MIYB 4 (2 Week Countdown)

Today's MIYB Project will focus on a few links to get us thinking, and rethinking about our fundraiser scheduled in 2 weeks.

Here are the links:

Xingbake (Scroll down to the entry made on Jan 04, 2006)

Kieron1 (From the artist)
Kieron2 (News story)

Marvin's Internet Scavenging Puzzle

Scenario:
My best friend managed to get me tickets for a Broadway musical. (I love Broadway musicals!) I, however, am a complete Forgetful Jones when it comes to details and I cannot--for the life of me--remember the name of the theater or even the musical. The show starts in 45 minutes, and all I can remember is that it's supposed to be like the prequel to "The Wizard of Oz." Can you find the theater, AND transportation directions from the Harbor? (1 East 104th Street, New York, NY 10029)

(Workshop) Searching the Internet

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The internet is a remarkable tool that you can readily use to sort through and retrieve information from around the globe. Websites today come with all sizes and types of files, and many of the more popular sites--like YouTube and MySpace--are updated hundreds of times daily. These means that when you logon to these sites, you are likely to find up-to-date information; however, when you don't know exactly where to go, the fact that these sites are updated so regularly can be a problem for someone trying to search through what's out there right now.

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Here are some questions we will ask ourselves today:

1. How do we search the internet for information?
2. When we look online, do we rely only on one site like Yahoo! or Google to find information on the web?
3. Do we use special functions or symbols to help with our searching? What are the special functions/symbols we can use?
4. What other tools are out there?
   

Completing the Cover Letter

Today, at First Work, we will be working to complete the cover letters that we began last week. Linked to this blog entry are two worksheets that we will use to check over our cover letters as we ready them for sending.

Students who have completed and blogged their cover letters as of 02/06/07: Krystal, John, and Tiffany.

(NOTE: Students wrote these, their first cover letters, as a future version of themselves, post training. As part of their First Work internships, however, students will need to complete a cover letter that is written from their current experience and speaks to their immediate goal of acquiring an internship position.)

Creating an Individual Employment Plan

Today we will be working on putting together individual employment plans (IEPs) that will lay out for us our work goals and ways to get there.

The IEP will be broken up into three main components:

1. History (Job, Work, Education, etc.)
2. Skills/Needs (Personal Budgets, a List of Marketable Skills, a List of Services Sought)
3. Goals/Plans (Future Goals and Milestones, Methods of Attaining these Goals)

Creating a Cover Letter

When you look at the image to the left, what do you see? Do you see someone hard at work? A normal day at the office? Or perhaps the perfect picture you'd want to show a potential employer?

Today, we will undertake the task of creating cover letters--self-advertisements for your potential employers that will let them know instantly that they needed to have you in for an interview--yesterday.

The cover letter, which traditionally accompanies your resume is sometimes the only chance you have to make an employer an offer s/he can't refuse. The way we'll think about our cover letter today is as a self-advertisement in written form with three parts:

1. An Introduction
2. A Sales Pitch
3. A Call to Action

(Workshop) Job Searching on the Internet

When you're traveling the
Information Superhighway,
are you in hyperspeed or
the slow lane?

Last week, we reviewed using the newspaper and telephone as a way to find and research jobs. In a similar way, the internet can serve as a very useful way to search and find job openings; however, many people can get mired in the large number of search results they may find.

To make the most of our internet job hunting, there are a few pointers to take into account first. Otherwise, rather than zooming to your express exit on the information superhighway, you could end up winding along a long and uneventful detour route.

Basics of Job Searching
As we learned last week, there are a few basic things that you can do to take hold of your job hunting. The first is to know what you are looking for.

Knowing what you are looking for means more than having a salary-range in mind for a position. It means knowing what you'd be willing to do for how much, where, when, and for how long. Because when we use the internet, we are able to search through want ads based on the things we want out of a job, and to save time and energy, we should do just this so that we get straight to the jobs that apply to us and avoid dud search results.

Below is a listing of some excellent web resources for web-based job hunting. Some of the sites, including the New York Job Bank, allow you to input resume data and use these resumes to narrow down searches to jobs that appeal to your resume. The NYJB also allows you to create a "Job Scout" that will check the listings on a schedule and email you results that respond to your criteria.

New York State Job Bank (Lots of great search options)
New York State Department of Labor Site (Links to many job-related sites)
Not-for-Profit Job Listings (Lots of work, but many are not entry-level)

About Craigslist
Craigslist is another great search engine for jobs that will be even more specific to part-time or temporary work in the New York City area, but because this engine is not regulated, anyone can put a posting for anything online. Because of this, the people who are in charge of Craigslist stress that it is important for users to exercise extreme judgement when making any communication online. Many of the same things to watch for when we use the classified pages in the newspaper apply to when we use Craigslist. To summarize:

1. Never trust a potential employer that expects you to pay for training.
   This is a common trap that pyramid-schemes use to get money. They claim that you'd be perfect for their organizations, often without knowing much more about you than your name and age. Any real job wouldn't have you pay for anything but your uniform.
2. Never respond to a want ad that sounds more like an advertisement or infomercial.
   This is a sure-fire sign of a money trap.
3. Never respond to a want ad that is not clear about the job offered.
4. Don't get duped by "modeling/talent agencies."
   They make most of their money from training/head-shot fees.

Keeping these in mind, Craigslist, too, is a great resource for those with the time and patience to sift through lots of dirt for a jem of a job.