Career advice for emerging planners

The AZ Chapter of the APA has crafted a remarkable guide of Career Advice for Emerging Planners. The guide includes results from a survey of professional planners and presents both qualitative and quantitative results.

Some of the results are presented as quotes, such as:

“Learn technical skills, don’t accumulate titles or pieces of paper in school.” - Oklahoma City, OK

While others are numbers: 86% of respondents said that the most important characteristic to consider was "internships and transferable skills/ experience to specific position."

Perhaps most interesting to me was the last page as a giant table of skills as evaluated by potential employers. The top two, by a distance, were written communication and public speaking. No surprise. But number three is Mapping (e.g., GIS) which is also no surprise, but a point worth emphasizing to students who still have a few classes left.