Today’s post is written by Carrie Cress. Carrie graduated with her MBA degree, but without a job. Rather than panicking, she started teaching job search seminars at her local community college, which led to a full-time professorship job that she loves! Congrats Carrie!

Making the choice to invest in your future by earning an advanced degree is always admirable and seldom easy. What you do know and can control is that learning advanced skills will make you more marketable and valuable to employers. What you don’t know and cannot control or predict is the future. The job market fluctuates, your spouse may have to move for a job or you may even change your mind about the career path you are pursuing.

The future is uncertain, that’s for sure. If you graduate with your newly minted advanced degree in hand, but your field or the world is not quite ready for you yet, don’t get frustrated; instead, focus on the skills you used to get into and succeed in graduate school and put these skills into practice once again.

Use Your Graduate School Experience to Achieve Success

Whether you earn an online MBA degree or you graduate with a degree in human services, education, or some other field, you have invested a tremendous amount of time and, in most cases, finances, to furthering your education. You had to get creative right from the start about how to fit studying, classes, finals, internships, networking and other new activities into your life.

You had to create a budget, find the funding for your education, and make long-term commitments to lenders. There is a reason why not every person who desires to return for an advanced degree actually does it. You already have special drive and skills that set you apart from colleagues and competitors — your graduate school diploma proves it. So once you’ve graduated, it’s time to get into action once again. Consider trying any of these five innovative ideas for inviting your dreams to come right to you.

5 Action Steps Toward Your Dream Career

You probably did not enter graduate school blind — that is, you probably had a concept or working idea of what type of career you would like to pursue once your education was complete. But what you may not have yet had time to explore fully is all the ways your goal could come to fruition.

Here are five interesting, creative tactics for making your dream career come true:

1. Sell yourself. There is nothing stopping you from creating your own dream position and pitching it to the employer you want to work for. This tactic puts you in a position of strength to present yourself as an innovator and leader who will do whatever it takes to achieve success. Whether your pitch works or not, the employer will likely want to do what it takes to find a place for you to join their team.

2. Pretend every pitch is a home run. There are many stories of couples that went out on a first date and didn’t expect to like one another, and then they ended up getting married and are living happily ever after. For every interview you go on, just pretend like it is “the one.” Who knows — you might find out that it is!

3. Do it yourself. Small businesses are critical to the health of America’s economy. With your advanced degree in hand, you are already well-equipped to succeed in an arena where only 20 percent of new businesses typically survive their first five years. Use your advanced degree to do what everyone around you only dreams of accomplishing.

4. Give your expertise away. When you volunteer in your area of expertise, there is no telling whom you might meet. Perhaps the CEO of your dream company is passionate about that cause too. Or maybe you will meet someone who is an innovator like you and you will decide to start a company together. Everything is possible when you decide to give your skills away to deserving others.

5. Network. If no one knows what you are looking for, you won’t have a very good chance of finding it. Perhaps someone is in a position to help you — and perhaps later you might be in a position to help them. People don’t just network to help themselves. They also engage in networking because it simply feels good to help others.

With these innovative tactics, you can be on your way to a job after graduate school!  Good luck!