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By Mark Venning, Association of Career Professionals International

Association of Career Professionals International

The Association of Career Professionals International is the World’s Voice on Career Issues. With more than 2000 members we are represented in more than 30 countries around the world, regionally in Europe, North & South America and Africa and Asia Pacific.

By Jeremy Diamond

Kids Explore Careers with the Help of The Learning Partnership Program

Has your child or neighbour ever taken part in the Take Our Kids to Work^TM Day? If so, you know how it works: Grade 9 students spend a day at the workplace of their parent or sponsor host and gain an appreciation for what adults do every day. More that 400,000 students and 75,000 workplaces throughout Canada participate annually, but many people are not aware of the organization that operates this popular initiative. It is called The Learning Partnership (TLP). Founded in 1993 in Toronto, TLP brings together business, education, government, labour, policy makers and the community to develop partnerships that strengthen public education in Canada. As a champion of and non-partisan voice for public education, The Learning Partnership develops numerous innovative programs that meet curriculum guidelines by addressing themes such as youth and career development, literacy and youth, and science, mathematics and technology.

Take Our Kids to Work, The Learning Partnership’s signature program, has made an undeniable impact on over one million students, parents, workplaces, teachers and the community. The program helps grade nine students make the link between their education and their future careers by providing organized job shadowing experiences for the day. It promotes the exploration of a variety of jobs and what it takes to get there, and provides an opportunity for students to begin exploring their career options and interests in depth. Students go “behind the scenes” at a variety of workplaces ranging from large corporations such as banks to small family run businesses like flower shops. They also take part in health and safety orientations and learn to interact with others in a workplace environment, thus experiencing learning beyond the classroom.

The Learning Partnership sees public education as a cornerstone of a civil, prosperous and democratic society and encourages parents, teachers and businesses to get involved. You can play an important role as a guest speaker, in-class volunteer or job shadowing host. To learn more about The Learning Partnership, please call 416-481-0799 and visit www.thelearningpartnership.ca/.

By Sheila Mulhern and Peter Rattan

Employment Connects For You – A Great Networking Event

The Centre for Education and Training Employment Connections For You event at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre was a wonderful networking opportunity for Employment Counsellors that often need to make referrals for their clients. It was a pleasure to match a voice to a face and also elaborate on a flyer or brochure that one may not have had a chance to review. My observations, as a participant working at a booth, was the general public inquired not only for themselves, but their friends and family to determine which agency suited their needs. Initially it was frustrating speaking with individuals who appeared not to fit the eligibility or criteria of a variety of known services. Where do they go? I quickly realized all I had to do was lean over and ask my neighbours in the booth next door, somebody is bound to know. The event was truly a one-stop shopping centre for individuals looking for agencies to accommodate their needs. It was also an educational opportunity for participants, who live and breathe their own agency, sometimes forgetting the diverse services offered by other agencies; one often needs to look outside to reflect on their own work. As an aside, it was an unintentional “job fair” for those seeking employment opportunities in this industry…a networkers dream!

Sheila Mulhern and Peter Rattan are Employment Counsellors at the ALDERCentre, an agency that assists individuals with Learning dis-Abilities find suitable employment and secure workplace accommodations. They can be contacted at Sheila@aldercentre.org and Peter@aldercentre.org.

Immigrant Economic Opportunity Generation Initiative (IEOGI)
Primary Goals and Objectives:

• To promote international trade by identifying international business opportunities for exploitation by Canadian businesses with the help of Canadian immigrants.
• To establish the linkages between the international business opportunities, Canadian immigrants and Canadian businesses and to promote an atmosphere of acceptance for new Canadians so that they are regarded as assets by Canadian Businesses, able to create international growth opportunities.
• Helping bridge the economic gap and removal of the economic barriers that immigrant’s face, which separates them from other Canadians with similar education and professional experience, through a comprehensive training, international job matching, career counselling and business opportunity matching programme.

