A Story of Success

On the surface, it might look like John Ord got lucky.

After a relatively short job search, he was offered an opportunity to be the cloud manager for an IT services company in New York with a prestigious list of clients. Now he’s at the forefront of a hot technology discipline and working with some of the world’s leading financial companies.

“This is the trend to be in, in this business,” Ord said. "This is the right place at the right time.”

What’s more, Ord never really applied for the cloud manager job. Instead, he succeeded on the strength of his wider networking efforts.

Ord treated his job search like it was a full-time job. He woke at 6 a.m. Monday to Friday, went to the gym, showered, ate breakfast and hit the job boards at full speed at 8 a.m. Breaking only for lunch, he’d work his network, research the job market and talk to recruiters all day long. By 5 p.m., Ord would have applied to 20 to 30 jobs.

“I spent the whole day looking for jobs,” Ord said. “By doing that, I got my resume to lots and lots of recruiters.”

The manual effort was helpful, but the resume, he said, was his secret weapon.

Without writing a new one from scratch, Ord tailored his resume to each job application by working from a “master resume” that detailed all his skills and experience. When he found targeted jobs that met his requirements, he cut extraneous information from this master document and submitted the relevant details. This system allowed him to send targeted resumes to multiple job postings quickly.

“The more kinds of resumes you can get out there … the more opportunities will come your way,” he said. “And be aware of the broad range of skills that you offer. … You get out what you put in. It is a numbers game.”

That’s why he was able to land this cloud job in June, Ord said. The recruiter who brought the opportunity to his attention had Ord’s resume on file from a previous job application and thought he’d be a good candidate for the cloud manager position.

“I didn’t apply specifically for this job,” he said. “Once I saw what the opportunity was, I was definitely interested.”

The strategy paid off. It worked so well, in fact, that Ord is still being approached by recruiters months later.

Additional text

Skim the text and explain how the key skills required by employers have changed with time. What skills are absolutely necessary for modern graduates and which are advisable? Make a list of them.

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Degrees are no longer enough — employers are looking for skills in the workplace.

Today, one in three young people enters higher education, and a degree is fast becoming the minimum qualification for any white-collar job. This is not to suggest that the value of a degree has diminished. We now live in a far more complex world and most jobs today require a much higher level of intellectual skills than ever before. Graduates enjoy higher pay and lower unemployment than non-graduates, but most employers will tell you that there is still a shortage of good graduates.

So what do employers look for in graduate recruits? Certainly, they want intellectual skills acquired in taking a degree. These include the ability to collect and analyze information, to acquire special knowledge, to solve problems, and to communicate. In the past this was enough. When graduates were a small elite, employers could afford to invest in extended training programmes lasting between one and two years.

Most graduate recruits today are expected to make an immediate contribution to the organization. This means that they need more than their academic qualifications. Employers look for a range of generic vocational skills which are useful in almost all types of work; they are usually known as ‘key skills’.

Six key skills are approved by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) for incorporation into many vocational education and training programmes. These key skills are communication, using and presenting numerical data, information technology, team-working, improving your own learning and performance, and problem solving. Graduate employers certainly hope to find all of these, but they also look for some additional qualities such as adaptability and commercial awareness. Above all, they want recruits to have already had some practical experience of applying them.

Certainly, all students should have some ‘quality work experience’ before they complete their full-time education. However, not enough employers offer suitable vacancies to provide this. Ideally, you would get vacation or part-time work relevant to your area of study so that you could start to apply theory to the world of work. But many students end up serving in retail shops, bars and fast-food outlets, or waiting in restaurants. The money is certainly useful, but does menial work (чорна робота) provide opportunities for useful learning and help your career prospects? It does.

Even in the most menial jobs you can analyze everything you see and do and what your colleagues at all levels are doing. You can try and work out why things are organized in the way they are and why people act in the way they do. What do you find motivates the customers of your business – and annoys them? The job can be used as a learning opportunity so you can tell future recruiters what skills and understanding you have gained.

Few people will find a lifetime employer. They will move between employers to gain greater expertise and experience. Many will be offered short-term contracts, others will be offered work as consultants on a self-employed basis. Graduates face more flexible though less certain futures. In going to university it is important to recognize that the future will be very different from the past, that you must learn to adapt and that you can and should learn from every experience of student life.