
MIT Career Development Handbook [pdf] - pagade
https://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/about/files/career-handbook.pdf
======
mcenedella
As the author of the bestselling books on Amazon for both Interviews and
Resumes, I’m pretty impressed. Few university career guidelines are presented
as readably and attractively as this one. It avoids the trap of suggesting
“active verbs” and instead suggests a quite effective list of “action verbs.”
And the summary of the differences between CV and resume are the best I’ve
ever seen.

A really terrific job by MIT Career Development.

My works on the topics as reference:
[https://www.amazon.com/Ladders-2018-Resume-Guide-
Practices-e...](https://www.amazon.com/Ladders-2018-Resume-Guide-Practices-
ebook/dp/B07933JPCG)

[https://www.amazon.com/Ladders-2018-Interviews-Guide-
Questio...](https://www.amazon.com/Ladders-2018-Interviews-Guide-Questions-
ebook/dp/B07BS2V9JH)

~~~
dartdartdart
As a casual lurker of a cool website news.ycombinator.com, please stop
shilling

~~~
dang
The links are relevant, posting them is not a repeated pattern, and mcenedella
has been a good HN contributor for many years. Therefore his comment was just
fine.

~~~
mcenedella
Thanks. I thought the facts were relevant to the comments, and that students
wondering if this were good advice, would benefit from the reference. I’ve
been contributing here eight years so I know moderators and community would
flag anything actually self promoting.

~~~
dang
Self-promotion only becomes a problem here when it's repetitive, and
especially if the thing being promoted is out of context. Otherwise it can
fairly be described as sharing one's own relevant work—obviously a good and
on-topic thing for Hacker News!

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galago
Being attached to the MIT brand makes finding a job a lot easier, regardless
of how your resume is formatted.

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amelius
Nice, but I probably need a career-repair handbook :)

~~~
rzzzt
"Zen and the art of career maintenance"

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hliyan
The "Skill Inventory" on page 9 is in itself an eye opener. I wish I had it
(and pages 10, 11) when I was starting my career.

~~~
dougmwne
The interviewing section starting on page 60 is also great. It's not long on
technical interview tips, but gives good lists of common general interview and
behaviorial interview questions, plus a good list of questions to ask
employers. Running through these in a mock interview or recording yourself
would be nice practice and should help with the soft skills portion of any
interview. I'd think it'll especially help getting through the HR recruiter
gatekeeper. Of course since this is a general handbook for all possible
careers you may want to customize to your industry if you're running a
practice session.

Busniess idea: mock phone/video interviews as a service

~~~
Arkdy
The guys behind Hacker-rank tried something similar in India. Students would
pay to practise interviews with someone from the company they were applying
to. Their challenge was that the difference between what they had to pay an
Amazon/Google engineer for their time and what a student could afford was too
small to be profitable.

They ended up pivoting to giving the students free access to coding
challenges, and changing _the companies_ for a platform to conduct their
technical interviews.

[1] [https://m.soundcloud.com/ycombinator/66-breaking-down-
hacker...](https://m.soundcloud.com/ycombinator/66-breaking-down-hackerranks)

~~~
zoidzoid
Interviewing.io already does this and although you are paired with random
people it works very well to practice

~~~
dougmwne
I can't tell if it's a recruiting agency disguised as a service or really for
the benefit of job seekers. They advertise that 60% of their candidates make
it to an on-site.

Either way though, very cool and exactly what I was thinking, so thanks for
sharing.

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zacharyozer
I used this extensively when I was a student (MIT '07). I sort of assumed all
schools did something like this. I still reference the action verbs (page 31)
when updating my resume.

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yohann305
Opening this handbook, looking at the first pages, it's full of
advertisements. How could you trust this handbook to be objective enough to
assist you in forging your educational path?!

~~~
todd8
I think I understand why the two ads are there, Siemens and iBoss would like
MIT students to consider applying for employment, but how would this
invalidate the information in the handbook? The contents of the handbook look
pretty objective to me.

Isn't the presence of the two ads in the handbook a bit like University
placement offices allowing employers to recruit from the University campus?
University career fairs have all sorts of employers on campus promoting their
companies as places to work.

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jogundas
How about career orientation? Is there a comparably good resource for people
who don't know what they would like to do?

~~~
todd8
Unfortunately, the structure of American universities seem to celebrate all
fields of study equally. While I find the opportunities to learn about so many
different areas quite fantastic, I'm afraid that young students aren't given
enough guidance in avoiding choices that will lead to large debts for little
gain once they graduate.

