You know, the one in your head about the ideal person you’d like to be.

By 25 I’ll have my own apartment and a dog.

When I’m 25 I’ll have enough money to go travelling.

MY POINT IS this: we set ourselves goals in life, they might not even be things we write down, or even say out loud (or write on a national blog for thousands of people to read because you have no shame). Whether it’s something like “get my first full time job at 23” or “I’ll be married before I’m 38”, these goals are usually ones that don’t work out, or, at the very least, don’t work out right on schedule.

Setting these major life goals can be tricky, because you don’t know what life has planned for you, and while having aspirations is great, make sure you don’t set these expectations for yourself to heavily in stone – allow yourself the breathing space to let life take its place. Ride the wave. Let it be. All those clichés.

Now I certainly don’t mean that you shouldn’t set goals, there are&nbsp;definitely some things you should have nailed&nbsp;by certain points in life, but these aren’t difficult tasks – they’re more like basic adult behaviours that you should have adopted. If you’re coming up to graduation, here are a few life skills to have nailed before you get there.

Adults are the most guilty of this. When we get sick we tend to power through and pretend it’s not happening for as long as possible until the influenza takes hold and you find yourself clutching your pillow with a fever that makes you hallucinate – *deep breath*. You’re not superhuman; you’re not about to overcome your sickness by pretending you’re healthy. Allowing your body to get sick and recover is important – rest is one of the most important parts of our lives that we neglect when we’re busy and stressed out, and when we get sick, ignoring the necessity for rest can just make it worse. Slow down, accept that you’re sick, drink tea and go to bed.

Know how to cook at least&nbsp;one&nbsp;thing

None of us have to be stellar sous chefs in this day and age. Most of us live near a handful of restaurants that deliver, and takeout food is the staple diet of any uni student who can’t rub two $10 bills together. I get it, I’ve been there. I’ve eaten the weird ramen that gave me food poisoning and returned to the same restaurant that same month. I’ve done the mileage to know that having&nbsp;one&nbsp;solid meal you can cook for yourself is a skill. Master a stir fry dish that incorporates some vegetables and some meat, whip it up once a week and you’re feeding yourself for at least a few days. It’s cheap, it’s healthy, and if you’re heading toward a new job after graduation, it saves on time.

Stop making spelling mistakes in your cover letter

Come on man. You just did a university degree where they no doubt cut marks off your grade for each spelling mistake they found in an essay. Spelling mistakes at uni cost you marks, but a spelling mistake in a cover letter costs you a job. The job hunt is hard – believe me I know. It took me 8 months and 236 applications before someone hired me – and that was&nbsp;without&nbsp;spelling mistakes in my cover letters. Slow down, read the job description, write a&nbsp;tailored cover&nbsp;letter to that employer and proof read before sending. “Great attention to deetail” isn’t a good look, and you’re more than capable of landing the job if you take your time to get it right.

&nbsp;We’ve all done it – we all have some idea of where we’d like to be at the age of 50, who doesn’t? So it’s understandable that we set these expectations of ourselves to hit a milestone when they come around. Goals like these are great, it means you’re ambitious and you know what you want, but it can go one of two ways: either you reach your goal and give yourself a big high-five, or you see the deadline looming and start to panic about how far you really are from the person you wanted to be. The sense of urgency to meet these deadlines puts a lot of pressure on. This pressure is entirely self-inflicted, and it can lead to some pretty bad quarter-life crises if you don’t happen to be where you thought you’d be at this age. The important thing to remember is this: you owe it to yourself to let young adulthood take its place – you’re not meant to rush it.

I mean yeah… definitely make sure you know how to iron a shirt and cook a halfway-decent meal for yourself, but these are things you’ll learn in time. And if you’re headed straight toward graduation you only have to keep moving forward to hit that nail on the head. You’re graduating, and that’s what you came to uni to do. It’s a great big world so enjoy the victory and look forward to the next one, regardless of how old you are when you get there.

You don't need to be totally nailing life when you finish uni, but there are a few big life skills you should have under your belt before you graduate. And don't worry, they are totally achievable!

