 with everyone who's looking for work my position as you may have heard earlier was eliminated from my full-time position was eliminated from UC Berkeley in October. I've had a couple of small gigs since then, but I am actively looking so this has been helpful for me to reacquaint myself with some of the best practices for job search. I also want to say there's a lot of advice here and it's hard to take large amounts of advice at once. In fact, I've had to learn through my own painful experience, all of the things that I've said here. And I would not want anyone to think that after this meeting, you can walk out and do all of these things immediately it takes time to develop these skills, and you are who you are today who you are today is great. And moving forward, pick the things that you think you can tackle right away that work for you and keep upping your game as you go along. So I don't want anyone to feel like there's any sense of oh my God, I'm not doing these things. I'm not successful. I'm not good enough. That's not what I intend to say. This is rather meant to build people up. I, my I'm Tim bombush I am it have spent most of my career as an education professional at UC Berkeley extension at UC Santa Cruz extension at UC Berkeley I teach project management courses at UC Santa Cruz I teach technical writing classes. I taught for a long time and manage some educational programs at UC or at Stanford while I was doing my graduate work. I worked for a while at Diablo Valley College, and I've taught in some small volunteer organizations mostly English as a second language at my heart I'm an educator. My plans for being an academic didn't work out so I pivoted to a tech career where I started off as a technical writer at Kaiser Permanente moved on to IBM. And I learned at IBM one of the most painful lessons I thought IBM and going to be well paid for come for an excellent company for the rest of my life and I was laid off two years after I began there. I also realized that I enjoyed project management so I became a project management professional in the tech writing and project management skills combined led me to a career in consulting for tech writing project management business analysis and change management. Several years ago I returned back or I went to Berkeley to manage a set of program professional training programs at extension. I have taken a lot of extension courses and they transformed my career and I was thrilled to be able to return the favor to our students and the institution. I was very sad when that job was was eliminated. And so now I'm looking for my next adventure. I invite everyone will send out the slide deck I invite anyone to to connect with me through LinkedIn and my LinkedIn profile is on the bottom of the slide. I have about 15 tips I want to share with you. I put them and I put numbers on there just to make it easier to reference back and forth but you can choose the order of these things that you want to work on. The first one I want to emphasize though is that it's really important at all times but especially during a job search that you take care of yourself and your loved ones. We are emotionally and financially vulnerable. Our personal identities have been invested in our careers. Our sense of obligation to the people we are responsible for is powerful and we may feel as I do at times that we're not living up to our responsibilities. And all of that, all of those feelings are real, but go easy on yourself and take the steps that you can to be as physically and mentally strong as possible, including your health, including your relationships and asking yourself why we're between jobs. What kind of work are we really looking for? What is healthy for us? What is necessary financially? And what works for the stage of life that we're in right now? I may be reassessing some of my priorities for instance. What kind of risk am I willing to take? I'm not saying that my career in Berkeley was fulfilling for my core values. It may not have, and I thought that would set me up nice for retirement. So how you answer all of these questions changes during your career. I'm not reading every bullet point on the slide, but I think you've probably been reading them as I go along. But I just want to make sure that this is something that is front and center. I've made sense that I've made sure that I've done some things in my life to eat healthier, to exercise more, get some sunshine, spend more time with my family. And I think that I would encourage you to do the same. On this side, I'm going to go through this a little bit more bullet by bullet. We are taught to be loyal employees and to do everything we can to provide value to the people we work for. It's a work ethic that people really appreciate, but it's also important for us to think about our side of the equation. Our jobs are only as secure as the economy. Many of us live in a boom or bust economy, and revenue and tax shortfalls trigger massive layoffs, including in government sectors where we might have felt like we were safe from being laid off. The next thing I think is an important point. Milton Freeman is a Nobel Prize winning economist, I don't know if he's alive anymore, but his most famous saying is a business's sole responsibility is to maximize profits for its stakeholders. That means nowhere in there, does it say we have to be nice to our employees, we have to keep them on the job if it's affecting our ability to maximize profits. So we have to have a very healthy relationship to our employers and realize when the money's not there when the profits aren't there, we will not take care of our workers first, we will take care of our stakeholders. We need that kind of perspective to our work that helps us keep some emotional distance, but it also forces us to be constantly aware that our jobs may be at stake and we have to be ready to deal with the reality when our jobs are taken away from us. When there are disruptions like we're having now businesses will use an economic downturn to pursue other priorities in the name of money saving, or if we're going to experience some pain let's get, let's experience a lot of it now, such as reorganizing which may lead to eliminating duplicate positions or what they feel are duplicate positions in an organization, eliminating products, services, and city areas. When the stock market is down companies have with a lot of cash are able to go out and buy other