Knock'em Dead Secrets & Strategies for First-Time Job Seekers

Martin Yate

• Publisher: Jumpingdude Media
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780983973478
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

This is the guide to living life on your terms. It's tough landing that first job out of school and starting your climb up the professional ladder in such an uncertain world. In Knock 'em Dead Secrets & Strategies for First-Time Job Seekers, you will learn how to climb the ladder of success and get what you want out of life. You'll learn how to: -Develop social networks that deliver results for the new professional you -Build a resume that gets you interviews -Complete your job search in record time with a killer plan of attack -Turn job interviews into job offers and paychecks -Build a professional brand that delivers credibility -Bring your entrepreneurial dreams to life Working your way through the proven job search and interview strategies form the inimitable Martin Yate, you'll gradually discover a blueprint for professional success. You'll immediately begin to make sense of the world of work, start your career on the right foot, and gain access to the corporate inner circle and win promotions way ahead of your college peers. You can get what you want out of life, and live a meaningful life on your terms-you just have to learn how to do it. In Secrets & Strategies for First-Time Job Seekers, you'll develop a practical career plan that puts you in control, with commonsense strategies that really can bring your dreams to life. You need never be unemployed, never be without income streams. In short, you can score the job you want and learn to survive and prosper over the long haul with a brand new approach to professional success that always put you first. How will you guide your professional destiny?

PART I

WELCOME TO
THE PROFESSIONAL
WORLD

CHAPTER 1

WAKE UP, STAND UP,
LIVELY UP YOUR LIFE

You came to this book because you’re savvy enough to know that transitioning from school to work, and then navigating the twists and turns of a professional career, requires more than a hope and a prayer. You want to discover the practical strategies that will give you an edge over most of your peers, who haven’t yet figured out the frat party’s over. But awareness doesn’t lessen your anxiety; you are only too aware that the first step of your career is one of the most important, and that the coming months should mark your successful crossing of the final bridge into adulthood. It’s all up to you now.

Being nervous about this transition is a natural reaction to entering such a forbidding work world; after all, economists are saying that this is one of the most challenging times to start a career in modern history. Yet while many graduates from recent years still have not found professional jobs suitable to their education, this will not be your outcome: Your drive to succeed, coupled with the tools for career success you are about to learn, will ensure your success.

Even in an economy as bad as this one, there are plenty of jobs out there. Our economy is still the largest in the world, and throughout the last five years of recession not a month has gone by in which less than four million new jobs were posted on the Internet. Bottom line: there are plenty of great opportunities for the young professional willing to take the skills of career management seriously.

If you want to make a successful transition into the professional world, you have to get involved in managing the trajectory of your professional life. Successful careers don’t just happen; they stem from an understanding of the business world and the application of integrated career-management strategies that will enable you to:

•Develop a resume that works

•Get job interviews with good companies

•Turn those interviews into offers

•Make a success of your first job

•Secure raises and promotions

•Plan and execute job and career changes on a timetable of your choosing

•Integrate and pursue entrepreneurial and dream careers

This is your life, and what you make of it is up to you, because no one else really gives a damn beyond your immediate family, and they can no longer be expected to support a full-grown adult. If you are intent on building a successful professional life and willing to learn and apply these job-search and career-management secrets and strategies, you will start your professional life off on the right track. I’ll share all the tools you’ll need to get that first job, make a success of it, win promotions, and change jobs and careers. These are secrets and strategies you will use successfully throughout your entire career, but the bottom line is that while I can show you what to do and how to do it, it’s your life, and what you make of it is up to you.

How do I get my career off to a good start? Work your tail off so that you can move up the ladder to a leadership position that allows you to manage your own time.

Leslie Zaikis, Director of Business Development, www.levoleague.com

As you use the secrets and strategies in this book to execute a successful job search, turn interviews into offers, and get off on the right foot with your new job, you will also discover a complete career-management strategy for your career going forward. In these pages you will learn strategies not only for navigating the twists and turns of your professional career, but for giving your life real meaning, because you will discover how to successfully integrate both entrepreneurial endeavors and your dreams into a workable career-management plan designed for the modern world. I have inhabited this world throughout my professional life and I won’t waste your time; so much as you can at this critical time in your life, relax, open your ears, and get on board with a commonsense plan for getting what you want out of your life.