Things You Should Have Nailed By Graduation

If you’re in the market for a job that gets you off the ramen diet, read on. There are a lot of ways to screw up a cover letter. Don’t let this put you off writing one though, they are super important to landing a job, and your resume is almost useless without one. While anyone can write a cover letter, you’d be surprised how many people make the mistakes I’m about to list. If you’re one of them, no judgement, just edit it for next time! Here are the biggest mistakes you can make when writing a cover letter.

Duh. It’s almost impossible to find a job advertisement nowadays that doesn’t ask for a cover letter, so if you haven’t written one, get writing. A cover letter shows that you’ve made an effort to tell the employer how you believe the job suits you best – if you haven’t submitted one they will assume you don’t care. Immediately in the trash pile. Don’t be in the trash pile.

Nothing, and I repeat –&nbsp;nothing&nbsp;is worse than reading a cover letter with spelling mistakes in it!&nbsp;Please, please, please&nbsp;read it before you click ‘send’! Spelling mistakes tell the employer a lot about you. Either you’re:

Like anything in life, check your work. I repeat: don’t be in the trash pile.

The job ad asks you something specific, and you miss it

You can tell someone how you’re ‘detail oriented’ until the cows come home, but if you don’t read the job ad carefully, all of that means sweet nothin’. Many job ads will try to be sneaky and put something in the description about what they want to see in your application. Examples could be:

If you miss these things, you’ve pretty much shot yourself in the foot. Do yourself a favour and read the description carefully, it’s the difference between being employed and unemployed.

Sure, include a photo of yourself if you want, but your appearance should have no bearing on your ability to do a job well, so usually I leave my photo off the resume altogether. However, if you’re one of those people with one good headshot that you use on all your resumes and blow up to take up a whole corner of the page, maybe reign it in, yeah? They’ll know what you look like in the interview, save your time and effort for the words on the page, your photo won’t distract them for long.

List qualifications that have nothing to do with the role

If you’re going for a job as a doctor’s office receptionist don’t tell them about all the times you made coffee at Gloria Jeans. Sure, customer service weighs in to the equation there, but don’t list off your abilities to Windex windows and sweep a floor. It’s irrelevant and it wastes their time. Lots of jobs are competitive, and if you don’t get to the good stuff straight away, guess where you’re going? Trash pile. Because it’s trash now.

If you’re rocking a&nbsp;<a href="mailto:my_chemical_romance_rulz@hotmail.com" target="_blank">my_chemical_romance_rulz@hotmail.com</a>&nbsp;email address, you do you, but maybe make a more professional one for this, ya feel? While I’m sure your love for MCR is unparalleled and they probably spoke to you on a deeper level when skinny jeans were the height of sophistication, tuck that baby away for your spam mail because it won’t look great at the top of your cover letter.

Cover letters aren’t that daunting once you get started. Just list what’s relevant to the role and make sure you check your work before you send it anywhere! Take your time and concentrate. Once you write one good cover letter you’ll be able to adapt it to lots of job applications.

While anyone can write a cover letter, you’d be surprised how many people make crucial mistakes. Here are the biggest ones you can make when writing a cover letter, to help you avoid them.

The Cover Letter: What Not To Do

“So what are you doing after your degree?”

There is nothing so frustrating as someone who asks you about your life goals. The whole&nbsp;where-do-you-see-yourself-in-five-years&nbsp;conversation is something I actively avoid.&nbsp;

When you get to your final&nbsp; year of uni, you start to realise the imminent approach of *~adulthood~*. Yes, your 18th&nbsp;birthday meant you could buy alcohol, but finishing uni means you have to sort your life out, and that’s terrifying. Up until now you were probably lapping up the sleep-ins, cheap on-campus food and rent that included the utility cost. It’s alright to have a little bit of an inner-crisis when this happens. And it’s understandable. Up until this point, no one had taught us how to prepare for anything. Our entire lives up until our university degrees was in a lead up to getting&nbsp;accepted into&nbsp;a uni. The final-year freak out makes total sense.

