The biggest milestone through out your educational life is without doubt the day you land your degree. Ever since you first stepped into the educational system, the target has always been to come out with atleast a degree. Here in Mauritius, it is always assumed that the responsibility of parents is to ensure the education of their children upto maximum tertiary level. Hence, once the children are graduated, it is generally assumed they are independent enough to decide about their futures now. And most importantly, it will be easier to get a job.
This illusion was totally so far fetched for me in my case. Having just completed a degree in Mechanical Engineering, I have always displayed amazingly unbent optimism to land a job as soon as university is over. It has been nearly 1 month since I am done with my tertiary studies and surprise, no job yet. I guess the good learning point for me here was that the more educated you are, the narrower are your chances of landing up a job. Moreover, it is of general knowledge that you can easily land a job in the public sector through your personal network of contacts. That difference between public and private sector is being rapidly levelled. Hence even in private sector, your own network of contacts is of immense help.
Alright, I might be sounding so dramatic. Others might be telling that it's been only so short time since the tertiary studies are over, you should be landing a job sooner or later. But, believe me, I feel like sitting inside a pressure cooker. There is huge subtle pressure of landing a job as soon as possible at home, and mostly to apply for the government sector. I have kept wondering why it is such a great deal, STILL NOWADAYS, to land a job in the public sector. Alright, apart from the security part of it, what else? For me, what is more important, is job satisfaction. For those who did management will recognize the term intrinsic and extrinsic motivating factors. Right now, I feel I am more aligned to working in the private sector, in order to grasp maximum knowledge, to harvest it at a later stage of my professional career.
So through the past 3 months, I have applied for over 40 companies, landed 3 interviews and selected in none. Quite a horrible track record you would say, right? I was discussing with my friend, Varun, today about my track record and he shared with me an article, that really left me wonder. Here are the main points of that article, which I am sure, will make you reflect about your job application process as well.
Five reasons a company never reply you back:
- Not qualified for the vacancy published.
- You have not keyword-optimized your application
- Resume not properly formatted.
- The resume was substantially different from your online profile such as myjob.mu, linkedin
- You were the 499th applicant out of 500 :)
Another interesting part of the article is how to make yourself stand out as an applicant through your application package. Here are the 5 main points:
- Use of social media
- Get professional help to write your resume
- Don't wait until you are out of job to start job hunting
- Use of personal network
- Start blogging in your field of studies :)
Well, these are not bad and difficult ideas to implement. I guess it is high time to modify my approach towards job application. What about you?