What IEOGI is:

CFID in collaboration with Fincon Services will undertake a marketing initiative to target an even greater pool of skilled professional immigrants. Marketing efforts will concentrate on those media sources that cater to ethnic or immigrant audiences. There are four main components of the IEOGI project:

1. Immigrant Training:CFID will train those skilled professional immigrants who wish to participate in the IEOGI program to make them more attractive to Canadian businesses. The training program will be consist of two components: clients will be taught to more effectively market the skills that they already possess and they will also receive training in areas that they may be lacking such as communications, research, business and strategic planning, and cultural understanding
2. Export Development for Local BusinessesThe ultimate goal of the IEOGI program is to create a sustainable, mutually beneficial relationship between Canadian businesses and the skilled professional immigrant population. CFID will collect and identify local businesses capable of international expansion and match those businesses with qualified immigrants who have participated in the IEOGI Trainingphase.
3. Promoting IndependenceIEOGI will allow its clients to venture independently into the business arena once they have established the foundation for a strong relationship with participating businesses. This source of diversity and new ideas will render Canada’s business community even more diverse and prepared to accept the opportunities of the global economy. Such an approach to business and industry is consistent with Canada’s multicultural heritage and strong commitment to diversity in every sector of society.
4. IEOGI ConferenceTo further the chance for these newly trained skilled professionals to be matched with local businesses capable of international expansion, the IEOGI project provides a one-day conference. The objective of the job conference is to encourage representatives from local companies and local immigrant professionals, to attend the conference to interact with each other. This type of social event essentially grants these professionals a chance to discuss their job knowledge and skills with companies possibly seeking to employ new individuals. It also advocates a chance for companies presently or aspiring to export services abroad, to interact with highly skilled and professional workers from other countries, whom retain a tremendous wealth of knowledge, experience and contacts to offer to the Lower Mainland based businesses. This social interaction provides an ideal chance for companies to talk one-on-one with these professionals, to learn their skills, goals and personalities.

Location:

Canada wide with the Focus on British Columbia

Conclusion:

Fincon Services with CFID believe that the IEOGI project can help bridge the economic gap and remove the economic barriers faced by these skilled immigrant professionals. In combination with IEOGI’s training, its large database of potential local companies willing to hire, and the final interactive conference, this belief of linking this gap will certainly be achieved.

For further information regarding the IEOGI Project, please contact Shaun Prentice at FINCON Services via email at sprentice@finbyte.com, or 604-590-2973

FINCON Services and Canada Foundation for International Development
Suite # 204, 8556-120th St.
Surrey, BC
V3W 3N5

By Sandra Lim, CPRW, CCM, CECC

Part 1 of this article will answer your questions about e-résumés and discuss the technology implications of using them in your job search. Part 2 will deal with confidentiality and privacy issues, offer a brief discussion on Web résumés, and include links to e-résumé resources.

Due to space limitations, step-by-step instructions on creating an e-résumé have not been included, but I have provided a link to a chat transcript (www.abetterimpression.com), on coaching a client to convert a Word résumé to an e-résumé from my Web Portfolio.

Q: What is an e-résumé?

A: An electronic résumé, or e-résumé, most commonly refers to a plain text (also called text-only) résumé. A common mistake is to refer to an e-résumé as an ASCII résumé. ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Most people are not aware that ASCII does not just refer to plain text résumés, which are identified by the file extension .txt, but also to rich text résumés (identified by the .rtf file extension), and hypertext résumés (identified by the file extensions .html or htm). Part 1 of this article will focus on plain text e-résumés, and Part 2 will touch on hypertext (Web) résumés.

You may be wondering where scannable résumés fit in. As early as September 1998, an article in the Canadian HR Reporter’s Guide to Recruitment & Staffing stated that “Scanning is… becoming obsolete quickly as more and more résumés are sent electronically.”

