How can career fairs work for you?

image:www.trabahophilippines.com
culled fromwww.jpb.com


Career fairs are one of many great resources when exploring career options and looking for employment/internship opportunities.
Below are 5 tips from Bayt.com, the Middle East's No 1 Job Site, to make the most of this experience.
1. The 5 Ws: Gather information about the career fair, when and where is it taking place, what is it about (ex: engineering career fair, Marketing and advertising career fair, etc.), who will be there, and why you would want to attend. It is very important to know which companies will be represented at the fair in order for you to research the ones that interest you, learn more about their corporate culture, their values and their mission statements and then assess whether you would like to be part of their corporate vision. Define the reasons why you would like to attend, set your goals so you can work towards achieving them and making the most of this fair.
2. Prepare your toolkit: Make numerous copies of your CV and different versions tailored to the employer you’re targeting, the company’s business, and the industry in which it operates, making sure you shed the light on the CV sections that are most relevant to the company’s requirements and field of work. Attaching a cover letter to your CV is always a plus that helps attract the attention of employers. Keep in mind that thousands of job seekers visit career fairs and take advantage of this event to submit their CVs to the biggest number of employers. Thus, you should grasp every opportunity and use every tool to stand out from the crowd.
3. Prepare your introduction and a list of Q&As: First impressions are of utmost importance especially in career fairs where every employer meets hundreds of job seekers. Therefore, make sure you prepare a concise yet very appealing introduction of yourself that would catch the employer’s attention and trigger his curiosity to know more about you. Preparing a list of questions is also essential to show your interest in working for the company you are targeting. Another must do is to prepare some answers to the most common questions asked by employers/interviewers as many companies perform on-site interviews as a first phase of screening candidates and filtering CVs.
4. Dress properly and have good manners: To each career fair its dress code. Remaining a very professional event at all times, dress codes may vary from a fair to another. (While some require business attire, some others are business casual.) It is very important to visit the fair’s website to get as much details about the event’s guidelines as possible. Aside from the dress code, good manners are essential components forging first impressions. You should be polite and professional to everyone you meet; speak up clearly and have a good posture. Interpersonal skills are key in career fairs!
5. Be active when it comes to career fairs: Keep abreast of all career fairs happening in your country and participate in the ones that interest you. If your time does not allow you to visit physical fairs you can always attend from the comfort of your home/office virtual job fairs that go live online and bring together job seekers and employers in an online recruitment environment to explore potential fits (Bayt.com brought the Virtual Job Fair Series to the Middle East over 2 years back and they continue to prove to be a great success) In addition to the same benefits traditional career fairs offer, Bayt.com’s virtual job fairs are accessible 24/7 and provide a confidential environment for candidates to enter a career fair and apply directly to jobs.



Source:http://www.bayt.com/en/career-article-10062/
Implementing Ideas: Baby Steps


So your creative, collaborative team has come up with the stunning, incredible idea to power all of your factories with wind and solar power. It's an idea that is sexy, green and sure to garner good publicity for your company. At least it seemed an awfully good idea when your team dreamed up the idea over beer at the pub around the corner from the office last night. But now that you are back at your desk, it seems a rather overwhelming change to inflict upon your company. Worse, everyone whom you've shared the idea with thinks you are "out of your mind!" And, indeed, you are beginning to wonder how many beers you and your teammates had last night.
This kind of thing often happens following the birth of a great idea, whether it is over drinks after work, the result of a brainstorm or a suggestion submitted to your idea management software. Big, crazy, breakthrough ideas seem wonderful when you are dreaming them up, but frightening when it comes time to implement them. Fortunately, the field personal development has a technique that you can apply: personal development planning (PDP). Indeed, this approach is so simple and effective, I have included it in as the fourth and final step of the anticonventional thinking process.
Personal Development Planning (PDP)
PDP is about achieving personal goals. Just like creative ideas, personal goals can seem desirable when you dream about them but overwhelming to implement. The 50 year old accountant, who is bored with her job and dreams of travelling around the world on her bicycle, finds it easier to dream about her big goal than to take the steps necessary to achieving it. Why? Because the dream involves a lot of frightening change: giving up her job and reliable income; travelling to strange and possibly dangerous places; funding the trip; and returning to the world of work after a year or more cycling the world.
PDP says you should break the goal down into smaller, achievable steps and envisioning each step. In the case of the accountant, the first steps might include: joining a bicycling club to gain more experience and talk to others with the shared interest; planning relatively short bicycle trips during her holidays, calculating costs and putting aside some money each month; and so on. Small steps such as these are sometimes called "baby steps". Baby steps are less intimidating and eminently more doable than running blindly into your goal. PDP says that when you take such a baby-steps approach you are much, much more likely to achieve it than if you just dream it.
PDP also says you should focus your thinking on each step, what needs to be done in order to achieve it and how you will feel about. This will make it easy to tackle each step towards your goal. Importantly, with each completed step, you will achieve some of the satisfaction of accomplishing a goal.
Applying It to Innovation
In business, a creative idea is essentially an original way of achieving a goal. In our example, you and your team came up with a great way to substantially reduce your business's carbon footprint and reliance on fossil fuels. However, implementing it in one fell swoop would be a massive undertaking. No wonder it seems scary when you get to your desk. No wonder your boss won't approve it. The end point of the implemented idea -- or goal -- may be desirable, but the necessary change is intimidating! But, just like our 50 year old accountant who dreams of cycling round the world, you can break your big idea into baby steps. These will make the idea more doable, easier to sell to your boss and much more likely to happen.
In our example, your first steps might include: identifying factories suitable for a pilot test; getting sunshine and wind information for each of those locations; selecting a factory to serve for the pilot test; installing a small wind turbine; installing solar panels; compiling results; extrapolating requirements for a powering an entire factory with renewable energy; and so on. Each of these steps is relatively small, will cost little and poses minimal risk to you or your company. If you see failure early on, you can re-evaluate the project and make changes or even cancel it before any substantial investment or change has taken place.
Responsibility
However, there is one more thing you need to do. In personal development, the person who is developing herself needs to take charge off each step in her path to achieving her goal. In team led innovation in an organisation, you need to ensure that there is a person responsible for each and every baby step. And, in the very first steps, the people in charge need to be members of your team. If you do not do this, you can be sure even the baby steps will never be taken! (In a recent anticonventional thinking workshop in which participants were breaking their ideas into baby steps, I saw a small team enthusiastically preparing a list off steps. Indeed, I thought they were a little too enthusiastic. When I spoke with them, I found that they were happily assigning steps to their colleagues and none to themselves! I pointed out that while this would make the tasks easier from their perspective, it substantially reduced the likelihood of their idea being implemented. At minimum, their first steps would have to be to convince their selected colleagues to take charge of their assigned steps. I am sorry to say that the team's enthusiasm was reduced substantially by this insight --but their planning improved dramatically!)
This approach is remarkably effective1, whether you want to implement changeS across your company or within a team or division. Moreover, it empowers the owners of an idea to take steps towards implementing it. For this reason, it has been included as the fourth step of the anticonventional thinking (ACT) process. But it can also be used with ideas selected from idea management tools, brainstorming and elsewhere.