Article
Publication: Sun Herald
Publication date: 22-9-2002
Page no: 2
Section: My Career
The
Job Is Our There
James MacSmith
Running your
finger down a 'jobs vacant' column is not quite the same as
knocking doors down, James MacSmith reports.
IF YOU'RE looking for
a new job, trawling through newspaper advertisements and surfing
internet sites for employment vacancies just isn't enough
these days. There is a whole other world of job vacancies
out there.
According to figures
released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, last year
only 17 per cent of jobs were found through newspapers and
the internet. Which begs the questions: where are all the
jobs and how do you get them?
Tap The Hidden Job
Market, by Pauline Charleston, attempts to remedy the situation.
In the book she stresses the need to network, to know your
selling points, to set aside a specific day for job searching,
and to be proactive in your employment search.
"You
have to do more than just sit back and wait for the right
job to appear in the newspapers or be e-mailed to you,'' Charleston
said.
"You actually
have to get out there and look for work yourself. Job ads
and websites encourage a lazy mentality and you're not really
doing yourself justice. You have to do a lot more, the work
force is so mobile jobs are opening up all the time.''
Charleston, a trainer
and consultant in career transition, has spent the past five
years running courses on the subject at TAFE and community
centres in Melbourne.
She found herself retrenched
in the early 1990s and was amazed at the lack of available
information for job seekers an experience that helped her
write the book.
"A lot
of people will look in the paper and think there is nothing
there. They will send off applications and not get anywhere
so it really gives them a different mindset,'' shesaid.
"Once
you get in direct contact with employers there are a whole
lot of opportunities you didn't realise existed. Perhaps in
a different form to what you might have realised but it certainly
gets you out of the rut of sitting back and just waiting for
things to happen.''
According to Charleston,
the advice contained in the book is more realistic than brutal.
" Having been retrenched and realising it is a pretty
bruising experience and that you're not going to get another
job overnight, I wasn't going to feed people cliches.
"Too many
advisers say one door shuts and another opens, just get out
there and knock them dead. Well it just isn't like that. I'm
trying to give people realistic advice. I look at it from
the point of view of what employers need and making sure you
have the right skills to meet those needs.
"You need
to think, `How can I market myself directly to employers,
how can I network through people I know and howcan I get information
and ideas that will point to job opportunities?'.''
It's also essential
not to take rejection personally.
"It's
important to de-personalise the process and that's terribly
difficult, because when we get a rejection we think, `It's
me', but it could be because of a number of reasons, for example
the type of criteria they are looking for might have changed,''
Charleston said.
"Realistically
you're not going to get every job that you go for, but when
you are being fairly passive in your job search the rejections
are harder to take because you don't have much control.
"What
I'm trying to say is that you can go out and talk to people,
and approach companies directly rather than hoping that one
of your applications is going to come off. So then you've
got more irons in the fire and if you get a rejection, it
doesn't seem quite as bruising because you're following various
other leads as well.''
Caption: ILLUS:
THE EXTRA STEP: Self-marketing is all important when it comes
to securing a job.
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