into the skills and experiences you need while Amanda offers guidance and strategies for those who lack them. Or who think they might lack them, because sometimes that’s not even the case, you just don’t know yet.
Ever wondered if German is a must when applying for a job in Germany. Stick around to find out Amanda’s take on whether a positive answer to the question „Sprechen Sie Deutsch?“ is a must.
One of the wonderful long words we have in German is „Wissenschaftszeitvertraggesetz“ Yep. This is really only one word and it refers to a law that for many doctoral students is very relevant. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry. Amanda sheds light on it.
Another aspect we talked about is whether or not it makes sense to do a postdoc after finishing your doctorate. Buckle up for this enlightening interview, we’re here to fill your ears with lots of information and with lots of practical tips. Enjoy the interview with Amanda Wichert.
I’m very excited to have you as a guest in our podcast today with this episode that is especially addressed at international doctoral students who are wondering how to get into the German job market.
Amanda, I have lots of questions prepared for you, but before we get started, please let our listeners know who you are and what’s your profession.
Amanda: If you’ve been listening to our podcast, you maybe heard my voice before because I am the other podcast host. But when I’m not doing this Dahlem Research School podcast, I offer trainings and coachings on a couple different topics.
You know organizing yourself, well-being at work. But my main topic is cross-cultural careers, so trying to figure out how to successfully launch your career in a new and international setting. And I work quite a lot with doctoral students and postdocs on this topic here at the university.
Marlies: That sounds very interesting and that makes you a real expert for our topic today. I know that many of our podcast listeners come from all over the world and every job market has its own rules and particularities. What would you say is special about the German job market, how is it different from the international job market?
Amanda: So one of the things that I think is really surprising to people that come to Germany, and I know it was really surprising for me when I first came here because I came from the US in 2008 and I thought, well, I can just keep doing the thing that I was doing before, and I was really surprised learn that that’s not really how Germany works.
So Germany still has a very structured job market and it’s a really specific job market and what I mean by that is that most people, not everybody, but most people in Germany do the thing that they studied. So there’s still a lot of connection between whatever it is that you’ve studied and whatever it is you’re gonna do.
And more so than in other job markets, there’s not as much flexibility, so people don’t usually change their careers as much. And this is really changing. So with the startups and with just the globalization of the job market, I think that in, maybe even in like five to 10 years, we’ll see a huge difference here in Germany.
But we’re still at a place where people are really looking at what did you study and what did you do before and how is that connected to what you do next as opposed to sort of what success have you had, which is sort of what we’re looking at in the US or, or are you well-rounded or you know, are you enthusiastic?
It’s much more about how does your profile actually fit the job you’re looking at.
Marlies: I can imagine that that also has some effects on the job application process itself. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the job application process in Germany, and if there are any specific requirements or expectations that have to do with what you just explained to us, that might not be very common to everybody.
Amanda: So one of the big things that German companies still want that’s actually really surprising to non Germans to international applicants is this photo, right? And I think the photo is sort of maybe, you know, not a huge element, but it’s kind of a thing that is a, a big symbol for me of the difference between what is expected in the international market and what’s expected in Germany.
So if you’re a German and you’re applying at a German company and you know, you’re looking at a very traditional German employer. You will almost always be expected to include a photo. And when I talk to German hiring managers or German employers and I say, you know, what is the photo for?
And they’re like, oh, I just wanna see like, what do you look like? Are you friendly? Are you „sympathisch“ as this word in German that they’re looking at. And most international employers in Germany don’t really want that photo. And I think again, it’s one of those things that’s changing. But, but there’s that and, and there’s also sort of this traditional German CV structure, which is not quite the same as the CV structure you have in the rest of the world. So in Germany, there’s not traditionally a profile or like a, a pitch at the top of your CV. Usually you just jump right in and it’s facts only, right? Like, so what did you do and where did you study?
And not so much this sort of How do we say it’s very optimistically phrased description of your skills or like a summary of your accomplishments. It’s much more about the facts. What did you do and how does that relate to the thing that you’re applying to?
Marlies: That’s a great bridge to my next question.
You already talked a bit about the CV structure, that it’s different. About the photo, which is still quite common to include, but would you say that there are also some specific qualification or maybe skill sets that German employers value, especially when hiring PhD graduates?
