Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Helping People Get Jobs

Last Saturday, Eric, Matt and I taught the Career Workshop at BYU. I was recruited to teach the Sunday before and they told me that their last workshop that they tried to put on was a bust. Even with that torrid history, we were still optimistic. We had had over 55 people respond to the advertising and were confident that we would have at least 20 of those show up.

Getting there bright and early, we set up for the conference and slowly people began to trickle in. They did so for some time and we ended up having 64 people (who signed in) attend our four-hour workshop!

Now, it is difficult to squash a 12-hour workshop into 4 hours, but we divided the workshop into parts, created a strict time limit for each section and went to work. I wish we could have included all of the practice time that is normal and we cut out a few sections, but overall it was very successful!




My favorite sections are the 'Me in 30 Seconds' and 'Power Statements'. Me in 30 Seconds is almost like a trailer at the start of a movie. It tells you about yourself and it tried to get the audience hooked - without giving away too much. The audience could be an interviewer asking, 'tell me about yourself' or a CEO who you randomly meet in an elevator. 'Power Statements' take a quality or attribute, a specific example from your life, and the result and put it into a statement that has power! These can be used to answer almost any power statement!

Attribute + Example + Result (with numbers preferably)

An example: I'm very creative. While working at a recreation complex, I was asked to create some new programs. By the time I finished I had created the plan for three new programs that we then implemented.

These two principles will help anyone present their skills to an employer and help them get a job.

It was a lot of fun. Even my Mom came. It made me remember the good old times in Brazil. By the way, I'm a very effective teacher. For example, while teaching the Career Workshop in Brazil, I taught weekly sessions for between 10 and 25 people per week. As a result, about 25% of them got new or better jobs within 3 weeks of taking the course!

1 comment:

Myrna said...

Cool... I hope it works for me. I think I might need some follow-up tutoring.