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The Department of English & Modern Languages Shepherd University
Spring 2005 Semester Job Workshop #1: Wednesday, Wednesday, February 16, 4:30-5:30
Step
1: Know yourself. To conduct self-assessment, visit the following excellent site from the University of Waterloo.
Understanding Personality and Characteristics
Understanding Career Clusters Finally, you'll want to do a very practical and very short job skills analysis. Be sure to print this page out and keep it at your side when you are creating your resume for the next workshop! You might also want to consider some of the "Job Horoscope" career assessment links from WashTech (the online technical industry publication from the Washington Post). Step 2: Find a job that interests you. While you might not be ready to apply for a new job today, you should already be thinking about the types of jobs you'll want to pursue when you finish your education. If you spend time now learning how to find outstanding jobs, how to research potential employers, and how to use your educational experiences to become the ideal candidate for these jobs and organizations, you'll be much further ahead of the game than your competition! Before you visit an online job board or peruse the classified ads, give some careful thought to the type of job you are seeking. Return to your self-assessment for a moment. Then plan your job search, coming up with as many keywords, skills, job titles and categories as you can. You might want to look at Monster's tips on searching, as well as "Finding a job" (developed by Shepherd University Technical Communication students), to get some tips on coming up with keywords and job titles. Now that you have a sense of the type of job you might be seeking, you can experiment with a variety of online job boards. Shepherd University Technical Communication students have created a guide to "Locating job listings." I suggest exploring at least one national job board (I highly recommend Monster.com), one federal/government job board, and one local job board (either the D.C. area, a local W.V. job board, or a job board from another area where you plan to relocate). Use the key terms, job functions, and other items that you developed above to search for jobs on the particular online job boards you've chosen. As you choose the job you want to target, give some thought to what matters most to you in landing a job. Finally, you need to learn about the company or
organization to which you'll be applying. The best applications are written
by people who have learned something about the company and have considered
the ways in which they would make an excellent addition to the
organization. To learn about the organization or company you've selected,
you can use the following company research tools: Return to Senior Capstone Guidelines. Move on to Workshop #2: Creating effective application letters, resumes, and portfolios. |