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The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Organizing Your Job Search – Glassdoor Blog

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Organizing Your Job Search
Source: Glassdoor

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Organizing Your Job Search

 

When on the hunt for a job, it’s not uncommon to be applying for multiple opportunities at once. This is especially true for those of us just starting out in our careers. But multiple applications mean different resume versions, various cover letters and many, many different deadlines to keep track of. With so many moving parts at once, it’s easy to become disorganized.

But a disorderly job search process can lead to embarrassing mistakes such as lost phone numbers, confused deadlines, and missed interviews. To help you avoid these downfalls, we’ve put together a few tips to help you keep your job search organized.

Start With Your Career Goals

It’s easy to want to just jump right in and begin filling out job applications. But before you do, it’s best to take a step back and take a look at the bigger picture. Your career journey should start with a look at the direction in which you’re headed.

Though it may seem trivial to set aside time to organize your thoughts to clearly think through the career path you’d like to pursue, this is one of the most important steps to take. How are you supposed to start going anywhere if you don’t know where you want to go?

Reflect on what you’d like to do and why you feel that’s the right path for you. You might feel a little lost and be unsure about where you’re going, but at this stage in your life, that’s ok. Start by thinking about your long-term goals as those don’t need to be overly specific. Where do you want to be 10 years from now?

Then work backwards from there down to five years, one year, and six months from now. Be sure to think through your personal goals in addition to your career and finances. Take your family, education, and anything else you value into consideration.

Create a Schedule

After you’ve spent some time finding your direction and clearly thinking through your goals, it’s time to start building out a schedule. After all, in order to achieve the goals you now have in mind, you’ll need to set aside time to go after them.

The first step in this stage is to identify time you can set aside that’s dedicated to job searching. Find blocks of time within your schedule between classes, work, and any other responsibilities. Job searching is a time-consuming process and requires regular attention. So aim to set aside at least two hours every day to fully focus on it.

Next, start building a schedule to complete certain tasks you know you need to get done. For instance, devote one hour to cleaning up your professional online profiles like LinkedIn. Devote another hour or two to preparing your resume. You should be able to fill up at least the first few days of your schedule, if not your first week, with tasks to complete.

Perhaps even more important than actually setting up this schedule is sticking to it. Let’s be honest here — activities like resume building and email sending are less than thrilling tasks. It can be easy to let these fall by the wayside and choose something a little more exciting to occupy your time. However, this will only put you behind and lead you down a path of disorganized job searching. Make sure you leave the time you set aside for job hunting devoid of any other activities.

Minimize Your Job Applications

Looking for a job is more often than not a high-pressure situation, so you might be tempted to begin aimlessly applying for any open position you find. But even though applying for more jobs can make it feel like you’re increasing your chances, this is actually just a waste of your time — not to mention an easy way to become disorganized.

Remember that time you dedicated at the beginning of this process to think through your short-term and long-term goals? Here’s where that comes in handy. Start off by narrowing your search to only the jobs that align with those goals. Look out for the opportunities that will help you get to where you want to be.

Next, narrow your search down to only the openings that match the level of skill you have. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that your qualifications need to match up with those listed on the job description exactly. In fact, this will likely never be the case. Job descriptions should be more of a directional tool for whether or not you’re a potential fit for a role, so look for those where you match around 80 percent of the qualifications listed.

Track Each Position You Apply For

Here’s where things can get especially messy. Applying for multiple positions at once leaves you with a lot of different things to manage. It’s very important to make sure you’re keeping track of all of the different details as you go along.

One of the best ways to do this is to create a spreadsheet. This is an easy and effective way to help you keep track. Don’t worry about making anything too fancy. Just be sure to include basic information such as:

  • Company Name
  • Contact Details: include the name, email, and phone number of your contact at the company. In most cases, this will be a hiring manager.
  • Date Applied
  • Deadlines and Interviews: deadlines for upcoming information the company asks for and scheduled interviews
  • Date Followed Up: date you followed up after an application submission or interview
  • Status of Application: whether you’ve been rejected, are waiting to hear back, or have an interview scheduled

Not a fan of Excel? No problem. There are tons of different ways to track this information.

JibberJobber is an online job search organization tool that helps you keep track of what you’re working on. If you prefer working off of your phone or tablet, then there are tons of great apps available. Keep in mind, though, that setting up a system for tracking alone is not enough. You need to be diligent in updating your system each time you take a new action or receive an update from a potential employer.

There are so many different things to keep track of when job searching, that you can easily become overwhelmed and confused. But by following these few simple tips, you’ll be ready for a more organized and effective job hunt.

This story was written by StudySoup, a peer-to-peer learning marketplace that connects top students in the class with those who need a little help. Top students can upload their notes and study guides to the StudySoup Marketplace, providing their peers with helpful materials while also earning some extra cash.

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Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. – NYTimes.com

Professional success is hard, but it’s not complicated. The foundation to achievement and fulfillment, almost without exception, requires that you hone a useful craft and then apply it to things that people care about. This is a philosophy perhaps best summarized by the advice Steve Martin used to give aspiring entertainers: “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” If you do that, the rest will work itself out, regardless of the size of your Instagram following.

Source: Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. – NYTimes.com

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BEAKERS AND BEER | 2016/2017| Networking Event

BEAKERS AND BEER

Join us for free food, drinks and networking from 5-7 PM! These networking events are free and open to employees who work on the BNMC and members of the community.

