The Center for Career Development (CCD) offers a wide range of services, including workshops, resume and cover letter reviews, mock interviews, individual appointments, career fairs, employer information sessions, and much more.
In addition to these virtual and in-person offerings, students and alumni also can access a diverse suite of online career resources. Our “Cool Tool” series will introduce you to tools that you can take advantage of anytime online. In this post, we’ll cover Candid Career!
What is Candid Career?
Candid Career provides accurate, honest, and current career information and career planning through video. Their easy-to-use website has thousands of 1-2 minute video interviews with real industry professionals across many industries, companies, and positions. These professionals share their job descriptions, backgrounds, and advice for education, training, skills, and experience necessary to get hired. Candid Career publishes hundreds of new career profiles every year, so we encourage you to visit the site periodically to see what’s new.
Why use Candid Career?
Candid Career is particularly helpful as you’re exploring careers. One of the ways you can improve your understanding of career options is hearing from professionals in roles, fields, and organizations of interest to you. These videos can help you discover fields you didn’t even know existed! You can consider how what you’re learning fits with what you know about yourself and your career goals.
While there’s a lot of value in having live career conversations or informational interviews with professionals and we regularly encourage students and alumni to do so, there are also unique benefits of checking out the career videos on Candid Career to gather information and insight.
- The videos are only 1-2 minutes long, so you can easily fit them into your schedule.
- Candid Career has already taken the steps to identify professionals, interview them, and package their interviews into shorter, topical video clips. All you have to do is tune in!
- Not only will you learn about careers, you’ll also learn how to have your own career conversations. You’ll get ideas of questions to ask, gain background knowledge in areas of interest, and become better prepared and more confident!
Lastly, you also can use Candid Career to deepen your knowledge of career-related topics with their “Get Hired” section, which includes videos on resume writing, interviewing, networking, mentorship, career fairs, internships, grad school, and much more. Some of their recent featured videos are “LGBTQ+ Rights”, “Transferable Military Traits”, and a “Disabilities” channel, which covers landing a job, inclusive companies, disclosure, and more.
How to find and use Candid Career?
You can access Candid Career through Handshake. Once you’re on the site, you can navigate to the “Get Hired” and “Explore Careers” sections and browse by advice topic, industry, career title, or college major to see what kinds of careers might align with your academic background. You also can search the site by keyword or you can conduct an advanced search and filter by career title, major, college attended, city, state, or company. There are even videos from a few BU alumni in the library!
Lastly, when you’re watching videos, keep an eye out for links in the description to additional career exploration resources that will provide information on salary, industry outlook, and more.
Learn more about Candid Career
To learn more about Candid Career, you can watch this 3-minute video to get started.
To learn more about the CCD’s online resources, you can see our list of offerings on our homepage and you can visit our Handshake resource library.
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