Learning new things

Hello my fellow residents of the unemployment line! Happy Saturday!  I'm back with a little update on my unemployed life.  First things first, I quit smoking, so no more posts about how to find cheap cigarettes, I know you will all be disappointed with that but it has been five days, and I feel great!  What that means is the ten dollars I get to cut the neighbors grass or the thirty bucks I get for moving my friends furniture out of the house gets saved up for better things like a trip to interview in another state.

Now as far as the title goes, learning new things, well what have I learned since I last posted?  I learned the value of the cover letter.  You see in all of my years looking for work I had to figure out on my own how to write a resume and how to apply for jobs.  No one ever told me what was good, what works, and what doesn't. Through my adventures into networking, I learned that a good cover letter can make you or break you when the HR department receives your application.  When they are getting hundreds upon hundreds of resumes, a cover letter serves as a snapshot.  It is a short blurb that tells them why they should bother looking at your resume.

I am still learning as I go, so right now I have just a few general cover letters, two tailored to the job fields I really want to get back into, either security or telecommunications, and one general letter that can fit the odd jobs I have been applying to.  I used a form template from monster to write mine, and as I learn more, I will write a personalized letter for each application, but something is better than nothing!

Well that is all from my corner of the Unemployment office for now, but I would love to hear your feedback.  Tell me and the other folks what works and does not work for you in your day to day adventures in the job hunt, I look forward to hearing from each one of my readers, so leave a comment, shoot me an email, or find me on twitter!

Volunteering

Last night I was having drinks with some friends. In the course of the evening, one of them mentioned that she volunteers at Habitat for Humanity. That got me thinking. I have never volunteered for anything in my life. Sure I enlisted in the “all volunteer” military, but I wasn’t donating my time, I was getting paid for that. This morning, I started to sign up to give back.

I thought long and hard about it and I realized that volunteering was more than just giving up some of your time to help someone in need. For someone in my position with no job and no call backs on any of the resumes I send out everyday, it is an opportunity. When you volunteer, the first thing it does is get you out of your house.

In this day and age when college is so accessible, candidates for employment need something to set them apart from the pack. Add some volunteer experience to your resume, and you will have a leg up on others. Nothing shows a potential employer that you care like building a house for the poor or feeding the homeless. Giving to the community will give back to you tenfold.

While you are out there working and helping others, you get a chance to meet new people. You are out networking, the person serving food next to you or helping build the house may be a manager, a ceo, a company owner. By meeting someone in a volunteer setting, it is an informal get to know you, and they aren’t judging you by what you write on your resume, all they know is that you give back.

Even if your volunteer time does not land you a full time job, at the very least, you can feel good about yourself. For those few hours that you help, you are doing something for someone else, and that brings a warm fuzzy feeling. So friends and followers, lets give up a little bit of our time, and help someone in need!