companies, which could even healthy companies. So, when that happens we'll start having downsizing and reorganizations. So, realize that that is going on as well. And there are a host of other factors that I'm sure all of us are aware of that could negatively impact our employment in the Bay Area, including companies moving from state companies such as Amazon or Uber disrupting a market which leads to downsizing automation, etc. So we have to keep this in mind and be aware of what this means for our careers on an everyday basis. So I always recommend that we practice constant vigilance. I'm a baseball fan so I always tell myself that I am a free agent after this season and free agents always want that last year their contract to be amazing. It motivates me to be as amazing as I can be every day while looking around the world and understanding what the landscape is out there where my threats and opportunities, how do I minimize my opportunities, and how do I, excuse me, minimize the threats and maximize the opportunities that are available to me. We can talk about that a little bit later when we talk about upping our skills. All times but even especially when we're between jobs we need to develop financial resiliency strategies. Leah told me that we had that the library has some workshops on this, but these are all really important in the one that I want you we have to expect that emergencies will happen and to the degree possible have financial reserves to deal with them they. It's not that they might happen. They will happen and if it's not a job it could be a car repair, a home repair, a health emergency, and as to the degree possible we have to be able to absorb those shock events. In my life with my wife and myself, we have never wanted to be dependent on a single revenue stream. So I've had two jobs for most of my adult life. We have an investment property, which sounds really sexy and like we get work but it also means that we had to reduce our standard of living for 1520 years in order to afford that investment. The investment property takes a lot of work on our part, but now it's an asset for us in a small revenue stream, and by by having multiple revenue streams if one income is taken away. At least you have some cash coming from somewhere else. Again, I don't want to dwell too long on that, but it is something that we have to think about. I'm scared. Keep your resume and LinkedIn profile up to date. I set calendar dates to review both my resume and my LinkedIn profile on at least a quarterly basis. If I'm given new responsibilities at work, I go back and update both. When I start looking at industry trends what industries are strong which ones aren't. If I had to go look for work tomorrow where would the opportunities for me be. And I would ask myself, do I have any gaps in my skills or experience that I need to close so that I could act on those opportunities, and then I develop strategy and plans to do that. And these questions that I ask here are things that I ask myself all the time. Could I start a job search tomorrow. Does my read LinkedIn profile reflect the work that I currently do is my resume aligned with what I what I'm doing or what I wish to do in the near future. Am I able to summarize my work in a sentence or do. And what do I need to do to update all of these things in case I need to. When we talk about resumes and LinkedIn profiles, we're really talking about advertising it's these are marketing collateral assets. They are not technical specifications. Our job when we create a profile or resume is to help our audience recruiters or hiring managers know that we have what they are looking to buy. LinkedIn is a little bit more difficult because you have all kinds of people you don't control who sees that necessarily, but to the degree possible when you're applying for a job tailor your resume for the particular industry company and opportunity that your, your high recruiter or hiring manager is looking for. When we create resumes it's very easy to create a list of duties things that we have done but the idea is not to just do that we have to help them understand what is the value of the work that we've been providing. And if you can put dollar signs on that value. That's good. If you can quantify your value and other ways that's good. Have you helped solve strategic problems in your work. If so, try to make that clear as well so I'm going to share one version of my resume I have because I can work in multiple industries. I have different. I have different resumes so is this too small should I go to a different view level here. Okay, let me see here I need to move this file to a different screen. Okay, this will let me do it. View, I'm going to go into page with. You can't see as much but you'll see more details. Can you see this okay now. Okay, thank you for helping me. Recruiters and hiring managers usually spend about 20 seconds to 30 seconds looking at your resume. Before they decide whether they want to look deeper or throw it away. So one thing that I've learned and I've asked many people about this over time. Your first third or first page of your resume should be just a keyword inventory that they can scan. They need to know your name your phone number and your LinkedIn profile. I feel like that's the most valuable place on your resume and it's wasted but I've asked a lot of people and they and so I thought, maybe I put that in the footnote of my page but no they really want it there. I have a very simple one or two sentence summary of what I do. It's not sexy. I'm not using a lot of marketing words here, but I wanted to be clear and correct so when I apply for jobs as project managers, I have a very simple sentence. I manage programs and projects to drive strategic change it system upgrade upgrades and product development. It's not sexy but that tells them who I am. The next one is where I think I differentiate myself coming from an education background. I'm very interested in enabling people this is what makes me different in how I describe myself for most project managers I say I advocate passionately for individual team and organizational success. And then I have two tables with a summary of my project management skills related skills and industries, and then, and only then do I go into a reverse chronology of my employment history. I'm very interested in trying to quantify our results. So, when appropriate, I put a think results and say