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WHY SHOULD I DO INFORMATIONAL INTERVIEWS?

WHY SHOULD I DO INFORMATION/AL INTERVIEWS? 

Information interviews help you find and then get your dream job. Here are the five top reasons for doing information interviews:

1. You confirm that a certain job is the one you want. An actual job can be quite different from a written job description.

2. Information interviews take the terror out of hiring interviews because you learn how to talk with a professional about the job you are interested in.

3. You learn what parts of your experience, training, and education make you a strong job candidate. Knowing that, you can talk about yourself in a hiring interview in a way that will convince your interviewer that you are the right person for the job.

4. Doing information interviews lets an employer see that you are willing to take initiative and responsibility. Both traits are highly valued by employers. ( Because of your initiative -as well as your skills and interests- you may find yourself being considered for a job that was not even advertised.)

5. Information interviewing can provide you with knowledge that offsets your lack of work experience.

[Excerpts from - "What color is your parachute? for teens" - by Richard Nelson Bolles & Carol Christen- taken for review purpose only]

How to Plan for a Career

In order to find out your most suitable career it will be worth doing Career Planning.  You have to do some introspection on your sources of motivation as the first step. There may be a lot of careers that might appear suitable to you matching the skills and knowledge you have already acquired. You may have been attracted to certain careers as they appeared to be highly appealing to your senses. But this does not necessarily indicate the most suitable career for you as your skill sets may not fit in with the demand.

You may sit with a pen and paper and list out your personal interests and what all things you expect from a career. Once you have completed doing this, you will get a rough sketch of your ideal job. Many jobs become parts of a career and many careers have the same jobs as their integral parts. Your ideal job should match with one of those careers. Find out which career is more related to your ideal job.

How to start Career Planning

Many people end up in miserable careers as they did not have a plan about their careers. You must remember that once you have already selected a career and have already worked your way up for a certain time only to find that the chosen field was not suitable to your interests and expectations, you may not be able to flourish in another career easily. This means that you must be careful while choosing your career. A cautiously worked out career plan will help you to eliminate possibilities of dissatisfaction.

It would be good to consider the following points during the initial stages of career planning:

• The academic qualification that you already have
• The course that you are studying now
• Your work experience in any field, part-time, full time, or as part of your family business
• Your extracurricular activities during college days
• Your hobbies and other personal interests
• Your experience that interested you during social activities

Once you have completed this list, take the points one by one and put them for a deep thought. Then you try answering the following questions honestly.

• Why did you do that?
• Which part of that work/study you enjoyed the most?
• Which part of that work/study you really found boring or useless?
• What was the challenging aspect of that study or work?
• What did you really contribute during that work/ study?
• Which aspect of that study/ work earned you your teacher’s or colleagues’ good remark?

Did you finish answering all these questions?

Now you may just read what you have written as answers to the questions and you will find that a certain pattern has evolved around a particular kind of work that employs your skills and interests. This should invariably form the basis of the careers range that you are most likely to enjoy.

Pinpointing the Exact Career of Choice

By now you have laid the foundation to your career planning. Yet you have not arrived at a choice that would suit you the most. So the next step is browsing through the various career profiles available in your country of choice. Various industries involve numerous careers and each career path has a certain profile that consists of varying requirements and attractions.

You should be able to flag your career line by matching with the career profiles that will be included in this section of the Maxnewsonline.com

Career Advice

The selection of your best suitable career from such a broad spectrum of careers could be sometimes a difficult task for most people. You can seek advice from of a career specialist who may help focus on what you are looking from a career and work out strategies on how to get where you would like to be.

Points to Ponder

By now you may have arrived at a point where you are almost sure of your career choice. Just having an idea or a plan may not bring you the exact details of the work you are going to do to build your successful career. For this you will need to consider certain issues related to each job before putting your plan into action.

There are practical issues like salary, work environments, safety at work, possible discriminations, stock market fluctuations, country specific issues, family relocation difficulties, job market, and many others. You may also require skill upgrading and updating and sometimes extra qualifications that become essential to get hired at that given time.

There is stiff competition in most of the careers in the job market. Careers like modelling, anchoring, film direction, journalism, politics etc. always demand lot of paid or unpaid work experience. While choosing such glamorous careers you must keep in mind you may have to do really hard work to progress. You may also consider career progression options in the selected field or a related field. Sometimes you may require additional qualifications to progress. Are you prepared to go back to a college for this?

7 Vital Tips for Effective Job Search

You need to be in possession of two very important tools for a successful Job Search. They are good information and well-developed job-hunting skills. These two items can be further classified into four important key areas as follows:

1. A clear idea about your skills and goals
2. An understanding of your job market
3. A well-planned job search campaign
4. Effective use of powerful social media tools

The seven steps in the job-hunting process

Step 1.
You may consider yourself as a product and analyze it by identifying your goals, strengths, weaknesses, skills, experiences, values, and interests.

Step 2. 
Explore your career options with business houses and other organizations by means of effective company research, information interviews, and a detailed study of the professional organizations related to your dream career.

Step 3. 
Organize your job search with a definite goal. There are experts in the field who can help you to evaluate your effectiveness. Seek their assistance. Prepare your goals and organize a timeline for achieving it. The process may take 4 to 10 months time to complete. For this, you can organize the process through a customized monthly planner.

Step 4. 
Be ready with essential job search documents. Résumés, cover letters, and the list of questions you would like to ask your employer should be meticulously prepared in such a way that they reflect your qualifications as they relate to your prospective employer’s recruitment objectives.

