Beware the black hole!

It is not as ominous as the title sounds. What I want to write about is the problem of internet time wastage. Unemployed, with copious amounts of time on your hands, the internet can suck time like no other supposedly constructive tool in every day life. Don’t get me wrong, all day should definitely not revolve around job hunting, but dedicating some quality time to it is necessary and that’s when all kinds of useless tumblr streams become so much more interesting..

The mornings I know I’m on my own and need to get some serious job searching going I find getting up early and jumping in the shower as a good way to start. The moment I find myself still sitting in my pyjamas when the evening’s gone dark I tend to feel like a bit of a loser.. It’s all about feeling like I’ve accomplished something, however tiny sometimes!

So today I decided to address the internet time wastage head on with some anti-procrastination- procrastination! I do some paid work remotely and the time wastage on silly sites still applies for that, it isn’t just the job hunting that tends to side-track my concentration..

I have now installed a temporary site blockage on my Chrome browser, and it has worked so far. Every time I’ve landed on a site I have defined as unnecessary, a message comes up saying ‘Shouldn’t you be working?’ I might be of weak/strong mind because that has been enough to steer me back on the right track again. Nothing like some self-inflicted guilt! Let’s see how long it lasts.

Ship in the interns!

I wish I could write all the posts I want in a much quicker succession than I have so far, but part of the reason I don’t is because I’m interning. I work as an intern in a public affairs company 3-4 days a week and ‘interning’ has certainly become a way of life for many recent graduates.. Love or loathe it.

I haven’t grown up with interning being a fact of life so I was quite surprised and disappointed, I must admit, when I realised I had to get on the intern wagon. If one is either just out of university with no prior work experience or changing careers to a field one doesn’t have practical experience in, becoming an intern for a few months is sadly becoming the way to go.

It all depends on individual circumstances, but I would hope that I do not need to do more than two internships before things start loosening up on the job front. Some people will probably disagree, however, this is where I would advice anyone to never go into an internship lightly. Really do your research and prepare questions for the interview about what you can actually expect to get out of the internship. Since you are offering your time for free, the company or organisation should really have something worthwhile to offer you in return! Read more here

My own interships so far

The first internship I did I could quickly see that there would never be any hope for a paid job at the end of it. Nonetheless, it was my first proper internship and I got a stable reference out of it which I can count on at any time. There was also quite a few other interns there and I made some great friends that I can count on in my times of unemployment exasperation.

However, I remember I had a moment of questioning the whole internship project when I found myself in a musty, old storage room supposedly organising it for one of the extremely dithering staff members. Other than testing my patience and compliance, I don’t see how that would add any value to my work experience besides gaining the understanding that interns are there to do the shit jobs for no pay..

The second internship, my current one, I was a bit more picky and looked around for what kind of specific experiences I was lacking on my CV that an internship could help with. At the interview I also asked what previous interns had gone on to do after completing their time with them. When they told me they had hired a few of them, I figured this might be a good place to be.

Internship controversy

There is a considerable amount of controversy surrounding internships and work experience, and rightly so. Not everyone can afford doing unpaid internships over several months and not everyone live in bigger cities where they are usually offered.

Deputy PM Nick Clegg has come out with his internship plan where he has called on companies to be transparent in the advertising of their internship, and move away from a ‘who you know’-type recruitment. That is fair enough, but I think it is equally important to turn attention to what companies are offering interns in terms of experience. If you are taking three months out to work for free, you should not have to be the tea-rounds bitch and do the data inputting that no one wants to do!

So from my own experience, I would advise anyone to do proper research around the company that is offering internship and really interview them as much as they do you about the opportunities that would available. An internship isn’t just about getting a good reference, but about getting specific experiences you can use to secure paid work afterwards! Internships can also be a great way to broaden your contact network and possibly also open up for in-house job opportunities, however, I would be careful about going into an internship expecting that because you might be disappointed.

********

Intern Aware and interns anonymous are great sites to look at for more information about the campaigning that’s going on around the issue and read more about people’s experiences as interns, for good and for bad.

Picture from here

Organising your job searching

As you may have gathered from the previous post, I am a big fan of organisation. Lists, stationary and overview make me breathe easier. When I was told that the average time it takes a graduate to find a job after finishing uni was 6 months, I thought I should probably get a system going sooner rather than later. Also seeing my partner, who had been doing the job hunt some months prior to myself, and the amount of cover letters and applications he sent out, I figured a document folder would not suffice.

This is why I have wholly embraced the beauty of jreepad. It is a really simple, small programme that allows you to easily organise your thoughts, applications, informations in a no-frills database layout. You can only save text in it and you cannot format anything in the programme, but it is a great place to have it all saved together. This way you can arrange it in folders and sub-folders and save any bit of information you might need for later.

