Why you will likely never get your dream job

You are not to blame for this. It’s just how things are in the modern world.

However, “likely” is the key part of this. A perfect candidate for the position will be found in any case. The good news is that turning from a good candidate to a perfect candidate is entirely up to you. Most people don’t even try.

Below are my observations throughout my student career where I had to go through quite a painful process of job search. It was a very stressful and draining process that taught me a lot of lessons. Thankfully it had a happy end.

I graduated from university in Hong Kong 1.5 years ago and started off as a software engineer in an investment bank since then. It is absolutely biased to my personal experience, but something tells me my experience is not entirely unique. It is just an honest reflection from the perspective of a student who had to walk through the process of getting real-world job experience.

University does not teach you to apply for jobs

Throughout my journey as a student, I noticed this weird paradox. In university, you have to study. It’s better if you study well. Professors, assignments, exams, rankings, degrees - everything incentivizes you to study and perform well. 

In contrast, almost nothing prepares you to secure a good job after university. This really is one of the core purposes of a university - growing a talent that is able to make a difference in the real world. University can teach you how to be a good professional, but can never teach you to find the right employer. 

It is depressing. You have to fight the deadlines and perform well on your academic degree. At the same time, there is a strange feeling that “probably I am supposed to be applying for jobs as well?” 

The difference between these two fights is that your assignments have deadlines, and your exams have exact dates, but the job application process is so vague that our brain just ignores it until the end. 

Therefore it is solely on a student’s shoulders to navigate the job application process.   

There are more majors in university than types of job positions in the real world 

The bittersweet truth is that the majority of students will not get a job that is specific to their field of study. I have friends doing finance after graduating in marketing or software development after graduating in civil engineering.   

It is not to say that the degree you are pursuing is not applicable in the real world. It absolutely is. Just maybe not in your city or the country you are in. 

That is because cities and countries are not designed to employ a whole variety of specialists. Fundamentally because in still a very globalized world cities and countries are incentivized to specialise in some specific area rather than being moderately good in most of the fields. 

Plus, we change as we grow. Very often the field we chose when we were 18 doesn’t align with our visions at 21. Which is absolutely normal and maybe even great. Because we are in search of what we love. 

It is usually quite hard to move to get a job in a different part of the world in the early stage of post-uni life. Therefore it is very often more comfortable to be at the locality you are in already. 

Therefore it again lies on a student's shoulders to be aware of the economy and job market in their city or a country. 

 The application process is long and mundane

Let’s say you finally find the motivation to apply for jobs and more or less figure out what kind of job is in demand at your place.  

Application process… It's so painful. used to spend half a day applying for a job position just to eventually get rejected on it. 

Students do not have much money in general. So their priciest currency is time. The job application process sucks out time and energy like crazy. 

Students get tired of it. It is just an unpleasant process. So we just optimize for time and send out our CV to a bunch of places and use the exact same cover letter. Which is the number one killer of our chances for success. 

An applicant has to spend a lot of time curating customized application documents and hoping for a chance to get an interview. 

You never apply on time

If you haven’t been applying for jobs likely the best time to apply is now. However, overall it is just really hard to determine when to apply. Let’s be honest, there are just too many companies and we usually tend to miss most of the deadlines. 

Different companies post openings at different times and on different platforms. Maybe even just on their website. With an overwhelming amount of companies, we do not realistically have time to monitor the positions for all of them. 

Most often what happens is that by a miraculous chance we bump into an opening on LinkedIn that is kind of new and kind of still open for applications. In other cases, we just explore opening pages of companies that we know very well. Most of the time it is a very tiring and overwhelming process. We usually miss the companies that could be a great fit for us just because we are not aware of them. 

Skills needed in the actual workplace are very different from knowledge gained in university

Likely the materials you are studying have been out of date for years. Because the real world moves really fast incentivized by lessening costs and increasing profits. The lectures are driven by professors’ willingness to go the extra mile for almost no reward.   

Being good at university coursework can be an indicator that you are potentially a smart and very capable professional but is never an indication that you will land the best job position in your field. Just because there is quite a big gap between the two. 

That does not mean that one should just not care about university work. The university is usually a very nice environment to learn the fundamentals of your field. In addition to that many companies have good grades at university as a minimum requirement. If you are a very good student you have a very good chance of landing the job position, but to be a perfect candidate you need to know what is happening in the real world, be knowledgeable about it, and be able to prove it.  

The best way to prove you have an experience of real-life skills and knowledge is to have an actual prior job experience. Yes, it’s a “chicken and egg” problem. However, producing an egg without a chicken in our case is quite doable. Just start applying now

Is there a solution?

All these problems have been interesting to me since the university times. Thankfully to advancements in AI and Large Language Models specifically it seems these problems are solvable. Solving them will help people find what they truly love and do what they truly love. 

With this motivation, I came up with Joberry Bot. A bot that simplifies the process of job applications for you. 

In the short term, its goal is to drastically reduce the time a candidate spends on job applications. 

In the long term, the goal is to bridge higher education and the workplace. 

It is in a very early “raw” stage of its development. Therefore any kind of feedback, opinion, or suggestion can be useful for us. 

Try it out now: joberrybot.com

Demo:

Update:

I have launched a web version of Joberry Bot called JobMasterAI. It is a refreshed view into job application process. It is free of charge.

Try it out now: jobmasterai.com

Job Board with Internships and Graduate Positions in Hong Kong:

jobmasterai.com/jobboard

Find what you love. Do what you love. 

Apologies for the title of this post. It was just to get your attention to let you understand the depth to which I tried to understand the problem of transitioning from university to workplace. 

You will of course get your dream job. No one can judge you but yourself. 

Find what you love. Do what you love. 

(c)Joberry