When you realize the career you chose as an undergrad isn’t really the right one for you, the thought of going back to school can be comforting. After all, wouldn’t getting a graduate degree help refocus your career? With the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting a decline in hiring rates, the idea of going back to school might seem like a no-brainer, but reality is never that simple.

If you’re thinking about putting your career on hold to get an advanced degree, consider these five things before making your decision:

Have you been laying pavers of opportunity? Take a look at your social contacts and think hard about your professional ambitions because when you’re trying to advance in your career, it’s all about who you know.

A new friend could get your resume in the door of a company you’ve been following. An old classmate could tell you about an open position at the firm where he works, well before it’s posted publicly.

Networking is the lifeblood of your career. In fact, 40 percent of job seekers surveyed by Jobvite in 2014 found their job through personal connections.

Before you amp up your game, consider what makes for successful networking. The best networkers aren’t just advantaged extroverts, with a lot of social opportunities. They are strategic and carry themselves with a specific mindset.

Adopt these 10 qualities, and you could follow the path to success just by making connections:

Interview tomorrow? You’ve got it covered. You’ll just wing it, answering questions like you’ve done before…except for one problem: “winging it” won’t work anymore.

Today’s workforce is highly competitive. In fact, 85 percent of employers plan to receive more, or at least the same amount, of applications this year as last year, according to Snagajob’s 2015 Summer Hiring survey.

If you don’t take the time to prepare, you could end up committing some of today’s worst interview faux pas by answering questions poorly and completely ruin your chances at being hired.

Here are some examples of what a hiring manager thinks when you respond to interview questions in the following ways:

By now, you probably know that having an extraordinary resume is the key to drawing attention to yourself in the sea of applicants.

It’s daunting, for sure, to try to optimize your job search strategy when the market takes a hard turn. But developing an excellent resume will go a long way in helping you stand out from the competition to secure an interview. 

Here are some of the top resume trends for 2021 to help you get noticed:

You’ve lost the will to carry on in your current job. Not a moment goes by without you thinking about the day you’ll quit — how you’ll compose your letter of resignation, what you’ll say, the sweet satisfaction you’ll have walking out the office door for the last time.

But then, another emotion eclipses all of that benign confidence: fear.

You’re afraid quitting will result in months of unemployment, forcing you to take a temp job below your skill level. Most of all, you’re afraid of looking like a quitter and explaining to every hiring manager you interviewed with why you left.

Trust Your Gut

Scientists have found that our stomachs are superb at detecting threatening situations. New research, published in Science Daily in May 2014, shows the vagus nerve, which communicates information from our stomachs to our brains, heightens our awareness to stimuli such as light and sound. It triggers an instinctual response or “gut reaction.”

So the expression, “trust your gut,” isn’t too far off. What do your instincts tell you? Is leaving a bad employment situation worth a possible shaky career transition? Having the freedom to pursue a career in something you’re passionate about might be.

If you’ve thought it through and decided you want to quit, you can reduce the risk of realizing your worst fears if you have a concrete transition plan in place. Here are a few tips for developing a solid career transition plan, before you pull the trigger on your current job: 

You’re scrambling through old work samples, trying to remember all of those milestones you reached last October. Let me guess, you’re about to embark on the job search again.

It’s been awhile since you’ve been in-between careers. You might have to shake the dust off your old resume. And if you’re online portfolio hasn’t been touched since college, you have a lot of work to do to catch your online image up, to showcase your new, more experienced self.

You could be saving precious time and sending out resumes seamlessly right now if you had done one very important thing — many of us forget to do: keep a running list of your accomplishments.

If you’re on the job hunt right now, it’s likely your name has been Googled at least a few times by employers eager to know more about you.

In fact, nearly half of employers use Google and other search engines to research candidates, according to a 2013 CareerBuilder study.

Hopefully, what they find doesn’t include a photo reel from that one wild night you had after your high school reunion, the saucy selfies you and the girls snapped at the beach, or any other defaming information that could give a questionable impression of your character. However, when googling you, employers want to find more than just a blank slate. They want to get to know the real you.

Based on research, from the University of Texas at Austin published in March 2014, employers seek the following characteristics when researching you online:

You’ve been sending out dozens of applications for weeks, but still have heard nothing.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty common. In fact, 75 percent of job seekers who applied to jobs didn’t hear back from employers, according to data from CareerBuilder’s 2013 survey.

Even so, you’ve been showing your resume to everyone in sight and bemoaning the agony of a job search to your friends. You may think someone should have offered you a job by now. But while your motivation is clearly there, your approach might be spoiling your job search.

Here are four tactics that will ensure your job search will fail miserably and what to do instead:

I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve received asking me to provide a reference for a former colleague. The colleague listed me as one of her professional references, but the phone call from the employer was the first I’d heard of it.

Calls like this catch me off guard, and I have to recall what it was like to work with that person — it may have been several years ago. I hesitate and fumble with my words for a few minutes, which no doubt leaves a poor impression on the hiring manager, on the other end of the line.

If my former colleague had let me know ahead of time, I could have been more prepared to give a first-class recommendation. Don’t make the same mistake with your references.

Let’s discuss the right way to ask for and manage your references, starting with these tips: 

It’s that time of year again — time to clean up, clear out, and start fresh. With springtime fast approaching, it’s an ideal time for job seekers to dust off their resumes and take a fresh approach to how they search for jobs.

While spring cleaning is in full-effect in our homes, it’s equally necessary for your job search. Consider this: spring graduations are just around the corner, meaning an onslaught of new job seekers, hungry for entry-level positions, will be hitting the market.

In an effort to set yourself apart from the competition, while in search of your dream job, here are four areas to consider giving a good cleanse this season: