8-RUGGED STEPS TO SECURING THE PLACE OF YOUR DREAM FOR INDUSTRIAL TRAINING OR TEACHING PRACTICE
By Eburuche O.C.Banito
1. Discover Yourself!!!
Discover who you are so that you can discover what you will add to yourself to distinguish you from the multitude. You cannot get what you do not have until you discover what you have. The raw material for the products you are looking for outside, is within you. All you need do is to discover and process it into a well-packaged, palatable and marketable product. In essence, it takes your personal responsibility of discovering what you have to be able to maximize your potentials that will help acquire what you do not have. Discover your skills, talents and competencies. Discover your strengths and weaknesses; empower your strengths and starve your weaknesses. Ask questions like; what can I do best? What do I enjoy doing? What do people say about my service and relationship to them? What special skills do I have? Do I enjoy working as a team player or a team leader? These questions and more will help you discover your strengths and weaknesses, and to continuously and consistently working on them. This will make you become more functional, relevant, efficient, strategic and effective. What do I do now? Get a sheet of paper take at least 10-15minutes, write down all your skills, talents and competencies. Write down as many as you can, then take another 10-15minutes to review them to discover where your major strengths and weaknesses lie.
2. Trust In Your Discovery And Be Confident.
Whatever be the product of your personal discovery in step 1, trust it and be confident to work with it, and continuously work to develop on them. Please, do not let anyone convince you to believing what you are not; never accept discouragement from any one. Trust in your innermost conviction and judgment. Always practice your skills and talents to attain a high degree of perfection in so doing, you become more confident.
3. Beware of Psycho-Sociological Threats.
You might be confident to go out but some psycho-sociological threats might be pulling you down. For instance, negative contributions from family and friends; emotional imbalance resulting from relationship issues, family ties among others are all limitations to success and you must breakthrough before you can see through to the limelight. Everybody around you has their own opinion but you must stick to your innermost conviction. Control your mind; motivate and inspire it to think positive always. Family ties and other relationship issues are serious threats and you learn to settle them first before setting out. Never carry grievances and grudges in your heart while you are searching for placement. It reflects on your physical and facial appearance. You are meant to be enthusiastic and elegant and not moody. Never allow low self-esteem. Never allow negativism. Be the manager of your emotions and do manage well else, they will manage you to crisis and regrets.
4. Set Your Targets.
As an IT or TP student, you should operate under the principle of definiteness of purpose which I also refer to as the principle of clarity. Do not work with the mentality that “any place is a place”. It does not come randomly, by luck or by chance rather you have to define it and work towards achieving it. Pull your table, set your plan, write down all the industries and companies you are interested in whether 5, 10, 20 or infinity but make sure you have a target. Your targets must tally with what you discover about yourself i.e. your skills, competencies and talents. While listing these targets, list them in the order of priority with regard to your passion for each one.
5. Research Your Market.
There are two main markets in the labour market i.e. visible and hidden markets with a marked difference that in visible markets, jobs are advertised using the available media and reverse in hidden market. Statistics show that visible market provides 10-20% opportunity being applied for by 80-90% employees while hidden market provides 80-90% opportunity being applied for by 10-20%. This statistics show that a greater opportunity exist in the hidden market than in the visible market but lack of information and self-will by the employee among other limitations, keep the potentials of the hidden market untapped. Having known this, go back to your list of target and discover the ones that are visible and hidden as this will help you to manage your targets, time and distribution of your correspondence. By setting priority, tag your targets and this will help discover where you should channel your resources to. Next in your research, is on the industries and companies. Discover where your skills, competencies and talents can be of importance to them. In essence, discover their loopholes and be sure you can correct or proffer solution to them if given the opportunity. Research on the correct name of the company, their vision, standards, products and services. Use their websites, yellow pages or directory in your research. Get the at least the name of the human resource manager/officer or director. Never be a complete novice on setting out to the company.
6. Prepare Your Toolkit.
Now that you have discovered your competencies, skills and talents and having also researched thoroughly on your target company; it is a good work you have done. I guess you should get a sip of a bottle of a cool drink to cool your head. I give you kudos for having gotten here with me. But we have to continue right away. Let’s go back to the drawing table and draw up your toolkits i.e. prepare your curriculum vitae or resume, cover letters and other correspondences. Make sure your curriculum vitae or resume together with your cover letters are detailed and concise with much detail on the areas where your strengths lie and the areas that you discovered loopholes in the company. Your CV/resume and cover letter must be effective and impressive at a glance. The HR uses only 15seconds to go through your approach to him and your correspondence, so your CV/resume and cover letter must stand out.
7. Apply Action.
There is a great enemy you will meet at this stage. He is very dangerous and a killer. His name is procrastination. Never allow it to live; you must destroy it if you must move forward. Having gotten everything set, act immediately without delay. Reach your target and get the deal closed.
8. Follow-Up.
With my experience in career service, I’ve come to realize that follow-up is as important as every other step. Most people do drop their letters at the security post or reception and most of these letters do not go beyond there. I’ve also discovered that almost all HRs and MDs have a lot of files and letters to go through each day so there is a possibility that they may not have the time to go through your application. So what do I do? Follow-up your application. How? You use follow-up techniques such like cold calls, reminder letters, e-mails, call-in among others. By cold calls, you can decide to call the HR to remind him of your application or to find out about the progress of your application. You can also decide to write a reminder letter with reference to your first application or you can decide to make a short call-in to the company. No matter how well constructed your application is, the truth is if you want a quick result, you must follow it up. You have to do the follow-up, not the letter.Thank you for reading our updates. Your comments are highly appreciated on www.bntconsortiuminternational.blogspot.com. You can also share your IT or TP experience with us and subscribe for updates on this blog. Thanks for visiting our blog and please, stay connected for our next update. Please, you can follow us on Twitter or Facebook by clicking on our Facebook Like Button or Twitter Follow Button.