what I've done there. Sometimes those results are not easily measured or quantifiable in terms of dollars. So sometimes my results are going to be have other values. Let's see here where's one that's a good one. That was six months behind and enabled growth, global simultaneous release to key Asian and European markets. There's no dollar sign, but there was a strategic value to support a fast release of a product to many markets. So this is hard to do but I encourage everyone to think about how can you put those results in addition to the duties and responsibilities that you've done. I recently updated this resume and I've been getting a lot more traffic in the last week, and I wasn't getting a whole lot before. So I feel like the changes I've made to my resume have been validated. Let me go back to my slide deck and return to what I was doing. Okay, if we go to my next one. Try LinkedIn premium if you're not familiar with that you can pay $29 a month for LinkedIn premium and it is a job search accelerator you can start and stop the subscription as you want. But if you do this, it will really help you validate how your resume and LinkedIn profile are working for you. You can develop your profile to match job descriptions and keywords for the kind of work you seek. Your skill summary at the bottom is even more important because that is how recruiters will find you they'll look for skills and when they find a good match. They'll look closer at your profile. And when you subscribe to this service, you keep updating your profile and your skill summary and still until you start getting healthy matches. And LinkedIn will start presenting job opportunities to you that look like the kind of jobs that you're trying to get. So this is a process to go through over and over again. And when you get to a point where you're really getting a lot of jobs that make you feel excited, where your skills are matching well. Then you know that your, your profile and your skill summary are good, your resume should reflect that and you've gone through a process of optimizing your resume and profile so it will serve you well. That's when you know when you're done. I'm still subscribing to this because I like the fact that they bring these jobs to me, and I wanted to show you an example on LinkedIn. And I'll start by showing you my profile. Everyone's profile is going to look different. Don't think that I'm being prescriptive about how you want to do this. LinkedIn is a little bit more complicated because you could be serving different kinds of jobs that you're interested in. So I wrote a slightly more complex description of myself. My core value of empowering people in organizations has led me to be successful in project management organizational change, learning management and consulting. I'm not sure yet how successful that's going to be. We have my job history here. It's nearly word for word the same. I include my results statements here. And instead of at the top of my resume, your skills summary is at the bottom, and you can have up to 50 skills that you put in here. And the idea here is that when they look for you on for a job search or when you look at a job, it will inventory your skills and experience and communicate to you whether or not that's a good match. So I have an example of that. I looked at a position learning and development program energy for a biotech company in Emeryville. LinkedIn provided me this information because of my profile and skill summary. Okay. And then I click on this job. Oh, I'd like to be that person for biotech. I've done some work in biotech. And then I go over here. I can read the description, building and growing the general technical skills. Okay. But the really interesting thing is if you scroll down here. I match an eight of the 10 skills. And believe it or not 50 skills are not enough to cover everything that you do. I know I can do people management. I know I can do project planning. But if I know I'm strong in 10 of the 10 skills. I can look at the kind of people who have applied for this. And sometimes it doesn't happen with every job. They will compare you to the applicant pool. I wouldn't get lost on that. So, looking at this, I know that this is a job I'd like to do. It's a job I believe I can do. LinkedIn has brought me the job. LinkedIn has shown that in the kind of job that I'm looking for, I'm hitting on the top skills. So this tells me that I've done a good job of developing my profile and my resume. And then it's really easy for me to click on the apply button. I can apply for that job, which I did the other day. So wish me luck. So that's the, that is the idea of what LinkedIn premium can do for you. Don't pay for that. Oh, you also get a few more emails a month when you want to reach out to people. So this is these last two slides. The things that you're marketing yourself and LinkedIn premium are the things that will help you be more successful in your, your marketing collateral. So I'm going to go back into presentation mode. You really need an elevator speech and you need to tailor your message for your audience. And a lot of the times if you're meeting someone at an event before you give your elevator speech, get to know the person a little bit so that if it comes up, if don't force the issue. You'll know what it is they're interested in. And you can give them some some your elevator speech I put some examples here. You could say one of these sentence several, or all of them depending on the context in an interview. I might say all of these things. If I'm just meeting someone at an event, I might only use the first two. And then based on their reaction, we get into a conversation about what this means. Practice this. I love to practice if I'm taking my dog for a walk driving my car, working in the garden or other washing dishes. Practices practices with friends and practice often enough that it feels conversational and spontaneous. I strongly believe that networking is the best way to find a job. It leads from friends and colleagues that have led to work more often. That's not 100% true. I'm getting some good contacts from recruiters and from my LinkedIn profile right now. So that's not always true I've gotten some jobs the same way. So that's not always true but it's a good thing. It's also emotionally satisfying to network and make friends with people. When I was laid off at IBM, I had failed to do this. And it took me a good year to