 Do you want to keep California resilient? Do you want to make a difference? Do you want a fulfilling career? If you do, then we want to hear from you. The Governor's Office of Emergency Services, Cal OES, is a part of every sector of public safety, from cyber to wildfires. We're a team of dedicated emergency professionals committed to saving lives, protecting property, and ensuring a resilient California before, during, and after disasters. If this appeals to you, then join the Cal OES team. One team, one fight. Hi, I'm Brian May. And I'm Monica Vargas. We are public information officers with the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, also known as Cal OES. As you just saw, our agency is at the forefront of ensuring a resilient California before, during, and after disasters. Yeah, our hazard mitigation team addresses the before by helping communities lessen the effects of a disaster before it hits. While our response team deals with the during as disasters are still occurring. Coming up in this virtual job fair, you'll see that our recovery team has many, many, many exciting opportunities for you to join them in their supportive communities and their survivors in the aftermath of disasters. So stay with us. We can introduce you to our Deputy Director for Recovery and our Assistant Director of Human Resources. Together, they'll answer some of the most frequently asked questions about Cal OES, about recovery, and the proper steps to successfully make an online application. But here now are some quick introductions from both our Recovery Division and from Human Resources. Well, I'm Sheila Braverman. I am the Assistant Director over the Human Resources section at the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. My name is Ryan Beerus. I'm the Deputy Director for Cal OES. We are excited to be able to fill some vacancies at our department. If you want to work for the most exciting agency in the state of California, come to OES. Come to Recovery. We have a lot of positions. Cal OES is one of those organizations where if you want to make sure that you're making a difference and you're not necessarily working a desk job, this is where you want to be. My team is dedicated to those counties, to those individuals to ensure that not only that they can come back, but they come back stronger, they come back with a better community, and that's what Recovery is. So if you really want to make a difference in someone's lives, families, citizens of California, this is really one of those rare opportunities for you to be able to do that. I have a motto in Recovery. Relationships matter. So every day you should provide excellent customer service. It's one of the skill sets to work in Recovery that you must have. There are folks that are dealing with layoffs right now. So we're really in this push to be able to fill these vacancies to help folks get their lives back together and recover from all of these disasters. So it's an amazing opportunity to come and work for Cal OES. And thank you in advance for making a difference in the state of California. Well, good luck. I look forward to meeting each and every one of you at some point at Cal OES. Over the last few days, we've asked all of you through social media to give us your questions about all of these job openings that we have. And we received tremendous response and lots of questions. Yeah, so let's bring back Sheila Braverman and Danielle Ramos from Human Resources as well as Ryan Burris and Jennifer Hogan both from Recovery. So Sheila, I'm going to start with you. Tell us who you have with you and a little bit about you and your department. All right, so I'm Sheila Braverman. I'm the Assistant Director of Human Resources at Cal OES. About a week and a half into that role, I was the Chief of HR prior to that. Danielle Ramos here with me. She is the Classification and Pay Manager. She helps to assist with recruitment and making sure we're marketing our openings and get folks excited to come and work at Cal OES. And Ryan, tell me about you and your department and who you brought with you. Thank you, Ryan. I'm Ryan Burris. I'm the Deputy Director for Recovery, Practice and Social Distance in right now, which is important these days. And with me, I have Jennifer Hogan. She's my Assistant Director over Hazard Mitigation and she's actually running all of the steady-state operations right now for recovery during this pandemic. Okay, so a lot of recovery jobs out there. And first and foremost, I think that we wanted to talk to Sheila about getting started, that first step on actually getting that foot in the door. So sometimes the process can be a little daunting, confusing, but it can be really simplified with some guidance and tips from your office specifically. So can you give us a simple overview on where to start and what that looks like? Maybe some tips to help people who aren't familiar with this process, how to get started. Sure, I can actually show you. Perfect. All right. So to search for jobs at Cal OES, I'm going to take you to the Cal OES website, which is caloes.ca.gov. This is our main page here. You go to our careers link up here. It gives you various videos and different things that we've done to advertise our openings. You can look at the different opportunities by directorate. I'm going to hit recovery here just for example's sake. It tells you all of the different classifications and positions that we possibly have. The CalHR website is the link that you will go to so that you can pull up all of the job openings at Cal OES. So you can see this has already been filtered for the governor's office of emergency services. This is actually listed in alphabetical order here, so as you can see it starts with A. We have about seven pages worth of job openings. So I'm going to view the job posting for an associate governmental program analyst. This gives you information about the job and the duties. Talks about minimum requirements. It gives you information on the classification as well as the salary range, how many positions and where the position is located. Gives you information about the department. Gives you information about special requirements. Make sure you're following the instructions that are listed on here as well as the final file date. This one happens to be until filled so you don't have to worry so much about that. But you do want to make sure you get your application in time because we can fill positions fairly quickly. If you're interested I suggest you go ahead and apply. Gives you information on the contact for human resources as Laura Smith here. Gives you benefit information. And then down here tells you what the statement of qualifications entails and what you'll need to submit in order to be considered for this position. This is where the examination information link takes you. So the associate governmental program analyst exam is online so you can take it anytime. It's really something that's convenient for a lot of folks. You click here for the actual exam bulletin. You can see it gives you information on the classification, who should apply, special testing arrangements. Gives you information on the minimum qualifications so you can review that against your experience in education to determine if you meet the minimum