Jaylynne’s Blog

One crucial part of obtaining a career is having a decent resume. This piece of paper shows employers all about who you are, what you have done, where you have done it, and how long it took you to do it. Sometimes they are looked over thoroughly while other times they are barely glanced at. Your resume should provide enough information to show what all you have done.

The first item on your resume should be your contact information. This includes your name, address, phone number, and a valid email address. Your email address should sound professional, not hotbunny007. If you want the employer to take you serious, then use a serious email address.

Some people would say that next comes the Objective, but most employers know the reason you are sending them a resume so the objective could be ruled out. Instead, next comes your Academic Achievements. In this portion you want to list your school, your diploma type (Bachelor of…), skills acquired in courses, and any recognitions that you have achieved, like President’s List or Dean’s List.

In the next section you will list your Professional Experience. In this part you will list tasks or jobs that you have had that could relate to the position of which you are applying for. You will also want to put the dates on the right side of the paper.

The next section could be for any extracurricular activities that you have been apart of. Most employers would like to see that you have experience doing things outside of the academics. Any volunteer work that you have done would look really good in this section.

When leaving your college career and starting your professional one, it is probably best that you leave the college one where it belongs. With technology becoming more and more advanced it is easy to get caught up in all of the social networking sites out there, but when you start looking for a job it is essential that you know how you are represented in cyberspace.

When you Google yourself, do pictures from that party freshman year come up? Or how about that spring break trip? These are all things that a future employer can find and hold against you. It won’t matter how good your resume is but how you carry yourself. Knowing who your digital self is will help in the job search. As easy as it is for future employers to see the bad things about you, it is just as easy for them to see the good.

Set all of your social networking sites to private and control the flow of information about you. Writing blogs about important subjects is another way for future employers to see a good side of you. Don’t let opportunities pass you by just because of a few pictures. Be aware of how you are represented and everything should go well.

In my Public Relations class today, we did an assignment where we were given a letter written by someone that had no punctuation marks. Then we were split into sections and the first section had to put in punctuation marks to make it sound like a love letter and the second  group had to add punctuation marks to make it sound like the writer of the letter hated the person they were sending it to.

When both letters were read aloud it was amazing to see how with just a few periods, commas, or question marks the same letters could say totally different things. We were given this assignment to show how being grammatically correct is very important in your career. With a field like Public Relations, it is essential to have the ability to write really well and also to be able to get your point across clearly.

Today, where everything is being sent by email, it is easy to get information misconstrued. Losing a job or a client by putting a comma in the wrong place would not be a very good way to end your career. An easy way to catch any of these mistakes would be to simply read it out loud. If you read it how you wrote it , then the mistakes should make themselves known and you can keep your job another day.

WKRP

Today in my Public Relations class, we watched an old television show called WKRP. This show was about the inner workings of a radio station and though that premise alone doesn’t directly relate to Public Relations, the obstacle that they went through in this particular episode does.

In this episode, this station manager was feeling left out of the loop and wanted to be included in the day to day operations of the station, even though in the past he wasn’t that interested. His employers, however, were already used to him not being there and were pretty hesitant to give him anymore responsibility due to his over the top ideas.

Because the station manager was feeling left out, he decided to do a promotion all on his own without communicating to the rest of his team; not bothering to explain his idea or how he was going to execute it. In the end, the station manager ended up hauling turkeys out of an airplane into a shopping center parking lot. To say that that was over the top would be an understatement.

The ideas that we were supposed to relate to Public Relations were that when we set off to accomplish something, it is better to be organized in the things that we are supposed to be doing. Also communication is very important, whether it is with your team or with a client. If the station manager would have told someone his idea, they would have told him that 1) turkeys don’t fly and 2) that it was a bad idea in general. That ties in with another objective; do your research before starting a venture.

I don’t really get the point of blogging. It reminds me a little too much of someone not getting enough attention when they were young and so now they write about their problems and concerns for the whole world to see for that one little piece of gratification knowing that someone somewhere may read it and leave you a special comment that makes your heart warm at the thought of someone actually caring about what you have to say. *pause for breath* I mean really, is it not bad enough that you had probably told everyone within hearing distance the subject that made you so upset that you have to make it known to the people who had the unfortunate luck to accidentally come across what appeared to be a reputable site but only turned out to be someone whining about the psychological mumbo jumbo that their therapist had told them that day? Actually, I really hope someone looking for a reputable site comes across this blog because whatever they were searching for must not have been very reputable at all. I take back everything I just said. I love blogs….well my own at least.