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Using the Internet in Your Job Search
by Jan Cannon - www.CannonCareerCenter.com
Today’s technology is great for helping with your job search. You can use the Internet to look for jobs, network for information and do research on companies you’re interested in. Getting started is the easy part. Finding what you want and need can often be a challenge.
Here are some basics to get you started.
As with any search, the more you know before you begin, the less time it will take to find what you need. This means knowing what your skills and interests are and the kind of company you’d like to work for – big, small, in California. Information gathering of any sort is streamlined when you ask specific questions that can give you good answers. This applies online as well as off.
So, let’s assume you know you want a graphics job designing websites. You have three years of experience working for a large corporation designing their site, but with the recent wave of layoffs, you were let go. Do you want to work for another large organization? Or would you like to try a smaller company? Or work for a design firm that has many clients? If you don’t know the answer, a good place to start is by asking questions of other website designers.
Go to association sites for graphic designers, such as http://www.aiga.org and find the discussion page. You might find the answers you’re looking for, or you can post a question for others to answer, such as, “Can anyone who’s designed web sites for a large corporation, a small company and a design firm tell me the advantages and disadvantages of each of them? I’m starting a job search and would really appreciate your input.” This is Internet networking in action. Usually discussion pages have individual e-mail addresses to the respondents so you can choose to reply to one of them directly after reading their posted response or message.
Once you’ve decided what kind of organization you want to work for, you can begin your research on it specifically, going to the company website. Or begin looking for a specific job at a job board which posts many different kinds of jobs. Sometimes it’s difficult to know what job titles mean in different companies. A senior web designer may be defined as someone with 5 years of experience at one company, while another company may call a senior designer someone with 3. Be sure to look carefully at the job description, not just the job title. That goes for searching for job titles as well. Think of job titles that are close to the one you think you want. Again, different companies call the same job by different titles. If you research the companies listed on job boards you’ll find out what the title means to them. The more you know, the better you can tailor your job application to the specific job. The next step may be to develop your online resume and cover letter to send or post. But we’ll save that for another column.
An online job search can be very rewarding, or very frustrating if you don’t know what you’re doing. One convenient source for getting more information is teleclasses. Using your telephone to call a common number at a scheduled time, up to 30 people can attend a class led by a specialist on a topic. Usually there’s a presentation part of the call and then question and answer segments. They’re really a convenient way to learn more.
For more information and help with networking and on-line job search techniques, go to the Business/Technology listing at http://www.teleclass4u.com/teleclasses/index.cfm to find low-cost teleclasses you can participate in.
Jan Cannon, MBA, PhD, has over 10 years of experience helping clients to find work that they enjoy through career coaching and resume preparation. She was an online expert with CIO.com and jobfindtoday.com and currently provides online content to the Career Connection of the Boston Herald ( http://print.jobfind.com ).
Jan speaks to groups and leads workshops on making career choices, networking, finding jobs, and staying motivated. She teaches courses on entrepreneurship for those interested in starting their own businesses. Jan has Myers Briggs™ MBTI™ and FirstStepFastTrack™ certifications and offers Inscape™ DiSC assessments.
Jan's book on senior job search will be published by Capital Press in April 2005.
Jan's own web site is at http://www.CannonCareerCenter.com
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