build that professional network and it slowed me down. It cost me a year of salary, or at least I believe. And so you need to consider this professional network as an asset, you must invest in and manage the more you have a network that works for you to find work the faster you'll get to work. It's worth your time and money to do this. When you're networking with people realize you're making friends and you're building relationships first. I do not recommend saying hey do you have any job leads for me people will be turned off by that. Your relationship should be reciprocal. A lot of the time you will you will be the job seeker and it's very clear to that person. But make sure you still spend the time getting to know who they are and the energy you invest in getting to know them and following up with them in the future. If you're not able to reciprocate, or if you can't, I always tell people, you know, I really appreciate the time you've taken from me, if I can ever return the favor let me know, but I will be as generous to other people as you've been with me so think about paying it forward. I'm currently a member of PMI San Francisco, I volunteer as on the board of directors. I volunteered for the Society for technical communications or content management professionals. These are great ways to meet people in your profession. By volunteering, you earn trust and people remember who you are, and they can respect you and that's a great job, a great way for you to get job leads. I've never been successful when volunteering saying I'm looking for a job, but by building the relationships. I have gotten some very good job leads so people get a little bit scared if you go at it with a hard cell and a soft cell and indirect cell will tend to work better. And maybe it works okay for you and maybe it's my personality that this works for me, but that's generally what I would advise people to do. For informational interviews, most people are happy to make time for you if you ask for a limited amount of time, if you're clear what you're asking for, volunteer to meet them at a time and location that's convenient for you. If you're meeting for coffee offered to pay for the coffee, if they know or lunch, that's why I go to coffee. If you, and also it's a shorter time commitment for them. Oftentimes they'll know if you're a job seeker they'll pick up the tab but just consider this a small investment. Start doing this with friends, target businesses you would like to work for see if you know people there or if you have a friend who works for that business that you could ask for an informational interview, spend some time researching them and their business before that before you meet them. It, you'll be surprised how often you have something in common with people. And again, ask for leads and connections, not a job, you know one question I have. Are you aware of anything that's going on in your organization where I could add value, or is there somebody that you think I should get to know who might help me narrow my job search. It's a little bit indirect and polite and giving them an elegant way to, to not have that information, or, you know, maybe they don't like working that way. You give them an elegant way to, to not commit to the process. I think that's really easy to happen I have a friend I've been telling this, and he, he has been unemployed now for several years. He's, he doesn't shave. He shows up when we have coffee not looking business appropriate. And I think, not only, you know, I don't think that how you look is necessarily a predictor of how successful you are. I think remaining maintaining a professional demeanor is a mindset. And when he sits down and we start to talk. It's very clear he's more preoccupied with things other than his profession. And I'm sure that that's coloring his entire job search and that's part of why, why it's taking him such a long time to find work. I try to spend some time every day on my job search. I don't allow it to take over my life. It gets old, filling out opportunities or responding to opportunities and seeking interviews. And as I said, I try to take this time to connect with my private life and other things that are important to me, but make sure that you do what you need to do to maintain your professional demeanor. Later in April will have a whole talk devoted to investing in your skills. Investing in your skills can be expensive and time commute time consuming but there are ways to do this that are fast and inexpensive, and we'll look at some opportunities here. You don't have to spend a ton of money to acquire skills. For example, we just replaced our home router and routers have gotten more expensive so my wife took a couple of course Sarah courses, and now she's an expert on managing our home network. So she invested not even 20 hours and she's got some expertise that if she wanted to she could put on her resume. There are entire certificate certificate programs devoted to network administration, there are master's degrees for it. And you have to ask yourself what works for you and we'll talk about that in later presentation in in April. This one is a hard one, especially in the age of the pandemic. It's very hard to meet people face to face. So online applications through company websites, or through LinkedIn like I showed you earlier feels safe and convenient and job boards are another way to conduct virtual searches. I still advocate for human to human contact. It's harder to do these days. So go ahead and look at employer websites. When you apply for a specific job take some time to tailor your resume. Make sure your resume is machine readable that's something I, I assume Leah that you have a some resources for that. When you sign up for a job search board like monster or whatever. I strongly urge you to create a separate email account, I have ruined my primary account I get like 100 emails to a day and it's like playing whack-a-mole. I, if I don't do this every day I lose track of my things that are not job search related so I finally got smart and created a separate email account for that. And a lot of these job boards are really sly. They just want to make you sign up for other job boards etc etc. This may not be the best investment of your time again the pandemic makes this a little bit different than my standard advice. What I do is Sundays I sit down and I say I'm only going to apply through LinkedIn. Or today I'm only going