English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

In this chapter, Starting your Career, it talks about how you should find a job, type up a resume, write a cover letter, make a portfolio, and most importantly how to act professionally. That means don’t pick your nose during the interview.

A resume is a document whose main purpose is to create a good impression. Companies go through many resumes and many times only the candidates with resume’s that stand out are invited for an interview.

Chapter 15 helps in discussing the many aspects that make up the process of writing a resume. They talk about how you should preplan your thoughts, what the proper research about a company you need to think about, all the way through getting your resume out there.

Chapter 15 of Technical Communication Today discusses how to begin searching for future jobs as well as following up on the potential jobs that you have recently submitted your resumes. I think that it is very interesting and comforting that you should always submit your resume to people that you previously have connections to; but it makes sense because that is how I received my first job as an assistant professional. I also thought that it was important to know more about the ground rules of creating a resume.

Before reading chapter 15, Starting Your Career, I never realized that there were two different forms of résumés, those two forms being the archival and functional approaches to writing résumés. In any class or any time I have ever attempted to write a résumé it has always been archival. The chapter makes it seem like this is the most used and requested type of résumé. I thought it was also helpful that the chapter introduced the functional approach to writing a résumé.

I took plenty of notes on this week's reading, "Chapter 15 - Starting Your Career" in TCT.

Although I've been successful in finding a job in the sense that I have one right now, I wouldn't say I've had a lot of success with my job-seeking activities.

This week's reading, Chapter 15- Starting Your Career, is a practical reading for college students. I like how the author emphasizes goal setting. I feel that a person that sets high but reasonably attainable goals is most likely to achieve them. One point that I feel like the author did not emphasize was that goals should also be measurable. By being measurable a goal can be more clearly reviewed to see if it has been obtained. The author discussed job searching and how the internet opens up a lot of opportunities, but did not leave out the importance of personal networking.

This chapter starts out with tips on beginning and executing a job search. The job search tips provided do seem useful, such as setting goals for your job search and being prepared to hear “no”. Overall methods of job searching have changed drastically in recent years with the invention of job search websites and online resumes. The new online job market can be much more demanding in regards to the quality of resumes and the quality of information provided within those resumes.

Chapter 15 focuses some of the steps that you need to go to when searching for a job. It covered constructing a resume, writing an application letter, forming a portfolio, and interviewing.

When it comes to writing a resume the chapter suggested that you could use a template but then change parts of to make it original. In my own opinion I feel that creating your own “template” by changing font size, color and alignment produces a much better looking resume than anything created with a template. As the book suggests there are multitudes of websites out there with suggestions.

After reading Chapter 15 (TCT), a conversation with an old high school teacher entered my thoughts. I went to this teacher originally just to catch up on things, but eventually we started to talk about my future as a high school industrial technology teacher. The biggest point he tried to express to me was to get real world experience. He told me that real world experience in a field relative to the curriculum I would be teaching would not only benefit me in getting a job but would make me a better teacher.