The Time For Job Searching Comes Again

It’s around this time of the year that many graduating university students start scurrying and frantically searching for the best possible jobs that they can find. Recruitment talks and company presentations are now almost a daily affair at most of the 3 local universities and these events commonly see a turnout from hundreds to thousands of students. Very often though, we hear that the companies are only going to hire a handful from the crowd. With so much competition when we turn and look around ourselves, how are graduating students going to stand out?

For many of the graduating students, their first job may greatly affect their subsequent career, so this period of time may be one of the most important phases of our lives. This has been something that has been clouding my mind for some time. Am I outstanding enough to be considered a future leader in whatever company I may be interested to apply for? Do I have what it takes to climb the corporate ladder or even to grab a good starting position? While I’m confident in myself, I see a lot of outstanding individuals around myself, although all of us undergo very different life experiences.

It’s at this time that I think it’s especially imperative for me to position myself more favorably than my peers in order to stand out. With that, I began to tidy up my resume and come up with a final 2 page resume that densely covers my professional experiences and my knowledge. I also came up with a single page resume that summarizes everything and omit selective information, since one page resumes are requirements for certain companies.

Through this process, I began to re-examine myself and became really grateful for the multitude of different experiences that I accumulated by engaging myself in different disciplines such as Games Programming in Poly and Banking & Finance in University. Speaking to employees of banks made me realize that my programming expertise is really a very valuable skill and I proceeded to highlight other quantitative skills. For example, in my internet marketing endeavors, sometimes I turn to statistical methodologies to determine whether a campaign is significantly more effective than another.

At the end of the day, I don’t want to talk too much about myself. Therefore, I will go to the main point. If you’re a university student that’s graduating in year 2009, perhaps it’s time for you to tidy up your life and prepare your resume. Sometimes, you may be greater than you expected, so be sure to highlight that in your resume. Also, another tip I received which seems obvious is finding out detailed job requirements and matching your skills to them. I showed an example of how I related my marketing activities to a quantitative arena. At the same time, don’t try to put in things that you don’t know about, since you would fail the interview if you get asked about something you don’t know anyway.

If anyone has more tips, please feel free to post and share.