Amanda: When you talk to employers about PhD holders in Germany, so people with a doctorate and you say, what do you see? Right. The thing that they’re usually looking at is well first of all, they see you as an expert, in your field. You have, you know, cutting edge experience and information.
What they’re also a little bit worried about is sort of this we can say in English, this ivory tower you know, theoretical approach. And they are really looking to see, have you used your skills or your experience in a hands-on setting. So insofar as the job that you’re applying for isn’t extremely theoretical, and of course there are jobs in the industrial job market that are just theoretical, but even there, they’re looking for, you know, do you know how to do these things in a setting where it’s all about the application and not about just pure science, right? That’s the one thing.
The other thing they’re looking for is your interpersonal skills, your soft skills, and that might seem like, okay, well I’m an expert are these that important? They wanna see like, what did you do, where did you work with people so that they can feel more comfortable about your ability to integrate into this non-academic job setting, because the values are really different. And that’s one of the biggest things that we see when you work with people with a PhD in the industrial job market, is that they say, oh, these are the values of my employers.
They might be really, really different than the values that are central to academia. And so that would be what they’re most likely looking for. And then the other thing would be to look and see: What is it that I wanna do and what do most employers expect me to do in this type of role?
And something I would recommend is just go out and look at four or five job postings for the same position. It doesn’t matter what organization. That could be any organization ideally, like somewhat close to the organization that you’re looking at, but you know, a couple of job postings and look and see what are the key skills that they want for this role that’ll help you get to get a better idea of what really matters.
Marlies: That sounds like a really, really helpful strategy. I wanna quickly jump back to the first thing you just said that employers expect you to have some hands-on experience as well, some practical experience because I can feel like a lot of our listeners now kind of shivering and saying, oh, but I don’t have it.
I don’t, I don’t have any hands-on experience outside of university at least. So what can you actually do if that’s your situation and you’ve done your doctorate you can call yourself PhD, but you actually lacking still that practical job experience. How can you land your first job?
Amanda: I’m gonna kind of start off by saying you have hands-on experience. So I’ve never worked with anyone who has zero hands-on experience. You all have so much experience and what we tend to underestimate is, all of the work that you’ve done in your PhD, in your master’s, even in your bachelor’s, you have worked with other people to do things.
So that is hands-on. So where you’ve collaborated with people. Even if you’re, you know, saying, I’m just doing research maybe I’m in the social sciences or the humanities, and I’m maybe even just looking at text and I’m analyzing it. And you say, okay, I can’t really find the hands-on. The hands-on is when you work with other people. In that moment, you are using those skills that you’ll need to do your job later, and then all the other stuff that you’re doing at the university. So when you get involved in let’s say running a colloquium or giving talks or getting together with other students to solve problems in your department.
So you have just this example, it doesn not have to be at a company. It doesn’t have to be in an organization. It doesn’t have to be like a formal hands-on you know work experience because you already have that and it’s just looking for tasks and other kind of things that you can add to what you’re doing right now.
Or you think maybe I need a little bit more practice, then look for something that you can do in volunteering. Volunteering is a really easy way to do this. Get involved in like a student led startup. There’s a lot of them in Berlin. And just, you know, see, can I do this one thing?
Cause I want to try it out and see if I can do it on my own. And that is I think one of the best ways. Internships. You cannot do them in Germany as a student. So this surprises a lot of international PhD students. But if you are a PhD student in Germany, there is no legal or like regulatory framework for you to do an internship.
So you’d have to leave Germany and I actually don’t always recommend that unless there’s something that you really, really, really wanna do and you’re like, I know exactly what it is, and I found somebody that does it, I don’t know, in the UK or in Sweden, and you’re like, I’m gonna go over there and do it for a little bit.
That’s something you could do. But I wouldn’t call it an internship necessarily. I would maybe just think of it as like a, a collaboration or like a, you know, some kind of short work experience.
Marlies: So what I hear you say, it’s mostly about selling yourself better.
So you actually mostly have the experience, you have the skills, you just have to sell yourself in a way and make people believe that you actually do have them. And then also that if you’re still lacking experience, especially when you’re still doing your PhD, when you’re still a doctoral student and you’re not done yet, that you already think about strategically, what do I wanna do in the future? Do I still lack skills for the jobs I wanna apply to? And then try to get those skills, those experiences, by doing internships outside of Germany, doing some volunteering work or some other work experience you can get hold of.
