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By on September 16th, 2011

Resume Components

The odds are that the resume that you write will have all or most of its components in common with every other resume. Each of these components has a purpose and the overriding directive of getting you an interview.

Heading – The heading is pretty straight forward. It will contain your name, address, phone numbers and email address.

Objective – Your objective statement is a single sentence that describes exactly what type of job you are looking to attain. This component can be considered optional. In my case, I used the objective statement to address the two year gap in my employment. My objective statement:

After spending the last two years completing my B.S. in Computer Information Systems, I am looking for a position in the IT field involving programming and web development.

Summary – Think of your summary statement as a movie trailer that demonstrates your ability to effectively fill the open job position you are applying for. The summary statement needs to showcase your relevant skills to an employer in two or three sentences.

If you have used an objective statement on your resume make sure that your summary and your objective support each other.

Use the keywords that the employer has mentioned in their job posting, in your summary statement. If the job posting is asking for an “object oriented programmer” with “C++” experience, you had better include those two keywords in your summary statement if you want to be considered for the job.

Keywords are the first thing the recruiter or hiring manager is going to be looking for. And if the hiring company is using scanning technology to pre-sort resumes, your resume will not be seen by an actual person if it does not pass the scanners relevancy test.

Experience and accomplishments – The type of resume you decide to create is going to affect the focus of this section. If you are creating a chronological resume, the main focus is going to be on jobs that you’ve had in the past (in reverse chronological order) and your accomplishments in those jobs. If you create a functional resume, this section will focus on the different job functions you’ve performed and your accomplishments related to those functions.

The experience section is where you are going to use the accomplishment statements that you created earlier. Identify the keywords that the employer is looking for and tie them to your specific accomplishment statements. These are the accomplishment statements that you will want to be sure to include in the resume that you give to that employer.

Hopefully you have an abundance of accomplishment statements to choose from. But if you do not, you should include enough of them in your resume that it demonstrates your skill. Including accomplishment statements that don’t directly relate to a keyword that an employer is asking for is fine as long as you have enough accomplishment statements to demonstrate your ability within your field of expertise.

What happens when the employer has a very narrow definition of what they are looking for in an employee? In this case you need to be sure to include not only exactly what the employer is looking for but also include your most impactful accomplishment statements.

Education – List your highest level of education first and proceed down from there. You do not need to list your high school diploma unless that is your highest level of education.

Professional development – In the profession development section you can list any additional training you’ve had. These can be certifications, college classes or other training.

Associations – If you belong to any relevant professional organizations, list them here.

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By on September 15th, 2011

Self Improvement Plan

One of the options you may want to consider while you are unemployed is to take some time to build or create some additional skills. You don’t have to take the huge step I did and complete a four-year degree, but you can take steps that can give you a new skill and help with your job search.

A good place to start would be to take some college classes at the local community college. Local to the Lake County, IL area would be the College of Lake County. Columbia College of Missouri also has campuses in Crystal Lake.

If you decide to take college classes but are unsure where to begin, computer classes or language classes may give you an edge on your resume. The demographic information for Lake County indicates that from 2000 to 2010 there has been a 51% increase in the Latino population. Taking a few conversational Spanish classes could give you an edge when interviewing for a job in which you will be communicating with a lot of people.

If you find that you have a difficult time speaking to groups or in interview situations, you may want to consider joining Toastmasters International. Membership is about $27 every six months and you will gain invaluable experience with public speaking. Another similar program is Dale Carnegie Training. Both Toastmasters and Dale Carnegie will help you with your communication skills.

Another benefit of adding a new skill is that you will now have an answer to the dreaded question, “What is your greatest weakness?”  Interviewers receive all sorts of fluff answers to this question. Just imagine how many “perfectionists” they meet in a day of interviewing. Now imagine how impressive your answer could be if you demonstrate a weakness and show how you have overcome it. For example:

“My greatest weakness has always been my inability to speak in front of a large audience. That’s why I decided to join Toastmasters International. When I first started, I was very nervous on stage. However, after two months of constantly addressing large audiences, I’ve actually overcome the fear I used to have and I even look forward to giving new speeches.”

There are many other avenues that you can take toward self-improvement. You could join local business groups, teach yourself a new skill by purchasing a book or even improve your health by dieting or starting a workout regiment. Whatever you decide to do, make sure you enjoy it.

Searching for a new Career isn’t only about getting hired for another 9 to 5 job. It’s also about getting your confidence back and taking control of your life.

