Its no secret that Facebook is a great marketing tool when used correctly.

I was a late adopter to this social networking site but already im starting to see the advantages of using it to access a large audience.

If you are looking to further your career through postgraduate studies or are even looking to start afresh into a new career, make sure that you get the timing right!

From my experience, we can get the timing wrong when looking for a start or leave our jobs too early before deciding to go into further study.

The application process of Universities and other colleges around the country occur in the months of June and January.

One of the major issues of looking for work as a young job seeker is where to start.
 

Your head can be in all different places and it can get confusing on how to find the start to the career that you want.
 

Most jobs that are posted on notices, websites, in newspapers and so on require experience.
 

So is there a single best portal to look for apprenticeships, traineeships and junior roles?
 

The quick answer is no. You have to use a combination of resources.
 

Sometimes we have to travel somewhere to start a career. Sometimes we don’t want to. This can be a tricky decision, and one that many people make to start something new.

We should factor this into the decision of deciding what we want to do. For some it isn’t such a large problem but for others it is. Some are adventurous and want to travel but others are just happy to live at their parents considering today’s cost of living.

I have developed 8 steps to career success because as far as im aware, I haven’t found some practical step by step guides to working out what career is best for young people and then how to land a job in that particular area.

This step by step guide is relevant to people looking to start a career from school or for career changers.

It is easy to listen to negative factors in your head when deciding upon a career. Excuses are something we should realise we are doing when we are actually doing it. Making excuses that you cannot do something or don’t have the resources to do it is really your mind playing tricks on you. You have to push past these thoughts.

When it starts occurring, you have to remember your initial goals and persist and believe you can achieve what you set out to do.

A recent study by Graduate Careers Australia has shown Australians that have postgraduate qualifications in 2007 were paid an average of $60,000 in their first job.  This is compared with bachelor degrees, averaging $45,000 per year.

The postgraduate group includes those with a research masters degree or a PHD.

This annual amount was increased by $4000 from the 2006 study.

We have touched on managing your expectations when finding a graduate job in previous articles, however I thought this topic is important enough to warrant an article on its own.

Whether we like it or not, our generation are notorious for wanting everything now. The nice car, the plasma television and the electronic gadgets. What we have to realise is that we must bide our time for these items and the gratification that comes along with a top job.

This can be quite obvious to some, but it is imperative that we actually know what a job involves before launching into it. If the research done doesn’t have a whole lot of depth, it may cause you ramifications down the track. You might have to do some backtracking and retrain into something else some years later, hopefully not making the same mistake.

So how do we start this research? How long should I take in doing it and what should I do? 

It does make sense to talk to people already in established careers.

Many young people ask, ‘im not sure what the next step is’ or ‘I don’t know what im aiming for’.

So the question is, how do we know what to aim for? How do we know what we should do? This is becoming an increasing problem as there are now more and more choices than ever before.

Career counselors always say, ‘to find out what you want to do for a career, you must find out what you like to do’.

Well what if for whatever reason you don’t know what you like to do?