Amanda: Yeah, exactly. PhD students focus a lot on, like, I don’t have a job, I don’t have any work experience.
Anything that you are doing in your life is, is experience and it’s just that you need to be able to connect the thing that you that you want to do to something that you’ve done.
That might be a paper that you wrote internationally with different people, and you had to kind of coordinate maybe as a junior researcher on the project you were responsible for kind of getting everybody to answer, right.
And so you might have been the one that wrote those emails to get everybody to answer, got on the phone and called people. And so using that as an example of your ability to reach out and talk to people or, you know, maybe you got involved in a volunteer project where there were a lot of actors involved and you have experience connecting them.
And it doesn’t have to be work, it doesn’t have to be an official job. It can be anything that is remotely related to your professional experience. So, you know, student stuff, all of that is really valid.
Marlies: I really appreciate your optimistic perspective on that, that you actually just have to look at what you already have. And most of it will be there already.
Now I wanna shift the topic a little bit. I know you don’t have a PhD, but you are a foreigner. You have come to Germany a long time ago, and you have successfully established yourself in the German job market. Would you mind sharing your story with us and let us know how you did it?
Amanda: Yeah, so what I think was really important, this is the thing I always tell everybody, is it is about getting to know people along the way. So that I think is one of the most important things about the story. But when I came here, I was teaching high school in the US and university, and I did curriculum development for the us for the school system I was working in and I came to Germany and I thought, first of all, I’m just gonna take a year. That was my idea. I was gonna take a year kind of as a sabbatical because I was at a really stressful school. Although I really enjoyed, enjoyed my work, but I needed kind of a break. And I came to Berlin and I thought, well, you know, in about a year I’ll go back.
And I just sort of looked around at the time and this is not something that I would recommend that people do, and it’s actually, I would say kind of, it worked out well for me, but it’s something that my clients that I work with in coaching that it can often, you can get stuck, but I just looked and said, what can I do?
Who will hire me? Right? And I ended up doing consulting for a kindergarten company, a company that owned a couple kindergartens, and I would help them to work with the English speaking staff. So I did staff training and I did a little bit of educational consulting. And I also taught English what I was doing in the US and through those things that I was doing I met people who who I ended up working with later.
I met one of the partners who used to be part of my company now when we founded a couple years ago, she’s not with us anymore, but she was involved in the kindergarten. Her child went to one of the kindergartens that I was consulting for. And so I got to know her and she was like, oh, you know, I really wanna work in this intercultural field and you’re an intercultural specialist.
Why don’t we do something together as a project? And I also worked in IT for a little while and it was the same thing I was teaching, I was doing communication coaching, and I was working with the CEO of a company and I ended up just saying, you know, hey, I think I could work in IT.
And I talked to ‚em about it and I ended up working for their company doing consulting in IT for a little while. And I think it’s all about you know, I would not recommend just taking any job because that often doesn’t work in Germany. A lot of foreigners come in with this idea that like any job is good because you’ll be able to convince someone that you’re great and then you’ll move up. And that’s not the case. And especially for people with PhDs, that can be really dangerous. I mean, I guess today is a big word, but I would be very cautious to do that because what can happen is you end up in a job that doesn’t fit your profile and in Germany particularly, people will look at you and say, why did you end up there? What did you do? You know what happened that you are at this job that doesn’t match your profile.
And so I wouldn’t necessarily do that, but I would really look at like, who do you know and who are you talking to? And try things that talk to people and say, you know, hey, I’m interested in this. Because the more that you tell people about what you’re doing and what you’re interested in, the more likely you are to meet somebody and come into contact with somebody who’s interested in working with you.
Marlies: I can imagine that. Yeah. Now, you already spoke German when you came to Germany. How important would you say for someone just finishing their doctorate is it to actually speak German if you are looking for a job in the German job market?
Amanda: So first of all, there are a lot of jobs in Berlin, especially in this tech sector that are in English and in the science sector. So you can work in English. However, there are two kind of aspects. So one is you will be limited to the work that involves people who speak English. So, where you start running into problems will be in situations where there are colleagues or clients who don’t feel comfortable in English.