Think about Your Goals

What do I want out of life? The more clearly you can envision life goals—including those dreams everyone told you not to waste your time with—and see a real path to achieving some of them, the more effort you will put into the work that has to be done today and every day along the path that brings them to reality. Look at where you want to be ten or twenty years from now. And those interests and dreams that give meaning to your life? Stop cramming them under the bed. Haul them out and reexamine them as you read and learn—you might find they don’t belong there. Bring all these long-term goals and dreams into focus; own them, don’t be scared by what others might think, and don’t give up … ever.

This is not an either/or world anymore. Like many others, you’ve probably been told, “Find one thing you like, make it your career and settle down to it for a lifetime.” But most of what you have been told doesn’t make sense—life isn’t that simple and you are too complex a being. I like to write; but all day, every day for fifty years? Sweet baby Jesus, I’m ready, take me now.

The reality is that you can and you should have multiple career goals and multiple career paths: for climbing the corporate ladder, for starting your own business, for writing that book or becoming a painter. Other people have made it happen, and you can too; in the following pages, as I share cutting-edge strategies for resumes, networking, job search, and turning interviews into job offers, I’ll also gradually unfold the secrets and strategies you can use to bring those multiple, long-term career goals to life.

You might have dreams of career paths that seem impossible or that common sense tells you are hare-brained; yet all of them hold value and could well be achievable. Whatever those dreams might be, they are going to fall into one of three categories:

1.Core career: I’ll show you how best to land that next job and how to make it as secure as it can possibly be, how to land the plum assignments and win raises and promotions, how to navigate strategic career moves within your industry, even how to decide on new career paths.

2.Dream career: Your dream might be to succeed as a writer, painter, singer in the band, or landscape gardener. I’ll show you key strategies that can bring your dreams to life.

3.Entrepreneurial career: You’ll learn how to seamlessly integrate plans for an entrepreneurial career into the pursuit of success in your core career. You’ll recognize that they aren’t mutually exclusive: They are attainable and can even be complementary.

We’ll develop the means for achieving them throughout the book and bring them together in Chapter 15 when we discuss how to integrate the pursuit of multiple parallel career paths into jump-starting and pursuing success in your core career. But don’t jump ahead: there’s a plan, a methodology, and a new way of looking at your professional life that you need to soak up before it will all make sense.

Choose a Professional Core Career Wisely

As the MeInc philosophy unfolds, you will examine different paths to achieving a life that offers financial security and fulfillment, including becoming successful as an entrepreneur and in your dream career. With this approach, you aren’t restricted to either/or career choices, but you are advised to pursue a professional core career. You need a roof over your head while you pursue your dreams, and just as important, a professional core career gives you the business experience that will increase your abilities to get your entrepreneurial and dream careers off the ground.

With all its lack of security, a traditional core career is still the most reliable route to economic wellbeing: living the American dream of having a home, a car, disposable income, perhaps raising a family and taking vacations. When you are making a career choice for the first time, you need to look at your options with a clear head. While there is no real job security in traditional career paths anymore, some professions, some industries, are much better bets than others.

Some people graduate and have no idea what they should do to make a living and a life. Some people know exactly what they want to do, and some of these people have known since they were snot-nosed kids. Other people can be happily guided by family tradition, while some cannot: I come from a family of doctors, surgeons, nurses, and health professionals but I faint at the sight of blood. The rest of us float indecisively in a sea of uncertainty.

Your first job out of school might not be what you always dreamed of doing. No matter what situation you find yourself in, never think you are entitled to something else. Success and opportunity often come when you work to make good things happen.

Joshua Waldman, Author, Job Searching with Social Media for Dummies, www.careerenlightenment.com

While core career choice should certainly take into account personal preferences, it should not be made in the belief that the career you choose will l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: This Is Your Life
• The Knock ’em Dead Brain Trust
• Part I: Welcome to the Professional World
• Part II: Networking
• Part III: The Interview
• Part IV: After the Interview
• Part V: Lifetime Career-Management Strategy: How to Get What You Want Out of Life
• Appendix: The Knock ’em Dead: Secrets & Strategies for First-Time Job Seekers Brain Trust
• Index