I have arranged my jreepad into sources for job search, advice, etc, as well as actual applications and job descriptions. I have a folder for each month and within that I save each job I’ve applied for with the individual job descriptions, cover letters, CVs and application forms.

Word processing

I still write my cover letters and CVs in a word processor, but I save a copy in jreepad so I can easily go back and see which version I attached or what I wrote in the email I sent with the application. I also use it to keep track of deadlines and see the progress I’ve made each month.

With an increasing amount of applications written you’ll see that it gets easier with time. I truly hate sitting down with a new cover letter or CV, but with time I’ve saved phrases or CV versions that have worked and I only need to do a little tweaking each time rather than start all over again.

Jreepad is a freeware for Macs, while Windows machines do Treepad. The latter comes in paid versions and as freeware.

It’s worth a look if you feel like doing a bit constructive yet procrastinating organisation!

Screenshot from jreepad

New year – New CV

What better way to start the new year full of potential prospects, paid work and continued recession than to update the CV? Probably loads of ways, however, that is how I’ve chosen to start mine due to sheer necessity.

I began the year by tearing up my old calendar planner and transferring information into a brand new red one. Quite satisfying actually. Sometimes nothing cheers me up as new stationary! There is something about the buying of new stationary as being supposedly conducive to organisation, as well as being brightly coloured with blank pages wiping out the old, used and useless ones.

Picture from here

When it comes to CV writing there is tonnes of information online, so there is little I can add here that will be anything revolutionary on the subject. However, with a couple of months of CV writing I have started to discern what works and what doesn’t work.

Tailor-made and proof-read

Rule number one that is a pretty well-known fact in UK CV writing is to always tailor your CV to the job description. The advice I’ve gotten is to simply use the verbs in the job description and mirror them directly in your CV. When the employer or HR person then scans it your CV will easily tick all their initial boxes. My partner have done some recruiting in his job and they tend to chuck all applications that they can tell have been made on a mass-production scale. So it seems worth spending the time to fashion a CV particularly for each job, or at least for each sector if you are looking across different ones.

The next thing to remember, which I have been a bit sloppy with, is to ALWAYS proof read it, preferably by someone else than yourself. I’ve swapped CVs with friends so we can help each other and possibly notice things that could be improved that we do not see ourselves.

There are all kinds of different ways of organising your CV and it is usually a matter of taste and convention in terms of what sector you’re applying for, what experience you have and what you want to accentuate. A careers adviser gave me a really good tip once where he showed me the a way to give the recruiter a ‘trailer’ to my CV so they could straight away see that my CV was relevant and worth reading. I usually call the header ‘personal profile’ and provide 3-4 bullet points with particularly relevant pieces of information about me that I believe will help me get an interview. And straight after I started using this I got two interviews in short succession!

Personal profile

• Graduate of University of Awesomeness
• Considerable experience in what your job entails
• Project management of something that is super relevant
• Training in that exact software your company uses

Obviously this trailer should actually reflect what will follow in the CV, but it is a nice way to underline what matters straight away and make the job easier for the recruiter to pick you for an interview!

Here are some CV buzzwords that can be helpful to get you started with the CV rewrite:

Task done?

accomplished
achieved
conducted
created
implemented
organized
performed

Solved a problem?

analyzed
corrected
debugged
decreased
diagnosed
overhauled
rescued
streamlined

Trained others?

coached
counseled
empowered
guided
instructed
taught

So the personal profile can work as a great trailer to what is to follow in the rest of the CV. As long as it isn’t like the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean 3 where the trailer looked it would be a huge pirate fleet bust-up at sea and the film turned out to be the slowest load of crap I’ve seen and we got so bored we had to walk out mid-way..

RecruitMEnt

I have registered with a number of recruitment agencies but with no work to show for yet. However, I do not believe they are a waste of time necessarily. It seems like the key is to get on a semi-friendly tone with one person in the agency, preferably the one that interviews you if you get that far. And then call that person every couple of weeks and remind them that you are still alive and still looking for work. Hopefully this will result in them taking a liking to you and remembering you when they come across a job that would suit your experience and skills.

When you first register, usually online, you’ll most likely get an automatic confirmation and then never hear from them again. A good move next would be to give them a call and ask them what the next steps are. They’ll probably ask what interests you have in terms of work, and then put you in touch with the person working on recruitment for that sector. This is the person that it would be good to keep in touch with on a regular basis and hopefully you’ll meet them face to face at an initial interview.

One thing that is worthwhile to ask that person whether there are specific skills or aspects of your CV that is most marketable for them. That way they can help you with tailoring your CV in the best way for them when they are selecting candidates to put forward for jobs.

