Career Development Class

After grabbing a slice of pizza from the cafeteria (Yay for free pizza night!), I headed over to my first Career Development class session. It felt odd to sit at a table after two semesters of sitting in front of a computer for all my classes. Being in the IT-Web Developer/Designer program, I’m on the computer all the time.

In this class we’ll be learning about marketing: marketing ourselves! We do this through our resumes, cover letters, how we answer interview questions, and even how we present ourselves through social media.

What I’m really looking forward to learning about is how to find employment. We were already given a list of ways to find jobs including ones in the hidden job market. Networking is a huge part in finding jobs you can’t find on the Internet or when there is a lot of competition for a position. We’re going to learn all the ways to network effectively. Most people have heard of networking and its importance, but I think it’s somewhat unclear how you go about networking and who your network is.

I’ve got a lot of homework to do before next Thursday’s class. I’ll be reading two chapters out of our textbook and there are some assessments to complete. One of them is finding a job posting for the career field I’m in. We’ll be using that for tailoring our resumes. It’s an eight-week class so there will be a lot of information to absorb in that time, but it’s such an important thing to know how to present yourself. The potential employee that gets hired is the one who is the best prepared. They have a polished resume, a portfolio in hand, and have a solid answer for every interview question that is asked.