Hello everyone!

This week I continued my (what feels like never-ending) job search. My Resume Specialist, Martin Jaffe, suggested that I trim my resume down to one page. He told me that employers usually have multiple, if not upwards of hundreds, of resumes to read from qualified candidates every day. This is why he suggested that my resume be short and to the point, as this makes sure that the employers don't get impatient or bored while reading mine. 

For me that was a real challenge because I do not have a lot of work experience. Most of my resume was volunteer experience or awards and commendations and this format did not provide me the space to list all of these accomplishments that can make up for my lack of experience in the professional workplace. Luckily, my job counselor finally allowed me to expand my resume to two pages.

Now that my resume was complete, I continued working on the process of looking for a job. I used a search engine called “Indeed.com” that gathers all the job listings from across the web into one concise search. Most of the jobs I found using that search engine were jobs requiring "experience" or a Masters degree and I don't have either. This really concerns me because how am I supposed to get any experience in the first place if all the jobs require that I have experience to begin with? Because of my disability I have mostly had volunteer experience in my life and have not had the opportunity to do an auxiliary job such as become a secretary at a child welfare agency. 

In order to accentuate my positive attributes my counselors suggested a "functional resume". 

A functional resume lists three words that describe you on the left side, while on the right side you describe examples of those three words. For example my resume read:

Experience Summary

Client Advocacy Participates in LEAP Youth Advocacy group

This could be a good way for you to demonstrate your talents that may not be accentuated otherwise. 

Today was a busy day for me. First I went to my very first Job Club meeting where we talked about the myths about networking in the job seeking process. One thing I found interesting was that many of the other clients in the group were older than I were but were having a hard time finding work because they were over qualified or did not have enough experience with the Microsoft Office program suite. 

Later, I participated for my third consecutive year in the Achievement Center for Children’s Blue Chip Blue Tee golf tournament. The past few years my friend Justin and I have helped welcome guests to the outing as well as sell 50/50 raffle tickets. Just like the years before it was a beautiful day for golf and it was really great to spend some time out at Kirtland Country Club with the Achievement Center’s staff and their guests!