Lake County Colleges
College of  Lake County – http://www.clcillinois.edu/
Columbia College of Missouri – http://www.ccis.edu/nationwide/main.asp?lakecounty
University Center of Lake County – http://www.ucenter.org/
Robert Morris University – http://www.robertmorris.edu/
Lake Forest College – http://www.lakeforest.edu/
Rosalind Franklin University – http://www.rosalindfranklin.edu/
Trinity International University – http://www.tiu.edu/

Communication Training
Toastmasters International – http://www.toastmasters.org/
Dale Carnegie Training – http://www.dalecarnegie.com/events/individuals/

Preparing For Change
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By on September 14th, 2011

Continuing Your Career

Losing your job is a traumatic event. Your life is completely turned upside down in a very short amount of time. And often it comes as a great surprise to you. It’s not often that your employer will give you notice that you will no longer be employed. And when it happens, a lot of emotions will be going through you.

What you know has been ripped away from you and has left a big empty hole of uncertainty. Anger, resentment, fear and confusion are experienced by everyone to some degree.

And the best defense against these emotions is action. You will still have these emotions but when you do, knowing what your course of action is going to be will help you to focus your energy in the right place.

When I was first laid off, shock and confusion were the first things that I remember feeling. How could I be the one they let go? I consistently received the highest reviews. I was the only one who knew how to perform my job. And the general consensus of my peers and manager was that I would be one the last person to be let go.

But it happened anyway. And what gave me an edge was the fact that I had started making plans when I heard that my company would be laying of a large number of people. As unlikely as it seemed that I would be laid off, I knew it wouldn’t hurt to make some plans just in case.

While you may not have the opportunity to plan ahead, making plans before you start your new career search will help you out immensely. This was  part of the career training I received after I was laid off.

Planning

  • Set up a work area that you will do your job search activity.
  • Find a mentor that you can report your progress to. A mentor is just someone that you can talk to that will help keep you on track with your job search.
  • Set time dependent goals for yourself. As an example, you could set a goal of writing a resume template for yourself by next week. Or you could set a re-occurring goal of finding 5 potential businesses to apply to every week.
  • Decide on what method you will be using to keep track of off the details of your job search. Develop a worksheet yourself or use the ones on this website to keep track of the details of each company you interact with so you know what you’ve done and what still needs to be done.
  • Plan your finances. You will need to know how long you can survive on the money you have saved. Before the extreme downturn in the economy, financial advisers suggested having six months worth of income saved. With the new economy, people are often out of work for nine months or longer. Knowing your bottom line financial deadline will help you map out a time line.

Once you have your plan in place, don’t be afraid to adjust it as your situation changes. My plan was to take advantage of my unemployment and finish my Bachelors degree. This was all well and good until I realized there would be a large gap between when I would be able to start classes and the day I was laid off.

This meant my finances would be running out closer to my graduation date than I would have liked. So I did what was necessary and found odd jobs through networking in that interim time period to bring in some extra income. This allowed me an extra months worth of job search time once my degree was complete.

Once you have finished creating a plan of action you should take a good hard look at yourself and determine what you have done and what actions you will need to take to entice employers to hire you.

Assess your skills

  • Identify what skills you have and what additional skills would benefit your new employer. Find out what will really give you an edge compared to other people applying for the same job.
  • Clearly define the accomplishments and results you achieved in your previous job or jobs. These will be used in your resume. Nothing will impress a prospective employer more than reading about an incredibly difficult problem you solved or over the top results you achieved at your previous place of employment.

After you have done a self-assessment, your next step will be to focus on your resume.

Create your resume

  • Decide on the type of resume you will need to create.
  • Add the accomplishments and results you created when you were assessing your skills
  • Adjust your resume to be relevant to each job you apply for.

Once you have a general resume created that you can tailor to each potential job, you should begin your job search.

Job search

  • Define a strategy for your job search activities.
  • Do your research on the companies you have identified as good matches for your skills.
  • Refine your resume to meet each jobs requirements. Include keywords that are brought up in the job posting in your resume.
  • Prepare a one and a half minute introduction speech. This introduction speech should give some background on you and pique the interest of the person you are speaking to. This introduction speech can be used in an interview or anywhere that you have the opportunity to market your abilities.

At some point you will get an interview for a potential job. When you’ve reached this point, you don’t want to drop the ball by not being prepared.