 

Calling recruiters is a fairly less intimidating way of practising your phone-manners. The advise I’ve gotten is to call every couple of weeks. I hate calling strangers and I always feel like I come across as a nervous douche on the phone. However, with the regular calls to the recruitment agencies I feel slightly more at ease with cold-calling on job stuff. I’m still not completely there yet, but hopefully I’ll write more about this later as I have tried it out a bit more.

The relationship between yourself and the agent is a weird one where you might become quite friendly, but at the end of the day it is a professional relationship in which the other one can get you work. So always showing yourself from your best side would be the preferable default, even when you attend somewhat informal interviews.

Keeping the agent sweet seems to be important, and when the agent I had been in contact with seemed to be wavering in slight annoyance of my early morning call, I followed up with a polite email thanking her for the help she had given me so far and it seemed to be a good move.

It is probably better to use recruitment agencies as only one facet of your multi-pronged job hunting approach. If you think all that’s needed is to sign up online and then the phone will start ringing with offers, you’ll probably be disappointed (unless you’ve got an engineering degree – everybody loves hard science). If you just reserve, say one morning, every week or two to call the agents you are in contact with, after a while that perseverance might pay off.

Might not be final solution

Recruitment agencies might not be able to get you a full-time job or a permanent contract, but they can give you temporary work that might come in handy later on if you are just starting out and in need of some work experience.

The high street ones cater for a much bigger audience and will often spread across lots of different sectors. The reviews I’ve read online tend to be quite varied and many with bad experiences of not getting paid etc. I registered with one and they emailed me back with ‘an exciting new opportunity’ – chugging wholly on commission..

Looking around for the right kind of recruitment agency for the area of work you are interested in is a good way to home in on the kind of experience you want to get. REC (Recruitment and Employment Confederation) is good site for finding specialised recruitment agencies for different sectors (UK only).

I’m getting back in touch with the recruiters I’ve used so far after new years and will write updates as I go along. Some of the ones I’ve found useful focus on third sector and charities, on bilingual work and with a graduate recruitment branch.

Picture by mercurialn

Motivation! Strangulation!

Being motivated to carry on with the job hunt is really one of the biggest obstacles I’ve come across whilst searching and applying. It helps to know that you are not alone, with friends being in the same boat, but at the same time it can also make you feel equally or more helpless when you see others not having any luck either..

I am looking in rather specialist areas of employment with focus on public affairs, policy and campaigning, so I’m not casting my net that wide yet. For the time being I’m keeping afloat with a part-time job in media analysis and my partner’s salary. If it hadn’t been for that I’m sure I could not afford to stay very picky for very long. Internships have become a necessary evil in political and social science work and I’ll expand on this later.

When you read about the dire situation most of the country is in, as well as the rate of youth unemployment, it is easy to feel distressed. However, I do not think university graduates are facing disproportionate hardship in the current situation. Although we were promised that ‘the world is your oyster’ as university students, we are not the ones struggling the most and cannot begin to understand how scary it must be to face job searching without qualifications or experience.

Graduates might fall in between chairs in a way where we do not have enough experience for an entry level job in our field, yet we are over-qualified for other jobs that might be more within reach. This is where recruitment agencies might be a potential solution to help add experience to the CV. They are a separate beast in their own right but can prove to be a valuable backup.

I’m of the more pessimistic school and tend to expect things being a bit below par and disappointing, so I was not that surprised when job hunting turned out to suck a lot. What I have realised is that I need to fill my day with things to do that are not directly related to looking for and finding work. That is really one of my most important realisations in this process! Finding a new hobby (one you enjoy however geeky!), catching up with friends (unemployed or not). Without a job you are quite flexible and can then hook up with long lost employed friends on their lunch breaks and they’ve got a job so they can afford to get the coffee!

*********

On a totally unrelated note: Stopgap, a marketing agency, has a rather quirky xmas campaign where, with a couple of clicks on your part, they’ll donate £1 to Crisis the homeless charity. I’d say it’s worth taking the time: http://www.stopgap.co.uk/knitfurgood/

Waving not drowning

As a fairly recent graduate still without permanent work, I’ve decided I need to do something to motivate myself to carry on with ‘project job hunt’. I still attend my old university’s career centre talks and workshops and I aim to share some of that information here.

The blog is chiefly a way to crystalize all the advise I’ve been given, as a readership is not something I’m expecting in the near future. In the sea of blogs I have a feeling one needs to do some incessant waving to get noticed. But I hope that by approaching the job hunt in a sort of third person way by writing about it, I might become braver and actually follow some of the excruciating advice the careers advisers have given me (read: networking etc). And if someone finds it useful or just reassuring that others are in the same boat, that would be a great bonus!

I’ve also been on the whole internship carousel (and haven’t got off yet), and together with drawing on the experiences of friends as well, I’m sure there are lessons to be learnt and experiences to be built on from that! (even though internships sometimes seem a bit pointless to be frank)

Picture from here