If you’ve been living on campus up to this point, which a lot of you are, here are a few ways to prep for the full-time working world – and how it’s different from what you’re used to.

The job market is competitive, flooded and a moving target. You need to be in the right place at the right time, and you have to be better than the cohort of people who apply. If you live in a city like Sydney or Melbourne, it almost comes down to chance. You need a whole lot of things to come together to put you in the most favourable position to land a full-time job. It’s a hard thing to break into, especially if you’ve never worked full-time before – you need to convince someone you’re capable. So don’t take no for an answer. Tell them why you’re the best.

If things aren’t happening fast enough for you, just relax a bit. When I was looking for full-time work, I was desperate to break into the industry I wanted, and when it took more than two months I started to get frustrated. By the time I landed the perfect job it had been 10 months since I started looking. If you start freaking out early you’ll wear yourself out. Just brush the rejection off and get back in the race.

Not really anyway. The older we get, the more we realise how unsure adults are in their own life decisions. Our parents might have seemed like the most organised and put-together people we knew when we were young, but we’d be wrong if we thought that now. Don’t assume that you’re the only one in your circle who is flailing about looking for a way into the industry – everyone goes through the same thing, and it’s called life experience.

You’ll very quickly realise why adults always told you to eat your veggies and go to bed early. I’m 23-years-old and I&nbsp;love&nbsp;the thought of getting an 8-hour sleep. The first thought you will have after finishing a big day at work is “oh god, I need to cook dinner.” If you’re getting into a fast-paced industry, plan your week. You’ll thank yourself when you come home and find pre-prepared meals during the week. It sounds boring as hell, but you’ll get to bed faster, and nothing could be better than that.

When I was about to finish my degree it felt like I was about to go over the edge of a cliff. The experience is much less of a plunge. Things move slowly. Everything you do to set yourself up in the real world happens in stages, and you’ll have time to prepare. You might have an expectation of where you think you should be, but don’t let that define how you approach the path – allowing things to happen gradually will get you to where you need to be. Relax&nbsp;

When you get to your final  year of uni, you start to realise the imminent approach of *~adulthood~*. Here's why it is totally normal to feel a little stressed, and how to calm that stress and move forward.

The Final Year Panic, And Why It's Normal

Unpaid internships seem to be a necessary evil.

Especially if you’re in a competitive industry like media or arts. The question that’s plagued mankind for centuries is the ‘chicken and the egg’ scenario. You need experience for a job, but you&nbsp;<a href="http://groupclv.com/blog/the-job-hunt-why-youre-getting-knocked-back/">need a job</a>&nbsp;to get experience.

Having been through the intern mill and spat out the other side a slightly more experienced but definitely more out-of-pocket graduate, there are a few things you should know if you’re in the market for some *~life experience~*.

A lot of companies will advertise for their internship positions, and if you’re somehow in with a one-in-a-bazillion chance of being paid for your hard work, don’t read any further. Congrats. There are a lot of great companies advertising for interns that promise a decent program of fast-tracked experience so you can dip your toe in the industry. These are the best ones to aim for.

Yeah, sorry… That’s the nature of the beast, unfortunately. In the current job market, most uni students will need to have&nbsp;some&nbsp;kind of experience before they can be trusted to get paid for what they do. This, in my personal opinion, isn’t fair. Volunteering is a great thing to have on your resume, and I would encourage anyone to do this, but there is a difference between working the hard slog hours for no benefit, and volunteering for a good cause. Be mindful of what they are asking for before you agree to an internship. Some people can bend the rules. Read more about your rights as an intern&nbsp;<a href="https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay/unpaid-work/work-experience-and-internships" target="_blank">here</a>.

Make sure you’re working on projects that directly link to the job you want

I started an internship with a start-up fashion label with two employees. I realised after three weeks of work that I was teaching them. If you have to do an unpaid internship to further your career, make sure you’re picking one that will teach you something. It’s not worth your money and time if you can’t get something in return for your hard work.

