Live Ammo!

 

Thanks to Professor Terry at Pepperdine for providing me with a platform to present some of Career Secret Sauce to a real audience of college students (AKA Live Ammo).

From my perspective, three of the things struck home:

1. The combination of a shrinking job market, college loans, and the evaporation of social security really caught their attention. They realized that they were about to face total responsibility for their life and career.

2. The idea of working multiple internships as the BEST WAY to land your first job hit home. Although the students were mostly underclassmen, it seemed that my message was a call-to-action. Based on the questions I recieved it looked like most of them would be accelerating their plans to pursue an internship.

3. Although there is never a good time to relocate to the geographical region of your dreams, there is no better time than immediately following graduation.

I also want to thank the 60 students who attended my two speeches. I found a new tool that should provide hours of “what if” analysis when you start your search for where to work. It’s called Get The Job and it can be found at http://www.getthejob.com/default.aspx. I have also posted it on my blog roll.

Finally, there were a lot of questions about interviewing for an internship. I found this article that does a nice job of discussing the “tone” your resume should present. I think the same can be said for your personality when interviewing.

Dave

5 Personal Qualities Every Resume Should Demonstrate

Employment Digest has an interesting post on the qualities that potential employers want to see, and how these qualities can be translated on a resume.  Among them: ·         Communication Skills: For example, the phrase “Ability to be persuasive when interacting with clients, junior colleagues and CEO both in person and via telephone and e-mail” or  “Wrote clear, informative and effective guidelines to ensure successful project execution.” ·         Motivation/Initiative: For example, the phrase “Set and achieved challenging goals while demonstrating persistence, commitment and dedication” or “Identified and implemented ways to improve and promote quality through accuracy and thoroughness.” ·         Leadership: For example, the phrase “Inspired, motivated and incentivized a team of talented professionals performance” or “Monitored, evaluated and enhanced individual and team performance.” ·         Flexibility/Adaptability: For example, the phrase “Adapted to changing needs of individual business units” or “Followed company guidelines and instructions and adapted rapidly to management directional changes.” ·         Organizational Skills:  For example, the phrase “Planned and prioritized to ensure that set deadlines are met” or “Coordinated and scheduled colleagues’ work.” I appreciate the spirit of this post, because it’s always important to consider the point of view of the employer when crafting a resume, and these are qualities that most, if not all employers, would look for.  However, I do feel that these examples are a bit vague.  What challenging goals did you set, and how exactly did you achieve them?  What specific things did you do to motivate your team to perform?  What was involved in scheduling your team’s work? Remember that employers want to see concrete examples of how you were able to contribute to a former company, and how the organization was better off as a result of the work that you performed.  This means that in addition to describing attractive qualities and skills, you will want to use hard numbers and statistics that show quantitative change.