Step 5. 
Build and sharpen your presentation skills. Your oral presentation skills can be honed by participating in mock interviews and by practising expected questions of the interview. You may expect questions based on behaviour, various situations, required aptitude, and resources.

Step 6. 
Plan, develop and execute a job search campaign. Follow all media advertisements related to your job. Develop a professional contact network, utilizing all possible avenues including social media tools. Be persistent in expanding and maintaining this valuable network.

Step 7. 
Get the most desirable offer by performing well in the interviews. Manage this decisive stage by negotiating, sending thank-you letters, signing a formal acceptance document, and behaving in an ethical and professional manner.

'Informational Interview'- What's it actually?

'Informational Interview'- What's it actually?

I don't fully believe that, with just a few lines on this subject as given in my previous post, you got a clear idea on Information/al Interviews. Let me explain a little further on this critically important step in the career development process. 

What actually is this 'Informational Interview' in the contexts of higher education or career building? As I mentioned in my previous post, it's an interview conducted by a student or a job-seeker with an experienced person or persons of the university or industry of our choice. But why do we undertake such not an easy task to gather information about a program of study of a university or on the prospects of being employed by a particular company of our choice, whilst we have so many other risk-free sources of information already available elsewhere? Informational Interview can never be equal/led to any other means of sourcing information in the career building process.

For instance, I suppose you are a student looking for higher study opportunities and have already decided to pursue MBA (with some specialization/s of your choice). You have done all the usual search tasks generally carried out by an MBA aspirant and you know the basic requirements to get admission to the program in the three best institutes you have chosen at last. You have gathered the maximum information that internet could provide about these three institutes and most other sources of information like admission consultancy services in your area, Management entrance test preparation centres,  books, journals and periodicals that provide specific information on business schools, your teachers, general and academic library resources, your friends and their friends, etc. 

Still you have finally these three institutes and you are nearly unable to choose with confidence THAT INSTITUTE which is going to be your alma mater. You are yet to pin point THAT CAMPUS  you can be and have to be proud of being your spring board that launches you to the greatest echelons of your career success. Here you need a final push to take THAT DECISION and you can't trust anyone or any written source of information for that. You need the most reliable, most updated, most realistic, most futuristic, and precise and wisest remarks, opinions, suggestions, and advice and it can only be obtained from the horse's mouth, the horse trained from the same school where you seek to pursue your MBA. This puts you into the tracks that lead you to the brilliant alumni of your chosen schools. These people are sure to have a long story to tell you regarding their alma mater. Properly put in position, alumni of the immediate yesteryears are the BEST SOURCE OF INFORMATION for you about the school. They will tell you how the school helped them to be where they are now, and the experience, values, vision, and influence their school provided to their career building process. And, only a sincere alumnus, and never a professor or any other staff of the school, can be THAT PERFECT SOURCE. They will be able to explain you if you could do your MBA from that school and if the specialty/s that you consider are best taught there. They will tell you the prospects of all sorts. 

Similarly, if you are a job-seeker, the perfect source of information is a senior employee of the company/s of your choice. You need to find out the most suitable person of that company to be interviewed, and that depends on the position you have applied/selected with that company. If you are seeking a junior managerial position, you may best interview one of the senior managers of the firm who rose through the ranks in the same company. 

Informational Interview not only provides necessary clues that help you decide your school or program of study or future employer, the person you interview and the work place you visit can also show you the realistic visuals of your proposed study or employment. So, depending on the expanse of your interview, you are in effect experiencing certain core attributes of the course you are going to study there or sort of job you are likely to undertake once hired.  

Informational Interviews

What is an Informational Interview?

An interview conducted to gather correct and useful information regarding a particular subject is called Information/al Interview. In the context of higher study or employment decision making, Info Interviews play a very serious role.

You may be a student who wants to choose a specific programme of study at a university in a country of your choice. You have good background info regarding the programme of study, the university, and the country where you will have to live in. But is that information well- enough to confidently make it the final choice? Have you got a detailed picture of the programme? Is the university your best choice? Is your subject selection the most accurate -considering your true aspirations, dreams, cognitive strengths and weaknesses, career opportunities in the future, your chances of sticking on to such a career, and your values and culture?

Or, you may be a job-seeker seriously in the look out for getting into a suitable employment and have short-listed a few employers for making targeted efforts to be hired by one of them. Your listing has had a set of criteria for choosing them, and have already passed through the rigorous process of elimination and inclusion, until you narrowed down to this handful of prospective employers who according to your earnest estimates would provide you with a head start in your great career making. Where did you get the information about these employers [companies] and what is the credibility of the sources of such information? Did you know that some of the so called successful medium level companies have the history of having some of the worst employment policies, procedures and terms? Did you think that if one of the firms in your list employs you, that would be the best available and possible first job you could ever undertake?

Informational Interview is the wisest step you can take before finalizing your career decisions, be it in seeking higher education avenues or employment opportunities.

For informational interview you approach an experienced person in the industry to gather relevant information. In this mostly face to face meeting you actively seek information from a former student of the university or an employee of the organization of your choice. In a job or university admission interview, you are being interviewed so that interviewer collects relevant information about you, your background, your skills and admissibility or employability. During an information interview, on the other hand, you are the interviewer, and you gather maximum relevant and critical information about your university or employer of choice, by actively seeking answers to your genuine queries from an experienced person.

The information that you collect from such experienced people is recorded in full, organized systematically and analyzed critically in order to arrive at certain decisions which ultimately lead to your correct choice of higher studies and career.