Method 6, Job Fairs and Method 5, personal enrichment

The long beach job fair is coming up next Monday!

Though most of the companies are insurance or financial services (can anyone say cold sales?) There were a few in which I'm interested.  So, it's time to update the resume!

I have two resumes that I consider 'general', one for marketing, and one for coordination.  I use these for career sites and for jumping off points for resumes customized to job postings.  And it's high time I give them a revamp!

Because none of the employers in which I'm interested list positions, it'll be a bit of a guessing game as to what to put on the resume.  My plan is to put in those experiences which I would like to duplicate.  I plan on communicating what I want out of a job to the employer based on what I put in my resume.  Of course, I'll be a bit selective about which employers I give which resume, those that I suspect might be looking for salesmen I'll be more likely to offer my coordination resume, and those that I think might have a career path that starts with marketing I will give the marketing resume.

Of course, Long Beach is about an hour and a half away from Irvine, meaning most of the companies are not located near enough to my apartment.  But as they say, practice makes perfect!  In attending this fair, I'll be more than ready for the Orange County job fair on the 27th.

I plan on passing out more of the coordination resume due to my personal interests and strenghts.

And in preparation for any potential interviews or meetings, I checked out a book from the library; Doing Business In China.  Come to find out I should have checked the copyright date; 1994.  Suspecting that there may have been some changes in the past decade and a half, I purchased another book (Strategic Asia) from the local university bookstore.  This purchase was only $1, and contains information from as recent as 2007!  Not exactly bleeding edge recent, but a little better than 1994.

Wish me luck on my resume updates!

Beth

Method 1: Job Postings, Method 5: Personal Enrichment

While patrolling my common job posting boards, I found an interesting listing.  One that the job didn't seem to match up with the requirements.  By this I mean the job looked to be much higher level than  the requirements would dictate.

Sure, I'd love to be a management consultant to fortune 500 companies all over the world, but are you sure that I only need 1 year of work experience and a bachelor's degree to do that?

Intrigued, I investigated further.  Turns out they have an internship program, which in turn leads to an associate consultancy, and eventually full on consultancy, with a path into the company's upper management.

Cool!

I can do an internship, and I certainly fit their criteria.  So, after about 3 hours of collaborative work on a cover letter and resume (thank you Allison and Sara!) I finally had a product with which I was happy.

Of course, after staring at a screen for three hours, my brain will convince me that a three year old's story is Shakespearean verse, so I elected to take this morning (and early afternoon) off from the screen.

My shift at the library was from 12pm - 2pm.  I was on shelf reading, and, lo and behold, I reached the area with books on consultancy and working with China (the company has two offices in China!).  I checked out the books I thought would be most helpful, and plan on reading them in case they call me for an interview.  At the very least I won't sound completely green!

More than that, if anything happens with Henk's work, they're a consultant firm, too!  And if I am hired onto a management position, again I won't sound completely naive for the first few months.

And of course doing business in China will probably be inescapable no matter where I end up working.

I also started re-reading my programming book.  It's all in Python, but I figure I can take what I learn and apply it to other languages.  I got through the first chapter which covers if/then, while, and a few other basic tools of programming.

And finally I drew on my tablet for about half an hour (will probably do more of that before the day is out).  Nothing major, just working on a drawing of a woman.  I should probably start doing more graphical things rather than art, but I'm enjoying myself for now.

My day continues!

Beth