Interviewing

  • Prepare questions to ask the interviewer. You have done your research on the company that you will be interviewing with, now you need to prepare questions for the interviewer based on your researcher. It’s always good to have a few questions prepared to show that you are really interested in the job and that you have an interest in the company itself.
  • Practice your active listening skills.
  • Once you’ve finished the interview, prepare thank you letters for each person you talked with and get them in the mail that day. You want the interviewers to be thinking of you in a positive light when they do decide to hire someone.

After I was laid off and finished my degree, I was blessed enough to receive a job offer with the second company I interviewed with. In today’s market, I’m not sure that would still be the case. Having a plan and sticking to it will help you manage the negative emotions that come with being unemployed and it will help you impress potential employers.

Preparing For Change
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By on September 13th, 2011

Taking Control Of Your Career Search

If your situation is anything like mine was when I was laid off, you feel like your life is in complete chaos. You have an incredible amount to do and you are not even sure where you should begin.

Need vs. Want

You should start by getting control of managing your job search efforts. The first thing this should entail is determining your “need to have a job” date and your “want to have a job” date.

Your “Need to Have a Job” date is the day you are out of money and out of options.  If you reach this date you should have a backup plan for what you are going to do. Your “Want to Have a Job” date should be the last you feel relatively secure. This may be when you have used up 60% of your finances or maybe when you have reached as low as 30%.

Determining these dates will help you to plan accordingly and help to ease the stress of your transition.

Plan Plan Plan

Having a plan in place is the best way to stay focused. A plan will help organize your thoughts and efforts to find a new job. This plan should be written down and managed in the same way you would manage any large project you previous employer had given you.

Set Goals

You will need to set specific goals with specific completion dates. Large goals should be broken down into sets of smaller goals, each with their own completion date.

When I first became unemployed one of my larger goals was to complete my Bachelors degree. There were a lot of steps I had to take to complete that final large goal and for each of those steps I created an individual smaller goal.

First, I had to determine how I was going to pay for my degree. My first choice was to apply for funding under the Trade Adjustment Act (TAA). I also had to work with the school to ensure that I had a proper class schedule that would allow me to work within the TAA’s requirements. I defined each of the steps as an individual goal and managed them as such. Setting realistic timelines and goals are a crucial to the success of your job search.

Schedule Your Time

You are unemployed. But that does not mean that you do not have a job. Right now your full time job is to find employment. Like every other job you have had, this job should be based off of a schedule.

This means that you should be putting in 40 hours of work every week toward your ultimate goal of being employed. You need to have tasks scheduled every day that move you toward the completion of the goals you have set.

Setting your goals to a work schedule will also help to determine when you are falling behind with your goals.

Create A Work Area

Just as important as scheduling your time is setting up an area for you to work on your job search activities. Setting up a specific work area will help to mentally reinforce the fact that what you are doing is as important as every other project you have been involved in for past employers. It creates a mindset of productivity and will help alleviate that “out of work” anxiety that every unemployed person feels.

Part of creating your work area will be to create forms and procedures that you will follow during your job search. These forms and procedures will help you organize your job search in a way that will be easy to maintain.

For example, you might set up a procedure that you will follow every time you find a company that is hiring a person for a job with your skill sets. This procedure could look something like this:

  1. Contact friends and family to see if you have any connections that you could use to help give you an edge in getting an interview.
  2. Contact members of any networks (online or offline) that you belong to and find out if there are any connections you can use within these groups to give you and edge.
  3. Determine the requirements for applying to this company. Do they want a cover letter? Do they specifically request no phone calls? Do they prefer resume’s to be dropped off in person or emailed?
  4. Research the hiring manager. This doesn’t mean you should become a stalker. Try and find out any means of contacting them such as phone numbers, extensions, fax numbers or email addresses.
  5. Research the company.
  6. Adjust your resume so that it focuses on the key points that this employer is looking for.
  7. Send in your resume.
  8. Place a follow up call a week after you submit your resume.

Creating these forms and procedures will help you to keep track of exactly what your status is with each company and person you interact with. Keeping accurate and detailed records will also give you an edge if a company decides to call you after you have been out of contact with them for several months. Imagine how impressive it would be to an interviewer if after talking to you several months ago, you can bring up something in particular that you had talked with them about in the previous interview.

Finding employment is your new job and it should be treated as such. Your job search should be organized like any other project you’ve had in the past. You need to create a plan of action, set achievable goals and create a schedule that will keep you focused on the task at hand.

Preparing For Change
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By on September 13th, 2011

Preparing For Change

Many times when a person first becomes unemployed their initial reaction is to immediately try and find another job by applying to every company that has a job opening. While this may have worked out fine in the past, the current economic situation of the nation and Illinois in particular, inhibits the effectiveness of this path.  The August 2011 unemployment rate for the nation is holding steady at 9.1% while the preliminary July 2011 unemployment rate for Illinois and Lake County are 9.5% and 9.0% respectively.

