Silver lining among the gloom

FOR fresh graduates, 2008 was supposed to be a year full of promise.
But in the gloomy 2009, unemployment rates in Singapore are expecting a dip to an all-time low at 5% in a further 6 months down the road.

Like falling dominoes, banks and companies worldwide found themselves reeling from the effects of the mortgage crisis, which turned into a credit crunch and then a recession that skirted the edges of depression. Forced to cut costs to survive, firms started freezing new hires, laying off workers and slashing wages.

Now, young people are finding themselves stuck with pay cuts and lower bonuses - that is, if they are lucky enough to be employed at all.
Fresh grads are expected to bite the bullet and move into contract or internships, many will expect despite sending out dozens of applications and going for more than a few interviews. http://www.singaporeinternship.com/

In the past, a dearth of jobs prompted people to take a break and head back to school. But this time, paying for graduate school is becoming a less viable option as the world anticipates the worst recession in modern times next year

Things on the economic front are not likely to improve for much of 2009.Still, as with every dark cloud, there is a silver lining.

The cost of living is expected to be lower next year, with inflation tipped at less than 1 per cent - from an alarming 6 per cent this year.
Food prices are easing and oil prices are plunging, making it cheaper to pump petrol, take public transport, buy air tickets and use electricity, among other things.
With shoppers staying at home and saving their money, retailers are also likely to start giving bigger discounts to draw customers back.

And as many sanguine commentators have noted, there is also a philosophical bright side to the downturn.
A recession, coming after years of excess, can be a time for reflection and re- evaluation.
A survey of 100 companies, about half of them were still hiring. Another 40 per cent of the respondents had frozen their recruitment plans and the rest were reducing their workforce either through retrenchment or natural attrition. Jobs are being offered by accounting firms as well as service, IT and healthcare companies.
There are still job opportunities out there for new graduates, but they will probably have to moderate their salary expectations. In most cases, starting salaries are expected to remain the same.
Fresh grads are advised to take up job offers even if the salaries offered are slightly lower than what they are expecting. However, companies in the hospitality industries are supportive and have been hiring older workers (Silver workforce)

Resume Writing

1. Plan your resume to target the industry in general and the interviewer in particular. Doing this quickly brings the focus to:

a. Your Qualifications Summary: Be practical with this part; avoid making goal statements because they may be out of line with a particular company’s positional standpoint. Also, don’t get your personal goals and qualifications mixed up; this section is about your qualifications, it should stay away from any statement about your personal goals. This may seem obvious, but it is a mistake that is often made.
b. The Goal Statement: This is the section for your statement on the goals you want to achieve. Here again, avoid mistakes like ‘… to serve the organization as long as possible and grow to greater heights’. The reality is, your employment’s longevity is riddled with many practicalities and ever-changing market dynamics.
c. Your Salary Expectations: Your resume is not the place to have this discussion. Unless, of course, you want to torpedo your chances of either getting the job or getting a higher salary. Leave this section for oral negotiation.

2. Never write vague descriptions like ‘10 years experience in store management’. Instead, explain what and how you did in stores. A chemical store and an engineering materials store differ hugely in functionality. A description that applies to the former will not to the latter. Just like you were selling something (and you are!), it is better to be specific. Apply this principle to your specific career.

3. Your experiences are not true testimonies of your abilities until you make them link together. How do you do this? By highlighting verifiable and practical justifications. What you talk about in the interview must match the highlighted strengths on your resume. If they do not, you’ll just raise red flags.

4. Letting typos, grammar errors creep in suggests an unorganized character and uneducated behavior. It might not be fair, but that’s the way it is. Since your resume is in fact, your advocate, you must get the most mileage out of it by having it edited or proofread by others, if you can’t do it yourself for some reason. Do it twice or three times if necessary, but get the job done to perfection.

5. If you are a fresh grad, a new set of rules apply to you. As you can’t possibly be show extensive work experience, you need to highlight your educational achievements and extracurricular activities, in place of the experience and accomplishment sections. You can use this to your advantage by reflecting on your leadership skills- for example, if you were a football team captain, organizational skills and accomplishments- or if you were an editor of your school magazine, your meticulous attention to detail.