No one can work for free forever. It’s just not realistic and you shouldn’t be made to work for free for a long time. A lot of internships will be an average of three months. Some companies fast track it into two weeks if you want to do it on full-time hours. Either way, set yourself a limit and stick to it. Fulfill what you have committed to and finish up with a good reference. That’s what the internship is for.

It can be really hard to keep up motivation for an internship if you’re not getting paid. But there is nothing worse than not making an impact in a workplace – no matter who you are. An unpaid internship could&nbsp;<a href="http://groupclv.com/blog/doing-the-interview-with-a-little-more-confidence/">turn into a paid role</a>&nbsp;in the company, and that makes all the hard work and unpaid hours worth it. If you come in to the office and do the bare minimum required, you won’t look any different from the other interns, and that’s not why you’re there.

<a href="http://groupclv.com/blog/5-super-weird-ways-to-reduce-stress/">Don’t stress too much</a>, most of the time internships are pretty fun and you’ll learn a lot in a short space of time. Just make sure you know exactly what you want on your resume before you start working for free. If you work hard and impress them you’ll get a good reference and be one step closer to your career&nbsp;

Internships: How To Spot The Good From The Bad

As a uni student moved out of home, you may be looking for a job to support your new independent lifestyle. With all the noise of today’s world, it’s important to stand out when adding your resume to the pile and doing so can be much easier than you might think. With a&nbsp;less is more&nbsp;approach, your resume can become more appealing visually, whilst also packing a punch in substance! Here’s some tips to revamp your cover letter and resume before you send them out under the lights and into the ring!

Sending in just a resume alone by itself is no way to make your future employer feel special. By including a cover letter, it shows that you don’t take shortcuts and lets them know that they’re not getting another cookie cutter application.

Share what really interest you about the role and the company. This is an opportunity to highlight that the role means more to you than just a financial income. Touch on the learning and growth opportunities that it can provide, showing them that you’re thinking long term and the value you can bring to the table over time.

Address the required essentials

This is so simple yet so powerful! Address the&nbsp;required&nbsp;essentials in your own words but also be truthful in what you can actively bring to the role. For example, ‘good organisational and time management skills’ may be listed as an essential. This can be addressed by stating that you have ‘effective time management skills with a distinction average across all 4 subjects in first semester of uni’. Dot point these against each required essential listed that you can deliver on and provide a truthful example where applicable.

Make sure to fit everything under one page. If you’re going over, get decluttering and cut some parts down. Less is more.

By having an objective statement, you’re providing a quick snap shot of exactly what it is you’re after. Make sure it’s relevant to the job position being advertised and fine-tune it where required.

Don’t just list your previous work experience, outline what you achieved in those roles. For example:

Sales assistant at xyz clothing – Developed a simple and effective script for new team members on dealing with common challenging situations.&nbsp;

You want to showcase your highlights in each role and communicate that you did more than just the bare minimum.

If you don’t have experience or have big gaps between employment, turn it into a positive. For example,&nbsp;During that year I decided to focus on my studies and through that I built my confidence in working with teams and managing multiple deadlines. This is something that you’d more likely address in the interview.

Every other resume has the same basic set of skills listed like&nbsp;good communicator,&nbsp;reliable&nbsp;etc. To take yours a step up from the rest, reinforce your skill with a punchy example of when you demonstrated that ability. For example,&nbsp;Excellent problem solving skills&nbsp;–&nbsp;Achieved distinctions across three University research assignments.

No matter what kind of job you’re applying for whether it’s in line with your course or just something that’s available and convenient for now, there’s always something great that you can learn from it. Every job can be a stepping stone towards your dream career if you approach it with the right attitude.

Here are some tips to revamp your cover letter and resume before you send them out under the lights and into the ring!

Quick Tips To Help Your Cover Letter And Resume Pack A Punch!

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Things You Should Have Nailed By Graduation

The Cover Letter: What Not To Do

The Final Year Panic, And Why It's Normal

Internships: How To Spot The Good From The Bad

Quick Tips To Help Your Cover Letter And Resume Pack A Punch!

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