Integrating

Integrating: Am I evaluating and communicating my strengths?

Integration is all about evaluating how your efforts to be intentional and integrate went and figuring out what is next. It’s also about reflecting on your growth and learning how to articulate the value of what you have done and learned.

How do I evaluate my experiences and learning?
Giving yourself time to reflect and ask yourself what you have learned and what you still have to learn is a key to your growth and ability to continuously improve:

• Ask yourself, what did I set out to learn and improve? Did I meet my goals?
• Ask people you trust and who can give you honest, helpful feedback! This could be a supervisor, professor, advisor, family member, mentor, or a friend. Ask them to help you identify where you made improvements and where they think you could continue to grow.
• Identify the core outcomes of your experiences. Did you learn to handle hard conversations? Did you learn to listen better? Did you learn to identify reliable sources of information? Did you learn something about your own values, and did it inform your interactions with people who have different values? All of these and many others are the types of competency-based questions you can ask yourself to measure your progress.

Have I done enough? Am I career ready?
Everyone, even seasoned professionals, are always working on career readiness. It is not a destination. Remember, career readiness is an opportunity to continuously build and improve upon a core set of competencies and skills. We can all continue to grow and learn.

How do I articulate the value of my education and experiences in meaningful ways?

• Identify what you can do in clear and compelling ways. For example:
  
  • I can manage difficult conversations by actively listening and asking good questions.
  • I can identify reliable and trustworthy sources of data and information.
  • I can analyze and interpret information in ways that make it clear and understood by a wide variety of audiences.
  • I am always examining my own values. This has helped me better understand myself and has helped me improve my interaction with other people who are different than me.
  • I am improving my ability to conduct research by improving my ability to identify and interpret good source materials.
• Meet with your advisor. Your advisor can help reflect on your coursework and experiences and develop a clear narrative about their value.
• Enroll in HCOLL 310. It is a course that focuses on competencies, how to develop them, and how to narrate their value. It is one credit and is open to all majors.
• Once you have a strong narrative, connect with BYU Career Services to learn how to integrate it into your resume, cover letters, interviews, etc.