And this is quite interesting. In Germany there’s a lot of people who don’t speak English that well, and Germans tend to have a pretty strong connection between language competency and this kind of skill level. Germans don’t feel as comfortable speaking English if they think they’re not gonna be really, really good at it. And a lot of people will say, I can do it, but I feel like I am way more of an expert in German and Germany is an expert culture.
And so that’s an issue if you have like a client facing job and then anywhere where you have to interact at your company with departments of the company that are staffed by people with less likely high English skills.
So that might be like, if you’re working with bookkeeping or anywhere there’s a lot of regulations or all that stuff, that’s all still in German.
Marlies: I guess your recommendation would really be to get some German under your hood and probably just start learning German while you’re still doing your doctorate.
Amanda: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s gonna make it easier. You can get by without it if you really work hard. And I always say everything is possible, some things are just like a lot more work and the less German you speak the harder it will be unless you are very technical. So if you’re like, you know, a data scientist or you know, there’s some other fields you can usually get by with without it, but it’s gonna be harder. And then Germans tend to speak German with them.
You know, when they’re alone and you leave them alone, you leave the room, you come back and they’re speaking German. So it’s just easier for you if you learn German
Marlies: And also for your social life, I guess, not just speaking professionally, right?
Amanda: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s so much easier. I mean I would say, if you don’t speak German, there are two Berlins.
There’s the Berlin that is, you know, I would say the deep Berlin that’s in German. There’s all this stuff going on that you’re just not aware of, and it’s not, it’s completely different. It’s like a completely different city. And if you are only doing things in English, then you are in this international community, which is also great, but it’s, it’s not like as deep.
And you’ll also find that you will have a bigger network. And it’s just a lot easier to meet people and to get problems solved. It’s a lot easier to get things done and you’re never reliant on other people which is sort of a, a part of being international, we say it’s a lot higher stress.
If you don’t speak the language the stress level will be higher that you have to deal with over time.
Marlies: It’s worth the stress I have to learn German actually for what I’m getting out of it when I start speaking the language.
Are there departments at the university that actually help me setting me up in the best way possible for the job market, including learning German, but also that maybe help me at university and beyond that help me when I’m looking for a job in Germany that can support me.
Amanda: There’s a career service department at the Freie Universität, and you are allowed to go there as a doctoral student, and they have info sessions and you can contact them. You can also we have a couple workshops in the Lounjee that you can see that we do and we’re probably gonna repeat them.
You can get in touch with the Dahlem Research School directly if you have like questions and you’re not sure who to talk to. And in the BUA there’s a lot of career workshops. The different BUA universities have different resources and some of them have a little bit more career options.
So there’s that. And otherwise what I really recommend if you’re stuck is to, you know, go look at all those workshops, see if there’s one out there that fits you at any of the Berlin universities. Email, the Dahlem Research School and then talk to people in your department because a lot of the departments they do specific things to support your career development. So if you and your cohort, maybe your colleagues in your department need resources, you can always reach out to the Dahlem Research School as a department and say, look, we would really like this support and the Dahlem Research School can recommend trainers or coaches that you can work with.
And that is also a, a really good strategy if you can’t find something that works for you. And finally I do recommend taking a look at the different resources. We’re gonna put some from the website here. We have an interview we did with a welcome office that’s more for people who already work in the university and, and that can be quite helpful as well.
Marlies: Thanks a lot for that, Amanda. We will also link the resources you just mentioned on the website about this episode, so that you don’t have to look for them yourself. You’re gonna find the workshops Amanda just mentioned and also the career service and all that on the website and you don’t have to look for the links yourself.
There are two topics I still wanna mention before we come to an end of this interview. One is, it sounds a little bit complicated. Like if I imagine I would be a foreigner to actually enter the German job market, I need to, to learn German, I need to get used to all the different approaches that Germans have.
So it might seem easier to say, I’m just gonna stay at university. You know, why don’t I just do a postdoc so I don’t have to face all those challenges and I just stay at university. Would you, for someone who doesn’t actually see him or herself having a career at university, would you actually recommend doing a postdoc or would you say: No, there’s some danger involved in that as well, and there actually good reasons not to do so.