to apply to opportunities coming at me through my email and Sundays I'm just going to reach out to friends and colleagues so that I'm not missing key areas, key strategies, but I'm not drowning in any one of them because there's more out there than you can ever possibly respond to. So that's that's what I would say there. I'm not going to spend some more time here the San Francisco public library has interviewing skill resources, and I'm disappointed that I didn't capitalize that correctly. The thing is, don't fret, we're just people. Okay, we get better as we get older in life. Nobody has been was born with any of these skills. We will all make mistakes. I have. I've had some interview experiences that afterwards I dope slap myself, and I'm embarrassed, and I just tell myself I'm not going to make that mistake again. There's a lot of resume and you realize that there's something wrong. So you up your skills and making sure that your resume or your cover letter is better. So don't fret. If you make a mistake, you're just a human being it's not going to be the last job opportunity you ever have. It's not the luck the end of the world, just get better at it the next time around. Over time, by remaining positive and following some of these pieces of pieces of advice, something's going to come along. And you'll, you'll move on to the next stage of your of your job search career so I'm going to. That's really what I had to say in we're doing okay for time it's 1040. I would love to open this up for questions I believe the questions have been monitored the chat has been monitored and maybe there's some standard questions that a lot of people are asking that we could that I could answer. And Tim is, do you have resume advice for people who work in business or academia, and are now looking for jobs and hospitals data entry or the service industry. I've had to do that. I've spoken publicly about that. I don't know if there's a template, but that's really a wonderful way for people to reach out to me and I'd be more than happy to see what I can do to help. Realizing, you know, but yeah I people should get in contact with me and and we can talk about how to deal with that. It's not that I don't want to answer the question but really everyone's unique. I'd be happy to look at that. The next question is what what do you mean by machine readable. So when we author and word that the formatting can be kind of fancy. This looks simple, but for instance, this is a table. And let's see if I can show expose the table. Okay. So let's click here. Let's go here. And I can click here. Okay, and here. So this is really a table. I didn't select it correctly. This is a table that allows me to have two columns and space my bullets the way that I do, but I hide that. Okay. And each line in this has a different authoring style this is a header style. This is a job title style this is a resume bullet style. So there's a lot of code that the file is writing underneath this. Okay. So when you, however, when you upload your resume, it's not going to read your formatting necessarily it's just going to read the words. And, and let's see what happens if I do this is not an excellent way to do this if I take away all the fancy schmancy formatting I have. This is what my resume looks like. And then a machine is going to read this a machine is going to do keyword searches and oftentimes it will get rendered as a text file, rather than a word file. And, you know, this is a complicated topic that I'd be willing to spend some time on it for presentation, but the machine needs to be able to read it and it still needs to remain readable. And the person is actually going to be reviewing that job websites have gotten much better at this at rendering this so it looks the way that you've authored it, but it's still something that you need to be familiar with. So, before I get lost on that does that help answer the question. Did I lose everyone. I'm not hearing anything. Well, I think that you did. Okay. So first he's going to take the next question. Okay. Okay, so the question is, what is an ATS friendly resume, or what is ATS. Did I use that term. I'm not familiar with that term sometimes I use terms that I'm not familiar with I'll just look it up real quick. I assume. Um, that that is what we're talking about with resumes. No, that's not it. ATS resume. I think someone mentioned that term in the chat. Okay, I'm not familiar with that but I'm willing to believe that's applicant tracking system. It is what you were talking about Tim. Okay, great. So, um, yes. So, yes, that's, that's a special topic. And, you know, there, there, you know, Leah, there are probably people who are more skilled in that topic than I am, although I feel like if you needed someone to talk about it, I could. That's, and again, I want to assure everyone, these tools have gotten better than they were 10 years ago so it's not as big a deal as it used to be. The real important thing for you is to validate that you're using the keywords that will draw attention using the LinkedIn approach that I showed you. I would trust LinkedIn for that keyword development so that you're using the right words because they're drawing on thousands of jobs and thousands of job profiles. A resume expert is going to help you to present your resume in a way that as well, they'll give you a proof read they'll they'll help you pick the kind of resume that works for who you are, but they are not. There's no single human being who is going to know the keywords as well as LinkedIn. And that's really what you need to focus on first is getting the words on the page that that will help you the most. So, okay, next question. And that's a good segue to the next question which is how can I get keywords for business analytics if I am not a premium user in LinkedIn. The old fashioned way was how I did it. I read as many job descriptions as I could. I read trade magazines, which don't exist to the same degree as they used to. I read business journals, go to degree or certificate programs and look at the at the job descriptions you do and start stealing vocabulary. I don't know what something is look it up. If it's a skill that you, you believe you need after the research you've done, make a plan, an appropriate plan that you can afford and in terms of time that you have available to to at least gain a minimum skill there. So that's what I would do. That's the old fashioned way LinkedIn