The way you write your resume can either make or break your job candidacy. Also, if your resume will be posted on the Internet on some of the popular job boards, this means that it will be visible by nearly everyone. Not writing your resume properly, then, has the potential to sink your job prospects entirely. Don’t let this happen to you.

By following the resume writing tips above, you will position yourself as a strong candidate and make your resume stand out from the crowd.

Ten Do’s and Don’ts for Your Resume

The Do’s

1. Place your strongest material in the two-inch visual space that begins about 2 5/8 inches from the top of your resume. Make sure you include your most impressive, impactful achievements and qualifications in this "primetime" space. It’s where the reader’s eyes will focus first.
2. Use a professional profile or qualifications section in your resume’s primetime space to give the employer a quick but concrete capsule of your achievements and skills. Write it when the rest of your resume is complete and you’ve already decided what your strongest qualifications are.
3. Give the most weight to your most recent (past ten to fifteen years) professional position. The section of the resume for your most recent position should contain more bulleted accomplishments than your previous positions. For each position, rank the accomplishments in order of decreasing relevance to the employer you are targeting.
4. Quantify your impact on the organizations you have worked for. If you reduced expenses, say by how much or by what percentage. If you supervised a project, say how many were on your team. Always ask yourself how you helped the organization, and insert the numbers that demonstrate that impact.
5. Pay as much attention to your resume’s design as you do to its content. Use bullets or other appropriate symbols, insert rules (horizontal lines) to separate major sections, and use a 10-to-12-point conservative typeface for the body text of the resume. Aim for 1-inch side margins and slightly smaller top and bottom margins.
6. Include publications, patents, presentations, honors, relevant volunteer experiences, and professional licenses or certifications in your resume, particularly if they are relevant to the position you seek. These "extras" can sometimes be the factor that wins you the interview.
7. Edit and proofread mercilessly. Edit your resume to reduce fluff and make every word count. Set your resume aside for a few days and then come back to it again with "fresh eyes." Misspelled words and grammatical mistakes are the proverbial kiss of death in a resume. Eliminate them.
8. Place your education after your experience if you’ve been in the workforce for more than five years. If the degree you earned is the most relevant or impressive detail of your education section, highlight it. If the school you attended is the selling point, emphasize it.
9. Use a two-page resume if appropriate. Two-page resumes are fine (and in some cases, preferable) if you’ve been in the workforce for about ten years or more or have particularly impressive work experience.
10. Mail your resume in a 9-by-12-inch labeled envelope rather than folded up in a standard No. 10 envelope. The impact and professional image this produces is worth the extra postage.

The Don’ts

1. Don’t make things up or inflate your accomplishments, level of responsibility, or skills.
2. Don’t confuse your resume with your autobiography. While there are many pieces of information that your resume must have, its primary purpose is to focus on the aspects of your life and career that address the employer’s needs.
3. Don’t automatically include a separate "objective" line at the beginning of the resume. If you believe that stating your career objective will improve your chances, then mention the job title you seek in the "Professional Profile" or "Qualifications" section at the beginning of the resume (see "Do" number 2). More often than not, separate objective lines are too general and take up valuable space at the top of the resume that could be better used to focus on the skills prospective employers need. Use your cover letter to explain your career objectives.
4. Don’t use pronouns ("I") or articles ("a," "the"). They detract from the force of your accomplishments, slow down the reader, and take up precious space.
5. Don’t provide personal data. Marital status, date of birth, height/weight, and similar non-work-related information can be used to illegally discriminate against applicants, and they rarely add anything of value to your qualifications.
6. Don’t repeat the same action words throughout the resume. Instead of using the verb developed or led over and over, pull out your thesaurus and mix in terms like accelerated, delivered, directed, established, initiated, or reengineered.
7. Don’t leave out dates. Even if you choose the functional resume format to minimize frequent job changes or lack of experience, include your dates of employment somewhere on your resume (usually at the end).
8. Don’t use more detail than you need to convey your accomplishments. Dense, paragraph-sized bullet points make for tough reading. A good rule of thumb is to limit each bullet to one to two lines of text with three to five accomplishments for each position.
9. Don’t use adjectives like dynamic or self-starting. Let the details of your resume and cover letter convince the employer that you have these qualities.
10. Don’t make your resume a list of your job duties — make it a list of your accomplishments! Weave your job responsibilities into your descriptions of your accomplishments.