Amanda: Let’s start with the statistics. So my, my last number is, and this is not to scare you, it’s just like, you know, we want, we want you to be informed. So we say about 3% of PhD graduates will go on to be professors in Germany. And one of the best ways to increase your chances is to get a junior professorship that’s like something like 40% or maybe even like 70%.
There’s a lot of different numbers that of, of people who do the junior professorship become as a type of postdoc, become professors long term. The junior group leader is also a really good way to kind of get on that tenure track.
Otherwise, I would say the question is how far away is your postdoc topic from the non university job market. So if there is an application for what you’re doing and you think that you could find somebody in industry who would say, yeah, I could imagine that having like a real world use in the non academia world, right? They’re both real, I guess, but the non-academic world that I can go out into industry or in, in, you know, development work and say like, this is something that’s useful, then it’s okay. Then it’s no problem to go on and do a postdoc.
If your postdoc is taking you really far away from an applicable topic, so something that you can really see that somebody would quickly be able to understand, has an industrial application, has an application in NGO work, wherever it is, you see yourself working. That is where it becomes a challenge because the longer you stay in academia, the more employers will worry that you are not going to be able to feel comfortable and be able to adjust to the industrial job market, the values of the industry, which are really different, right?
In industry it’s about making money or maybe even not even just making money, but like creating something with a value, right? So in help and aid work. We’re not talking about like these academic discussions. We’re talking about what can we actually do right now?
And sometimes in aid work, for example, or in development work, the thing you end up doing is not really something that academics would jump in and do. They’d say, oh, we really need to talk about that first, because there’s a lot of, you know, a lot of sides. I’m an anthropologist from my background, so I would say, you know, there’s a really big disconnect between what applied anthropologists are doing in aid work and what anthropologists and academia are writing about. They’re not always, I mean, sometimes they are close, but they’re often very far apart, right? And so if you have these postdocs that are really far away, that becomes a challenge. And so I would really look and see, is my postdoc taking me in the right direction?
And another thing you can think about is you can look for a postdoc in industry or, you know, an industry is not just industry like pharma. It’s also all that NGO and aid work. You can look for a postdoc in what is we call academia adjacent worlds, right? So in science management and civil service. You can also do what I like to call a DIY postdoc, or you find your own funding and then you find an industry partner or you know an NGO partner that you want to work with.
There’s a funding database in Germany. There’s a lot of funding out there. You can look and see if you can find something and you can make a match. And those, those are strategies that will let you stay in academia a little longer.
But if you’re gonna do that, you really, really need to make sure that you’re also building those hands-on skills. So you wanna get involved in other stuff. One example that we have here in the university that I didn’t mention before, is the career day from the Humboldt Graduate School. And that happens every year in February, you can actually get involved and there’s another conference called Incredible Research, which is through the Charité, but again it’s BUA so you all can get involved, right?
And those two events are student organized conferences on different topics. And so getting involved in that is a really good way of building hands-on skills. And, you know, you just show up and you get a lot of support. And I mean, those are really great ways in the career day. Also lets you explore more about careers. So that’s a pretty good, pretty good place for you to be.
Marlies: That’s very good and wise. Thanks a lot for that. Actually, I would like to talk to you about the „Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz“ (German Act on Fixed-Term Scientific Contracts) as well, because especially for people who feel like they wanna stay longer at university, this will be important at one point.
Amanda, could you enlighten me and my listeners? What’s the „Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz“ and why does it matter? Why is it so important?
Amanda: So this is, I think, like very unique to Germany. I mean, there are other countries that have something similar, but so in Germany, the German government doesn’t want you to be in a temporary contract.
They think temporary contracts are bad. And the reason for that is basically all these insurance, like maternity leave, health insurance, long-term care injury insurance, unemployment insurance are all paid by the employer. So when people in Germany are on unemployment one (AGL 1), as we would call it their unemployer paid insurance and the government would prefer that nobody ends up on unemployment two (AGL 2) or what you may have heard of as Hartz IV, right? Because it’s not so great, the government has to then pay for it, right? So the first one is paid by the insurance employer. And the idea is they don’t want anyone on temporary contracts, except they’ve made an exception for a couple of things.