has done us a great favor on this. Thank you. The other another question is, do real people get jobs through indeed glass door etc. Sometimes it feels like a black hole. How many responses this does the typical employer on a posting board receive. I don't know, but I tend to feel the same way. And that is why whenever possible. I prefer the human to human approach to, and this is hard we're back to my IBM story if you don't have that network it's going to take time for you to build it so you'll need. If you find yourself in a position like I was in then, of course you're going to need to apply through job boards or LinkedIn. It's hard investing your time in your network. And then what I've learned to do is to, to allocate my time to those different areas, just in case something comes out of it. And so that's really the best advice that I have for someone but these job boards. They're like to mentors they suck your soul out and it's really depressing sometimes. So I would, I would make sure that I don't. I've been doing this for for days, I'm just playing whack them all with opportunities showing up in my email, and I get depressed, I feel unworthy because they never get back to me. And I feel like I'm the perfect fit and they can't sometimes recruiters will call you you'll respond and they never call you back. This is not a happy experience. While that is a a strategy that you might want to build into your job search. This is one reason why I start with take care of yourself and network and build relationships, because every time I talk to a friend or colleague. I feel so much better. And especially in the age of the pandemic, when we're kind of locked up in our worlds, even if we're lucky like I am and I love everybody I share my house with. And it's still affirming to reach out to people who you can identify with professionally. So, please don't get stuck just responding to job board notices, take the time to invest in those professional relationships. There's another question in the chat. Well it's. Yeah question I noticed that you included an extensive list of job experience on your resume. I have heard that it's best to limit the page count and the amount of text. How do you decide how long to make it. I get. I hear this kind of advice frequently as well. And so mine is let me go back. Shoot, I made a mistake. Let me go back into page view. So my resume is about three and a half pages with lots of white space. The first page is just tables. Okay, that's not an outrageous length. I have found, I took advice from people to squeeze it onto two pages. You cannot squeeze it down to two pages and make it unreadable. Okay, so to squeeze down to two pages if you've worked a while like I have. You're going to start eliminating some things that matter. So, I took everyone's advice got it down to two pages, and I wasn't getting the kind of responses that I want. Within the last month, I expanded beyond two pages and went down to here. I didn't get two and a half, but I devoted a lot of space up here to make it easy for people to say, Oh, this is what I need. It's there. Okay, good. Okay, and that might be the only thing they read in your resume. So, I am not a resume professional. I am not a recruiter. So, you may get different advice, but I've been given some bad advice, and it's hurt me. So it in the end, you'll want to experiment and see what works for you. Take advice, I'm not a know it all. I've tried I've tried people's advice and most of the time it's good advice. Sometimes it doesn't, but in the end you'll have to figure out what works for you. It sounds like a non answer but it's the truth. Thanks Tim. Another question is, do you maintain machine readable as a separate version of your resume. No. That's why the more instances of your content you have the easier it is for them to no longer be identical and content, and the easier it is to introduce errors, and I only create a machine readable resume. If when I apply through a job board like for an employer, like the one that I showed earlier. If I'm feeling like it's not reading my information correctly. The, the, for this job search, I feel the tools have gotten a lot better. I have not had to go back and do that. I do not do that because the more often you replicate your content, they're going to get out of whack and an improvement you make in one version will not exist in another. And, and you're going to spend your entire life making sure that your documents are have the same content. And that is why I emphasize it's these keywords that matter the most, because that is what they're searching for it's just like a tool for resumes. Okay, they're, they want to know, do you match enough of the skills that they're looking for for them to even be bothered to look at your resume. And that is why the LinkedIn technique that I show you will help you validate that you're putting the right things in these tables. Great question, by the way. Thanks, Tim. The next question is, why are job boards very ineffective. If I'm a recruiter and I worked for a company that did recruiting. If I'm a recruiter. I want to be the first person to put a resume in front of my client. So they are in a mad rush with hundreds and hundreds of other recruiters to put something in front of their client. And the faster they are, the better they are clients don't have time to read a ton of resumes, they will often stop looking. I had a hard time when I was when I've been a hiring manager, reading more than 10 to 20 resumes. And so, just by sheer number, it's going to be hard to be one of those first people who's going to reach the attention of the recruiter, who's going to get your resume to the hiring manager who's going to not be worn out by the day and have a fresh mind. Are you one of the first 10 that they read the odds of you succeeding that way are pretty slim. Okay, which is why it the human to human approach is better. If someone at my job comes to me and say, this person's hot. Okay, I'm validated by my opinion of that person. They know me they know what I want and I will take that resume much more seriously. So that's one of the problems with job boards. The other thing is, some of these places are sleazy and they get paid for every hit that they have. And so all they want to do is proliferate the number of people who are submitting. Look, we got you 10,000 candidates in two days. It doesn't matter how much attention was ever devoted to those 