“One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.” –Arthur Ashe
The career workshop held at UConn School of Business on June 2, 2015 and June 3, 2015 was about getting the students prepared for jobs and the real world job market. The workshop was led by Katherine Duncan who is the Career Advisor at UConn School of Business. This insightful workshop was about how to get ourselves prepared for the job market and job scenario in 2015. Katherine explained how one should focus on the target jobs and target profiles. She explained while searching jobs it is very important to stay organized and create an excel sheet of the list of jobs you have applied to and what is working, what is progressing and what is not and why! To measure your performance while searching the jobs, it is very important that you keep a track on it.
The workshop was about how to build your resume appealing to the interviewers, how to practice interviewing questions, be it a telephonic interview, in person interview or a Skype interview, how to practice behavioral questions and technical questions to maximize your chances to get a job. For eg she mentioned that one should always be prepared with the accomplishments they have made in career life, as that is one frequent questions that comes across in different ways. Also, it is not just about getting prepared, but also following-up. It is very crucial to network and follow-up with people in the job market so that it gets your results faster. She talked about how SEO and job search engines helps you to search for the right job roles. Wordle.net is an example of a website where it is easier to get the right kind of job listing with the keywords. But at the same time, staying motivated, organized and prepared for the opportunities is the key. Also, if you have missed the workshop, you can find the details of the workshop on the community page.
In the future workshops Katherine is going to talk about how to build an impressive cover-letter, how to develop and use soft-skills at the time of interview, how to practice interviews, the job search engines, and the presentation skills. She also plans to talk to the students one-on-one and help them improve on these skills. The students believed that it was very helpful and gave them a better idea of how to proceed further. All the students were very keen to attend the future workshops on soft-skills, resume, interviews and behavioral questions. Some of them expressed that they haven’t really started working towards getting a job and these future workshops would be very helpful for them and they want to learn more about it. Overall, it was an excellent start for getting the students prepared for opportunities and all the students appreciated the workshop.