Power Networking

Posted onby tmackinnon in Career Advice

Once you have finished writing that power resume and cover letter that clearly defines your abilities and Geomatics skill sets, you will want to ensure that you have it sent out into the real world (getting it off of your desk and into the job market). You need to have it sent to potential employers because obviously this is where your resume and cover letter will be of the most benefit to you.

 As you will eventually find out there are many different ways to accomplish this task, especially since our technological advanced society provides us with many tools such as mail, email, fax and the internet. However these methods, although very important to your job search can sometimes be impersonal and you will not always know that it has got to the right person. Therefore one of the oldest and better techniques that you should be using is the networking approach.

 One of the most powerful ways to network your self towards that new position is through a career fair or at professional conferences. You can often find advertisements for job fairs in most news papers or on the internet and they are often held at local hotels or convention centers. Colleges and universities also often organize career fairs before the school term is about to end to give their students ample opportunities to meet potential employees. Conferences are also a great place to network especially if you are still a student, because most professional organizations allow students to attend them at very low reduced costs.

At a career fair, you may not see any advertisements for a particular job that you would like, but you should not let this bother you, most times employers do not advertise all of their positions or sometimes have openings coming up that are not yet available. Therefore it is still important that you attend and distribute your resume and your business card (see my article on why you should use a business card with your job search) to all potential employers. Remember that it is not only you that will be networking, the employers will also network their findings throughout their departments, maybe with their affiliated companies and possibly just through friends or their own personal network.

Keep in mid that networking opportunities allow you to let potential employers know exactly what you could to be doing for them, and you never know, if you sell your self right then they might offer to create a position that was not available just for you that best suits your skills, or at least agree to let you have an interview. Unlike interviews, networking allows you to have some control over the conversation allowing you to promote your good aspects and perhaps avoiding any weaknesses.

Professional conferences and trade shows usually cater more to companies selling their products but keep in mind that these companies need employees and most times after communicating with them they will either accept your resume or provide you with the contact person of whom to get in touch with. Knowing the correct contact person in a company will allow you to research them further and give you that edge over those that did not have this contact information. Cover letters that have Dear Sir or Madam do not nearly look as appealing as those with the correct contact names on them.

A pretty good resource to help you find professional conferences is Conference Alerts, is a website dedicated to promoting Academic Conferences (http://www.conferencealerts.com/) and for a better up to date GIS related resource on Canadian GIS related conferences, you should keep an eye on my other GIS website called CanadianGIS.com. On this site I have dedicated a full section to posting and following professional conferences for Canadian GIS professionals .

(http://canadiangis.com/www/canadian_gis_events)

I highly recommended that you consider adding job fairs and job clubs to your arsenal of job-search weapons! Networking was one of the skill sets that I learned to use early on while at University and certainly has done wonders for both my job searching skills and my GIS career in general.

 About the Author:

This article was written by Ted MacKinnon based on knowledge and experience during his GIS career, for more information use the contact form above or check out CanadianGIS.com or tmackinnon.com. [If you find this article posted on other sites please do let me know]

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