10,000 candidates. So I don't know exactly what their incentives are or how they're compensated, but it's a pretty tough job for those recruiters and your chances of succeeding that way are much less than if you can find a way to have someone be your advocate inside the organization you want to work for. Thanks, Jim. The next question is how many years of employment history do you include if you are of an age where you have decades of work experience on the resume. That's really hard. Okay, I don't mind sharing. I'm in my mid 50s. Okay, so it doesn't take a very smart person to realize I got a PhD that takes some time. And it were in year 2021. And my first job that I list here was 1998. So that was 23 years ago. Okay, it's very hard for me to disguise my age there. Okay. I never put the year of my degrees down. Okay, don't do that. Okay. That's a real obvious way to identify your age. If I could. I would cut off my resume here in 2009. But some of the jobs that I'm applying for, especially my first one at Kaiser is a great experience that I really need. Okay, so I've chosen to just live with it. Okay. The other thing is, when I show this list of skills you don't develop this list of skills as a 25 year old. Okay, so there's a certain amount of experience implied there. There are resume styles out there that look at your us where it's more of a skills summary or you have key experiences that you describe. That has worked for me when I get hired by consulting companies. But it does not work for me for general job search. This is a very deep topic and, you know, I can tell you why I feel the way that I do, but I can't promise that this is going to work for everybody. So, age discrimination is something we need to be worried about. And that's the last comment I would say is stop including things on your resume when they stop being relevant for your job search. You know, I obviously had jobs before November 1998. Okay. But I don't put my grocery clerk or my graduate school futon sales jobs there or my cafeteria jobs down there because they're not relevant. So only go back as far as you need to for the relevancy of your search so that's a, that's a big hard topic that's hard for me to address the unique situation that people are in. Thanks. And the next question is, would you consider your resume, the one that you're showing to us with with the level of text formatting to be machine readable. It seems to be yes. I mean, that the real. I have to apologize. If this were a Windows machine I would say this to a TXT file. The Macintosh really doesn't have that kind of a tool. If you're working on a Windows machine save your resume to a TXT file and see how good it is. I would come back and say though that by now machine readable, they're reading the words less than your formatting. And so that's the best answer I can give you there. Sorry I don't have better answers for that. The next one is, it's a comment I agree with not including the year's degree received but I applied to a job that required noting the year for education. Is that even legal, does anyone know. I think that's backdoor job discrimination, unless you cannot submit your resume without putting that information down. Don't do it. You don't have to give them every piece of information they want. And you have to decide how much information are you willing to share for the job that you're applying for sometimes I accept job rights that I don't want because I need the job. Sometimes I give them information that I don't want to give them because I need the job, but there are times where it's like, look, if you're going to be that rude to me and that abusive during the job search, I don't want to work for you. But you have to know where you are in relationship to those questions I can't give you any answer that's right for every person, but don't do it try not to give them that information if you can avoid it. Okay, thanks Tim. The next one is, how would you know if your resume is machine readable and getting past the job board but I think that's kind of the same question we've had before. Make sure your keywords are correct and you should be okay. Okay. Christy you want to take the next one from Kevin. Okay. Let's see. I'm just scrolling down the chat. Okay. Thanks for waiting. I applied for a job with fidelity investments recently that required applicant complete their that required applicant complete their application. The app asked for dates of employment, even grade point average in college. I, sorry I'm scrolling. Years of employment with, I have years of employment with companies I've worked with app asked for dates I didn't know them. This is really, this is really hard. First of all, by maintain. I think this is a real problem and I have struggled with some of this the further back I go in my job history, the harder it is for me to know exactly what my dates are. Okay. I certainly could not tell you down to the calendar date. Sometimes it's a challenge like this job here. I, I think I started in the first week of December, and I think my job ended in May, but I'm not 100% certain. Okay. Make a decision for yourself what those dates are and stick to them. And if anyone ever, you know, they'll go do a work history. Don't be blatantly wrong. Don't lie, but if you're off a little bit. I've not had any problem with background checks on this. And if they call you on it, you can say, you know, that was 20 years ago. You know, I've had kids I put them through college. You know, I go to work every day, I just don't know the exact date. I, I think, I think and hope that employers realize that there's a certain level of precision that exceeds our ability to deliver and that shouldn't be a big issue. But for years, I tried not to put the month, and I got too many requests to put the month in the year in that I've just started doing it. That's a discouraging thing. And it can be difficult at times to know that information is accurately as you want. Just decide and be consistent what those dates are and stick to them. Okay, thanks, Tim. Someone else is wondering, or can, can you answer this question. Can you discuss more about how to maintain a professional demeanor without having a job. Well, I would the standard advice and it's hard to live up to is create a schedule for yourself where you're going to sit down and do your job search or add your skills or do any of your job search related activities, treat that like your job. So if