And one of the things that they’ve made an exception for is science. So basically the government has said science, it’s okay. Temporary contracts are okay, but you only have a certain amount of time. And right now, and this is gonna change, they’re discussing the change. But right now you have six years before you finish your PhD. And six years after, and that’s cumulative. Not like the clock starts today, but adding up all the time that you worked in a certain type of job.
And so a lot of the jobs in academia especially the postdoc positions a large, large, large portion of those jobs are „Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz“. So, that means that they fall under this category of jobs and you only have six years and sometimes you can borrow, and if you have kids, it’s longer and there’s like all this stuff that you can do. So what we would recommend is if you’re worried about it, you’re not sure and, and you haven’t finished your PhD, but you’re about to, each employer who is employing you under this kind of law, this exception, they will tell you how much time you have left.
So you can ask them. And again, right now, the clock resets when you finish your PhD most of the time. So you can ask them like, how many, you know, years do I have left? And why is this important? Because basically if you don’t get to tenure track before you run out of time, it makes it very, very difficult because, and again, it depends on the job, it depends on the type of funding.
It’s way too complicated to explain like you know, in a short podcast. But there are positions out there that are science positions that are funded in a way that doesn’t impact this. But a lot of them do use this type of exceptions. So that means you really only have, I would say like, those six working years, once you complete your, your PhD.
If you run out of that time, then you can’t take another postdoc, and that makes it really, really hard for you to, to kind of make that jump to tenure track because those pre-tenure, like the, you know junior professor, the junior research group leader, all of that is usually on this contract.
So if you don’t have any time left, you won’t be able to take on that job. And what we usually tell people to do is if you, if you run out of time and you wanna stay in academia, you have to go abroad. So there’s always kind of this loophole. You can just leave. It doesn’t count. Work done abroad is not part of this this exception.
But it’s just important to keep that in mind because if you’re not aware of it and you run out of time and you really wanna stay in academia, yes, you can go abroad, but we want you to be able to make that decision yourself and not have that decision made for you. And so being aware of it can make you give you permission to make your own decisions.
Marlies: So that’s definitely something you wanna consider, especially if you wanna stay in academia. Amanda, is there anything important that we haven’t discussed yet? Is there anything you would like to add?
Amanda: Maybe one thing. I think it’s really, really important that you sit down as early as you can. Give yourself the gift of the time that you will invest in your own career planning. Even if you have no idea what you’re gonna do, just like make a deal with yourself and say, I’m gonna take some time for me. You deserve this. Like this is your time. Even if you don’t know what you wanna do and you’re not sure where you’re gonna go.
Giving yourself permission to maybe take like half an hour a week or maybe you’re closer to the end of your PhD. Take a little more time. Take like an hour, set yourself some time aside and really spend some time on yourself and don’t wait until it’s done. Don’t wait until you’re finished.
Cause a lot of people mistake or they mix up career planning with applications, those are two different things. So applying for a job, that’s one thing, but deciding what you wanna do, that’s actually like a completely different project. And so give yourself time to spend on yourself and like end up thinking about, you know, what do you wanna do, where do you wanna go?
And you might say, oh, that feels so overwhelming, I don’t wanna do it. But the earlier you start and the more time you give yourself, the less scary it becomes because you can break it down to tiny pieces and you can say, today I’m just gonna start by making a mind map of all the things that you think you might wanna do.
And then start from there and like, learn about those things. Talk to people who are working in the field and the more time that you have, the more likely you are to be able to use the time while you’re still a student to like, take advantage of the university offerings or go take a class or build some soft skills or, you know, sit in on a, a lecture on something that you might need. You can do all this stuff because while you’re a student, you have access once you’re not a student anymore your access is much more limited.
And so we would really recommend I would recommend everyone that I work with recommends take the time for yourself. Give yourself that, that gift, gift of time which just for you where you’re focusing on yourself and what you wanna do.
Marlies: Amanda, thank you very much for your gift of time. Thank you very much for this interview filled with facts, with information, and with great advice and thank you.
Hello again, dear listeners. I hope you enjoyed the interview with Amanda Wichert as much as I did. Remember to explore the resources mentioned during our conversation.
For your convenience you find all of them on our episode’s website together with a transcript of our discussion in case you want to revisit certain parts of the interview. Wishing you a great date and until next time.