Board members from the Alabama Press Association were at Samford today talking to JMC students. Their advice: journalists are generalists, don’t limit yourself to print or video but get a bit of both, separate yourself from your competition.
The board members were passionate, optimistic and dedicated to helping their community and their industry. They gave good advice for students, both in the Crimson office, and in Dr. Jones’ print practicum class.
Dr. Jones got the ball rolling: “What skills do these students need?”
The consensus response? “Everything.”
Sounds familiar.
Meanwhile Brent Miller, a professor at Florida State, recently published an interesting column at The Chronicle of Higher Education about résumés. You might want to jot this one down:
Here’s a trick I have used to land jobs myself: I copy specific phrases and buzzwords from the job posting into my résumé. Then I build them into the bullet points. “Instructional design a plus” from the posting becomes “experience in instructional design” on my application. (Obviously, I only do that when the statements are true.) I don’t refer to instructional design as something else, such as “building course materials.”I have found that committee members who quickly scan résumés often look for the specific phrases they put in the job posting. Using other phrases to describe the same activity might cause a committee member to unknowingly pass over critical parts of your experience while they speed read. I have also heard of some corporate employers using an automated filter that electronically weeds out applications if they lack the right “keywords,” which essentially are the words from the job posting.
Have you seen a job that asks you to apply online, sending you through a portal and making you fill in forms? Your application may be filtered through keyword searching software. Think about that as it relates to cover letters, too.
Here’s another useful résumé read.