you want to say, create to the best of your ability, a hard line and say, I'm going to work every day from eight until noon on my job search or whatever those times are. It's very hard not to get interrupted at home, especially in the pandemic when everyone is at home, but do your best to do that. Most people would say, get dressed for work. You know, it's fun to sit in your jammies and unshaven without brushing your teeth at the computer and do your job. But there is sort of the Superman stepping into a phone booth and coming up. There is something about getting dressed for work and your thought process that you go through. If you're able to dress like you would for work when you're conducting your job search, you will find yourself in a better state of mind to conduct the search. That's, that's what I would say. And again, find time to devote to maintaining your professional network. You need to be a, you know, we love our kids, we love our dogs, we love our spouses, but they're not the people that we talk to at work to solve business problems at least I hope they're not. And so you need to stay in dialogue with those people so that you keep that way of thinking and acting top of mind so that when you're writing cover letters, or when you're having informational interviews or interviews. It's not like you spent all of your time worried about what you're going to cook the family for lunch, or what shopping do you need to do or, or mediating between your children. Try as much as possible to keep a solid amount of your time devoted to your profession, so that you keep that professional demeanor. And I know that's hard to do by the way. Okay, so. It doesn't look like there are any more questions, and let somebody wants to unmute themselves and ask a question I think that might be it. Okay, Tim, top tips to make resume interview, your resume and interview standouts. I think the lots of white space realize these people are reading a lot of of of resume so that easier it is for them to read the better. If you have nine point font and squeeze it on the two pages, and the margins are too wide and you don't have and the document can't breathe. They will feel assaulted. I had one friend tell me Tim, you're a friendly person but this formatting is unfriendly I wouldn't want to hire you. Okay, so lots of breathing room, make it easy for them to read and make sure you validate the language that you use because there will they will be looking for keywords to decide whether or not you're the person for that job. And, and then the last thing I would do is go look at other people's resumes look online look at resume resource tools, most libraries have books for that. Realize that books are not necessarily industry specific and there may be some industry conventions that are different like academia uses a CV rather than a resume. So make sure that what you're doing is appropriate for your, for your profession. Thank them. The next question is our cover letters good. Yes. I didn't have time to talk about cover letters. The nature of a cover letter has changed it used to be we would mail a cover letter, and we would mail a paper resume to somebody. Now, let me see if I can pull up one, because I just did some this morning. And I can show you now when a client is reaching out to me. Let me see if I can find one real good. No. Okay, so let me bring this over. So I got an email from joyo Tika at I I see. I don't know joyo Tika. I don't, I don't know I see what the job description here. Okay. And what I did is I read the requirements and I've, I've been working on this for a long time. Okay, and I have kind of a standard cover letter response, thanking them. And I say I'm perfect for the position, and I take out some of the major buckets of what they're looking for, and have bullet points addressing what they've said in those descriptions. When you do this for a while, you'll realize most of that information is on your resume, and you can create template cover letters for the kind of work that you're looking for, and tweak them. It's necessary for each job so I think that when you reply by email to a recruiter that's reaching out to you this cover remember they don't have a lot of time so make sure they are convinced that you've read the job description and you have the skills that they need. They are not assured by your cover letter, they may not read your resume. Okay, every step that you add to their process lowers the odds that you'll move forward. So I think cover letters matter. That's a whole topic unto itself. I'm not necessarily an expert in cover letter writing, but I've developed this style over the last few months and I feel like the better I get at this the more likely they are to come back to me and say, I'm going to put my your resume in front of an employer. So I think this is a strategy that works. But, Leah, if you have a cover letter expert, someone who's in the field now, rather than 10 years ago. That might be a good topic for a job search speaker series. Thanks, and if you know anyone send them our way because we don't have a cover letter expert. I, you know, when I got severed at Berkeley they put me with someone from the university who has not worked in industry for 10 years. And I'm sad to say that I lost several months of momentum taking that advice. So that's why I think it has to be someone who's current, and I don't know anyone like that. All right, I don't see any more questions in the chat. I hope this was useful for everyone and I hope someday we can have conversations like this also face to face, although I think zoom is a great way to reach large numbers of people. But I really like knowing people and I'm sorry we couldn't interact more directly with each other. I hope this is useful. I am not the font of all wisdom. Whether it's useful for you what I shared with you today, and feel free to adapt it to what works for you. But I really hope that that that trying through my experience to develop these tips and share that with you helps you in some way, and I wish everyone well. Thanks so much, Tim. It's great presentation and everyone is thanking you in the chat. Oh, wonderful. Thanks so much. And again, when you send out that slide deck, Leah folks should check for the LinkedIn profile. I'd be happy to interact with people through LinkedIn. All right, that sounds great Tim. Okay, body for joining us, and we'll see you at the next program. Okay, take care. Bye bye.