This presentation reminds me of the motivational self help books I see in Fedex. A lot of buzz words, but not much substance. The key requirement for landing any job is personal value. If you are not valuable to an organization, you are not going to be hired.
Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college
#12If I ever got an applicant for a position I was interviewing for and they said, "So if you want to look at some of my code, it's available here.", and they gave me a link to a little project they work on, that ALONE would move them up near the top of the pile, even if the code was crap.
Maybe it's different because of the industry I work in, but nobody seems to want to show the goods.
Re: Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college
#13Jesus, it took 19 slides to get to the point which can be summarized in exactly one sentence: 1) Have skills Newsflash: What we call a "job" is simply the trading of one currency (actual monetary currency) for another currency (useful work). If the work you are doing does not have some element of skill then you will not get a job. If your degree supplies some of those limited in-demand skills then you may not need mo…
I'll add to this his lengthy discussion of "free work" as opposed to "internship". I don't think that's something I would have even thought about right out of school and even if I did I would have blown it off as a silly idea. I think he made a reasonably compelling case for it, especially forcing potential job seekers to think about using prospective employers decision framing to their advantage.
Re: Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college
#14This presentation reminds me of the motivational self help books I see in Fedex. A lot of buzz words, but not much substance. The key requirement for landing any job is personal value. If you are not valuable to an organization, you are not going to be hired.
Yeah, it's written in marketing speak, the kind of thing that must have been rigorously tested as some point to appeal to the widest audience but instantly turns me off.
"I used to be struggling like you but now I'm on the top the world and I'm going to show you how", this kind of thing just never appeals to me even if they are sincere because of all the insincere stuff that has come before in the same format.
Re: Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college
#15The first 3rd of the slides sounded like a pyramid scheme presentation.
Re: Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college
#16If I ever got an applicant for a position I was interviewing for and they said, "So if you want to look at some of my code, it's available here.", and they gave me a link to a little project they work on, that ALONE would move them up near the top of the pile, even if the code was crap. Maybe it's different because of the industry I work in, but nobody seems to want to show the goods.
Out of curiosity, what industry do you work in?
Re: Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college
#17Jesus, it took 19 slides to get to the point which can be summarized in exactly one sentence: 1) Have skills Newsflash: What we call a "job" is simply the trading of one currency (actual monetary currency) for another currency (useful work). If the work you are doing does not have some element of skill then you will not get a job. If your degree supplies some of those limited in-demand skills then you may not need mo…
Oddly, I read it as having an orthogonal subject: not having skills, but demonstrating them. The presentation seems to be aimed at the sort of entitled mindset that believes employers will _just_know_ that they deserve 40k fresh out of college. Whether you have skills or not, if all you do is write your bachelors degree and some dot-points on your resume, you're not going to get much credit from employers.
Of course, as your skills go up, the chance that you'll get credit for them increases. Truly world class skills would market themselves. The point, however, is that there _is_ an independence between your skills and employers perception of them. It's not always going to be obvious to an employer that you can provide them with value.
It's not enough to simply have skills. It's necessary to demonstrate them, to get them out there. The techniques the presenter outlines might be familiar to someone who has done some reading on the general subject, but to the sort of entitled mindset that the presentation seems to be directed at, they mightn't be so obvious. Blogging, building a portfolio, networking: basic stuff to some, but not to everyone.
Re: Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college
#18Sort of a tangental topic, but I hate it when people post slides like this. These sorts of things should always work better as a blog post. If your slides are good presentation slides, they're not detailed enough to work without a presenter, and if they are they're bound to be too wordy for the actual presentation. Either way, it's not a presentation I want to be in.
Re: Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college
#19This presentation reminds me of the motivational self help books I see in Fedex. A lot of buzz words, but not much substance. The key requirement for landing any job is personal value. If you are not valuable to an organization, you are not going to be hired.
Yeah, it's written in marketing speak, the kind of thing that must have been rigorously tested as some point to appeal to the widest audience but instantly turns me off. "I used to be struggling like you but now I'm on the top the world and I'm going to show you how", this kind of thing just never appeals to me even if they are sincere because of all the insincere stuff that has come before in the same format.
Excellent post on your blog regarding higher education.
Re: Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college
#20As a software developer, I would have figured contributing to major open source projects to be equivalent or better than this. Still has the same element of demonstrating your skills, but also shows that you can work in a team, do things like unit tests etc., and actually know the codebase for whatever project you contributed to.