As more and more résumés are being sent electronically, plain text e-résumés are becoming an essential tool every job seeker’s arsenal. E-résumés are pasted into the body of emails sent to potential employers, and are also used to copy and paste into e-forms when posting your résumé to Internet job boards.

To create a plain text e-résumé, you need to have a word processing program and a text editor. Notepad is the text editor that comes bundled with Windows, and SimpleText is the text editor for Macintosh systems. Refer to the link above for step-by-step instructions.

Q: Why do I need an e-résumé?

A: In the electronic age, the regular résumés that we are all used to are called “presentation résumés”— they have fancy formatting such as underlining, bold, and italics, which make them visually appealing. There is still a place for presentation résumés in your job search, such as for networking or to present in person at an interview. However, with the proliferation of electronic résumé databases, and at a time where email communication between job seekers and potential employers is becoming more and more common, it is more likely that your résumé will be viewed by an electronic eye before being viewed by a human eye. The plain text e-résumé is the preferred format for submitting résumés electronically because, although not pretty to look at, they are universally readable across all platforms, whether the recipient is using a PC or Mac; Word or WordPerfect.

Furthermore, using a plain text e-résumé pasted into the body of an email eliminates the chance that employers may delete emails with attachments due to a fear of viruses. This concern became common after the “Killer Résumé Virus” was unleashed in 2000 – the virus was hidden in an email attachment with the subject line “Résumé – Janet Simmons.” Since then, we have all heard of, or been victimized by, many new viruses. It’s no wonder that employers are wary about opening attachments.

Q: What are the differences between regular résumés and e-résumés?

A: A plain text e-résumé is loaded with keywords, usually in a Keyword Summary immediately after the job seeker’s contact information. Keywords make a résumé retrievable in an electronic database. Keywords are nouns and buzzwords, rather than the action verbs we are used to hearing about. Appropriate keywords to use in your e-résumé can be derived from examining both your own experience and newspaper and Internet job postings matching your job target. Keywords can include hard skills, soft skills, licences, professional development, and academic qualifications. Here is an example for a fictional Webmaster job candidate (the italicized square brackets only serve the purpose of delineating for the reader the various keyword categories used, and would not actually appear in an e-résumé keyword summary):

Keyword Summary:

[hard skills] Webmaster, Web programming, coding, HTML, Java, SQL Server, MS FrontPage, SQL database management, Web server troubleshooting, [soft skills] creative, detail-oriented, team player, [academic qualifications] Computer Programming, Database & Internet Solutions Developer Diploma, Bachelor of Commerce.

Q: What happens to my e-résumé after I email it to an employer or post it on an Internet job board?

A: Whether you send your e-résumé to an employer or post it on an Internet job board, your e-résumé is automatically transformed into electronic data and entered into an electronic database to be later retrieved through a keyword search. Whether your résumé is being viewed by a human eye or an electronic eye, the objective is still the same: to secure an interview. The right keywords in your e-résumé will get you noticed. The focus is on content, not appearance.

Most job boards require you to copy and paste your résumé into an e-form, and if you do this with a presentation résumé (i.e., a résumé created in Word), in many cases, it will automatically be converted to plain text. That means that some strange characters may appear, such as question marks where bullets used to be – this is because bullets are not supported in plain text. Only the characters you can see on your keyboard are recognized in plain text.

It is advantageous to have a plain text e-résumé already prepared, which will make copying and pasting into e-forms effortless. In addition, sometimes there is a specific field for keywords – this is where you should enter the keywords from your keyword summary.

Once you or your clients start using e-résumés, questions may arise about confidentiality and privacy issues – these will be discussed in Part 2.

Sandra Lim, CPRW, CCM, CECC is a Certified Electronic Career Coach (CECC), and her Web Portfolio can be viewed at www.mylifecalling.com. Through her company, A Better Impression, she provides résumé and career counselling services to help her clients create a better impression. She can be reached by email at newcareer@abetterimpression.com.