How to gain more work experience?

It seems like even entry-level corporate jobs require several years of professional experience in 2014. How are students entering the workforce expected to gain work experience?

• Answer:

  They are expected to work for free to gain that "required experience" before they may gain access to the coveted "entry-level" job. But in all seriousness, you highlight a two-sided problem: employers want/need to get moving faster, and don't have/want to spend the time/resources training new hires. Couple that with the tight economy and you've got an employer's market. Then there's the fact that our educational institutions have been woefully ineffective at adapting to the new reality of the job market - on the whole, we're still graduating students through a system that worked pretty much along the lines of "get a degree, get a job." The reality is much closer to "get a degree, get experience, THEN get a job" - that may sound like common sense but our learning institutions are doing a piss-poor job at integrating this kind of mindset and the opportunities to nourish it into the learning curriculum, and are saddling graduates with more debt to boot. If you're still in school, the obvious answer is: you MUST go get experience! Its maddening yes, because the idea that any 18 year old-ish person has even a remote idea of what they want to do with their career is absurd, but the reality is that experience has to start somewhere. If on the other hand you are unfortunate enough to have graduated without the benefit of the aforementioned experience, well the reality is this - you'll have to pick up a job for which your degree woefully unprepared you for but for which you (probably) believe you are woefully overqualified for (think, BA holder working a Starbucks). You will have to find a way to make ends meet while picking up the necessary professional experience in a no-doubt unpaid internship for a few months to a year until you have the ability to actually speak to the basics of the job you're hoping to apply to. And you will have to network your ASS off. You will have to do things for many people, be helpful, and develop your skills while getting nothing in return. At the end of this you will hopefully have a job that is decent. Is the system messed up? Yes. The millennial hating you see such as "those entitled inexperienced young-ones" won't help either, but you've just got to roll with it until an opportunity arises.