Job-seeking workshops set for Thursdays at Job Service

A five-week series of workshops aimed to help people find jobs is continuing its rotation this week at Job Service-Havre.

The five-week rotation goes throughout the year, with this week’s workshop Thursday, “Success on the Job.”

Job Service-Havre workforce consultant Ligia Arango teaches the five different workshops to help people get prepared to not only find a job, but also to keep a job.

The workshops are held every Thursday from 9 a.m. to noon.

This week’s workshop is about how to get ready for the first day, Arango said.

She added that time management is discussed, as well as what things people need to have on the first day and dress code.

“We talk about developing good working habits, the difference between socializing at work and socializing with your friends, which is not the same, and we talk just about being ready,” she said.

The following week’s workshop, on March 12, is “Starting the Job Search.”

Arango said “Starting the Job Search” helps people with their skills and their own interests to start a job search.

“We want them to learn how to manage their time, how to manage money and stress during a time when they’re not working, and so we focus on how to budget while you are searching for a job if you don’t have income,” she added. “We also talk about how to handle stress. We do a little skill assessment to find out what people’s interests are, and we work with time management.”

She said the workshop also helps build a schedule for when they need to be up and doing things.

“I tell them coming here is like coming into the office to see what is happening today,” Arango said.

“Job Search Techniques” is March 19, and includes all the different ways jobs can be found and how to fill out job applications, she said.

“We actually pull up generic job applications, we fill it in, work on job descriptions and, like, their own prior jobs and look at the skills they might’ve acquired,” she said. “There are skills that can transfer and we talk about them.”

She added that they also talk about how to find the jobs they want to.

With the first session, people find out what their interests are and in the second one they find skills that match those interests as well as researching companies and businesses that utilize those skills.

“We work quite a bit on how to do an application and part of that is helping people describe what their jobs were,” Arango said. “We use a website called O*net,’ and that website has descriptions of every possible job on this Earth you could imagine.”

People use that information not only to know what they are looking for, but how to better explain what they are looking for and what they did before, she said.

“Writing Effective Resumes” will be March 26. Arango said that workshop is about the purpose of a resume.

“We say the purpose of a resume is to get an interview,” she added. “We talk about the different types of resumes depending on the job they are applying for.”

She said writing a cover letter is also talked about.

Lastly, “Interviewing with Confidence” will be April 2.

“One thing we do there that I like to do and people enjoy doing is they have to come up with a 30-second commercial,” Arango said. “They have to write something about themselves that speaks about them and that is succinct, that is very clear. There is no doubt that after that I know a little bit about you.”

The 30-second commercial has a  purpose, she said, one is that, when people interview the first question is “tell me about yourself,” they no have an answer.

She added that she tells people that they are interviewing the employer as much as they are getting interviewed.

They also learn to submit applications.

“A lot of stuff is done online, and a lot of resumes need to be uploaded, and a lot of those resumes are read by a scanner, not by people, so we need to learn how to write resumes so that when a scanner reads them they can place favorably in the job people are searching for,” Arango said. 

For more information about the workshops and other services offered, people can contact Job Service-Havre at 265-5847.

——

O*net interest profiler on My Next Move website: https://www.mynextmove.org/explore/ip .