Beakers & Beer 2016-2017 Schedule!

September 22: Coco at 888 Main Street

October 13: UB’s NYS Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics & Life Sciences at 701 Ellicott Street

November 17: Hauptman-Woodward Institute at 700 Ellicott Street

December 15: dig at the Innovation Center at 640 Ellicott Street

January 19: DoubleTree by Hilton at 125 High Street

February 16: UB’s NYS of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences at 701 Ellicott Street

March 16: dig at the Innovation Center at 640 Ellicott Street

April 20: Jacobs Institute at 875 Ellicott Street, 5th floor

May 18: Coco at 888 Main Street

More Details here: 

Beakers and Beer

http://www.bnmc.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Reasons-to-attend-BnB.pdf

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The Incalculable Value of Finding a Job You Love

The Incalculable Value of Finding a Job You Love

by Carl Wiens 

Social scientists have been trying to identify the conditions most likely to promote satisfying human lives. Their findings give some important clues about choosing a career: Money matters, but as the economist Richard Easterlin and others have demonstrated, not always in the ways you may think.

Consider this thought experiment. Suppose you had to choose between two parallel worlds that were alike except that people in one had significantly higher incomes. If you occupied the same position in the income distribution in both — say, as a median earner — there would be compelling reasons for choosing the richer world. After all, societies with higher incomes tend also to enjoy cleaner air and water, better schools, less noisy environments, safer working conditions, longer life expectancy and many other obvious benefits.

But context also matters. If you faced a choice between being a relatively low earner in a high-income society or being near the top in a society in which your income was lower in absolute terms, the answer would be less clear.

If the income difference was very small, being a top earner in the poorer world would probably be more satisfying. Your house would be smaller in absolute terms, but because it would be bigger than most other people’s, you would be more likely to regard it as adequate.

For sufficiently large income differences, however, that conclusion could easily flip. This time you would confront a different kind of difficulty. Although your house in the wealthier world would be larger in absolute terms, its relatively small size in that universe would mean that your children would be more likely to attend schools regarded there as substandard.

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It’s not just that more money doesn’t provide a straightforward increase in happiness. Social science research also underscores the importance of focusing carefully on the many ways in which jobs differ along dimensions other than pay. As economists have long known, jobs that offer more attractive working conditions — greater autonomy, for example, or better opportunities for learning, or enhanced workplace safety — also tend to pay less.

One of the most important dimensions of job satisfaction is how you feel about your employer’s mission. Suppose you’re weighing two offers for jobs writing advertising copy: One is for an American Cancer Society campaign to discourage teenage smoking, the other for a tobacco industry campaign to encourage it.

If pay and other working conditions were identical, which job would you choose? I once posed this question to Cornell seniors about to enter the job market, and almost 90 percent said they would pick the American Cancer Society position. And when I asked them how much more the pro-tobacco job would have to pay before they would change their minds, they demanded an average salary premium of more than 80 percent.

These magnitudes make sense. When most people leave work each evening, they feel better if they have made the world better in some way, or at least haven’t made it worse.

But moral satisfaction alone won’t pay the rent. You’ll be more likely to land a job that offers attractive working conditions and pays well if you can develop deep expertise at a task that people value highly. As the economist Philip Cook and I have argued, those who become really good at what they do are capturing a much larger share of total income in almost every domain, leaving correspondingly smaller shares available for others. Moral: Become an expert at something!

That’s obviously easier said than done. The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his co-authors have estimated that many thousands of hours of difficult practice are required for true expertise at any task. That’s why my first response when students seek advice on how to succeed is to ask whether any activity has ever absorbed them completely. Most answer affirmatively. I then suggest that they prepare themselves for a career that entails tasks as similar as possible to that activity, even if it doesn’t normally lead to high financial rewards. I tell them not to worry about the money.

My point is that becoming an expert is so challenging that you are unlikely to expend the necessary effort unless the task is one that you love for its own sake. If it is, the process will be rewarding apart from whether it leads to high pay.

The happiness literature has identified one of the most deeply satisfying human psychological states to be one called “flow.” It occurs when you are so immersed in an activity that you lose track of the passage of time. If you can land a job that enables you to experience substantial periods of flow, you will be among the most fortunate people on the planet. What’s more, as the years pass, you will almost surely develop deep expertise at whatever it is you’ve been doing.

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At that point, even if few people in any one location place high value on what you do, you may find that your services become extremely valuable economically. That’s because technology has steadily extended the geographic reach of those who are best at what they do. If even a tiny fraction of a sufficiently large group of buyers cares about your service, you may be worth a fortune.

There is, of course, no guarantee that you’ll become the best at what you choose to do, or that even if you do you’ll find practical ways to extend your reach enough to earn a big paycheck. But by choosing to concentrate on a task you love, you’ll enjoy the considerable proportion of your life that you spend at work, which is much more than billions of others can say.

Again, you’ll have bills to pay, so salary matters. But social science findings establish clearly that once you have met your basic obligations, it’s possible to live a very satisfying life even if you don’t earn a lot of money.

The bottom line: Resist the soul-crushing job’s promise of extra money and savor the more satisfying conditions you’ll find in one that pays a little less.

Source: The Incalculable Value of Finding a Job You Love – The New York Times

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