What this means for the average job seeker is that there is intense competition for every open position. Employers are being flooded with applications from not only qualified job candidates but also overqualified and underqualified job candidates. What this means for you is that, now more than ever, you need to accurately target the career openings that are the best fit for you.

Adjusting

Don’t be afraid to take some time to assess your new situation. Be honest with yourself about your previous job and your previous line of work. Is it a viable industry for you to continue to pursue? What are the industry growth projections? Do you have the skill sets and training necessary to be competitive in your current career path? If not and you are working in an industry with strong growth potential, what other adjacent industries could you target for employment?

Taking Control

You will need to take control of your unemployed state as soon as possible. This is going to require you to plan your path to employment. Setting and achieving goals will be your key to finding a new job. A haphazard job search will not net you the same results that it once would have. The better you organize your search efforts, the more likely you will be to have positive results sooner.

Budgeting

How soon do you really have to be back to work? Most people have at least a rough idea of what their monthly expenses are but not many can honestly tell you exactly what they need to survive. Creating a budget is something you will need to do very soon after being let go. You need to know what your absolute cut off date is going to be for being gainfully employed once again. By knowing this date you can plan your activities accordingly. Keep in mind that in August 2011, 42.9% of people were unemployed for 27 weeks or longer. Knowing your budget cut off date will allow you to determine how aggressive you will need to be in pursuing your new job.

Planning

Creating a plan for your change of jobs is essential. Having a predefined course of action will not only help introduce stability into the recent chaos you have been forced into but it will also give you more confidence in your decisions. Having a plan in place will help you to deal with everything from job interview to networking and will even assist with updating your skill sets to be more competitive. Create a plan or process for every action that you will to need to do during your job search.

Self Improvement

The odds are, there have been many more people in your industry that have been laid off. This means increased competition from increasingly qualified job candidates. Evaluating yourself for improvement has the potential to really pay off in your job search. Any skill that you can add to your repertoire increases your desirability with potential employers. A new computer skill, speaking a foreign language or adding a degree or certificate to your resume has true potential to make you stand out from other job applicants.

You probably had no choice about becoming unemployed. That change was forced onto you by circumstances beyond your control. It’s painful, aggravating, confusing, chaotic and infuriating all at the same time. But don’t let that stop you or hold you back.  Take the time to properly prepare for your job search and you can be one of the few that works your way into a new, successful career.

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By on September 08th, 2011

Adjusting To Change

Back in 2001 when I was laid off from Motorola, they provided free classes to help prepare former employees to find new jobs. One of the first things they taught us was a way to determine how difficult it was going to be to find new work. My goal is to pass this knowledge along to you, so that you can make the best choices possible when determining what career path you are going to take.

During your job search you will have a choice to make. Do you want to stay in the same type of job and industry or do you want to make a change? If you were happy with your last job, you will probably want to stick with the same type of work that you just left.

But what if you were not happy with your last career? Or you may have been happy but the work you were doing is being driven out of existence through outsourcing or obsolescence. Whatever the case may be, the greater the deviation from your last job and industry that you make, the more difficult it is going to be for you to find employment.

During the first day of class of the class I spoke of earlier, I was provided with a model that demonstrated the degrees of difficulty there would be in finding a new job. The farther you deviate from your last career and industry, the more difficult it becomes to find work. The model looked something like this:

  • Same job-same industry, Same job-similar industry, Similar job-same industry – In these three scenarios you will find employment the quickest.
  • Similar job-similar industry, Different job-Same industry, Same job-different industry – You will require some training to find work.
  • Different job-similar industry, Similar job-different industry – Extensive training will be required to find work.
  • Different job-different industry – This will be a very difficult change to make. A lot of training will be required and pursuing this course will take the longest time to find employment.

At the time I was laid off, the dot-com bubble had just recently burst and there was a glut of internet talent out of work that I would have had to compete against. So I had a similar choice that many people today will have to make.  I could have either stayed in my current field and struggled to compete for the few remaining Internet jobs, or I could re-invent myself and choose another career path.

In the end, I chose to get more training and stay within my field of expertise. I believe that is going to be the wiser of the two choices with the current economy and job situation. With the national unemployment rate currently at 9.2% and no improvement in sight, the workers with the most experience in a given field will be hired first.

Preparing For Change
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