qualifications. Gives you the overall position description on how it's used throughout the state. The examination scope tells you it's a training and experience and evaluation and what knowledge and abilities you're going to be tested for. The eligibility list for this is about 12 months. You can click on this to preview the training and experience evaluation just so you get to see what it's all about. But this is the link that will actually take you to the examination and you'll have to create an account for you to be able to go ahead and sign up for the exam. And that's pretty much the steps you need to be able to apply for an exam. Well, as you can see, it's a really simple way to be able to find our jobs, you know, 24-7 online. It's really easy to access. I'm going to turn it over to Danielle who can provide you some more additional information. Yes, when I applied for Caledas, I signed up to receive emails, so that is an option so you can receive emails for the vacancies that you're interested in. And then I went and took the staff services manager one exam and applied that way online. And I know when you get one of those notices that there's a job open, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to apply for it. It's just letting you know that it's there, right? Correct. It's just letting you know that it's advertised and it gives you all the information about the job, the duties, and it also has the duty statement on there so you can click on the duty statement tab and it'll tell you what the position is and the duties that you will be performing. So we mentioned the different positions. Are they just management positions? Are they entry level? Is it a range of different skills and positions? We actually have vacancies from entry level, journey level, and managerial as well. So office technicians, staff services analysts, all the way to the manager classifications. One of the great things about this agency is it's large enough and it covers so many different areas. Sheila touched on the fact that whatever your skill set is, there is something here that's going to fall in line with what you want to do, right? Yes, of course. Cal OAS is a very diverse organization. As Danielle had mentioned, we have clerical support, analytical support. We have super journey level analysts. We also are starting to use research data specialists and analyst classifications, managerial, staff services manager, program managers. But we also have the career executive assignment level as well that's posted on our internet. So we have a multitude of openings available for all different areas. Seems like there's something for everyone available right now in recovery. So talking about recovery, I do want to now go to Ryan. And Ryan, emergency management is a forever-growing field, especially now with all the different disasters that we're seeing. But can you tell someone who's never heard of recovery in emergency management what the mission is? The mission actually starts before the disaster. If Brian and his intro mentioned hazard mitigation, which Jen here runs, and we do try to plan to prevent disasters and the damage of that. And that's within the recovery division. But once the disaster strikes, whether it's a tornado or the wildfires we are faced with in California, that day starts day one. So there's a response. Recovery is heavily involved in that phase of the operation. And recovery is a long process. You have to rebuild towns, communities, rebuild schools. And this is all of our mission. So to me, it's just a great place to work in the public sector. You can help communities before and during and after the event. And it's a very, very exciting career. Jen, I know, especially in these times, to ask someone to describe a typical day is almost impossible. But talk about what your days look like, what a typical day looks like for you in your recovery position. Sure. I mean, I think that's the great thing about working for Cal OES is there is no such thing as a typical day. If you want a job where you come to work, not really knowing what's going to happen that day, it's definitely the place for you to work. I've told people, if you want a nine to five, a lot of times this may not be the best fit for you because we get to get out there and do so many things at weekends, early mornings, late nights, just because that's the nature of emergencies, right? Yeah. Another amazing thing about this agency and also being in recovery is you're not necessarily limited to just recovery. I know, Ryan, you're currently supporting response and a lot of your staff are supporting response. So helping the bigger response effort for California, but also when there are bigger disasters outside of California, there may also be other opportunities to help out with that. I know you and I were both in Puerto Rico helping with Earthquake, so this is a good agency to grow and to be mentored and to further your skills, right? Absolutely. I think the biggest thing in recovery is you don't have to be the recovery expert to come into this agency. We mentor our staff. You get on the job training, unfortunately, almost every single day in California. If you remember last year, while it was a slower year for fires, we did have PSPS, we had the power shutoffs, we did have a fire in Kincaid that our team responded to. Then we had the Earthquake in Puerto Rico that a large portion of recovery staff was the incident command team that deployed from California for over nine weeks to go support that effort since we have such great experience on Earthquakes. In this response, I would never have thought I would be leading 15 task forces coming up with programs like Great Plates, delivering food to our seniors in this great state, and we have a large portion of the recovery team that's activated right now supporting all of these initiatives for the current pandemic. It's pretty amazing. I like the fact you touched on customer service because I think a lot of people when they think of a state agency, especially an emergency response, customer service isn't something that you immediately think of, yet that's the business that we're all in. Bottom line, it really is the business we're all in. Our customers are the 40 million Californians that we serve every day. And that's so important. Every single day you pick up the phone and you're calling applicants, in this case the counties, and you're calling the elected officials all the way down to the managers of that town or county on our individual assistance team, they actually deploy out to the local assistance centers and they're talking to individuals in many cases that have lost everything. So customer service is critical. To me it's the one skill set that we just always have to be mindful of when we work in recovery. And when you lose everything you just have to know how to absorb that. And how to communicate well. What are some of the recovery projects that these positions will help support? I know we've had tons of major disasters in the last couple years. Are the big ones we've heard of like the Camp Fire, Ridge Press Earthquake, are those some of the projects that the staff that you're hiring for will help out? Absolutely. We're still closing out disasters from several years ago. I think the unique thing we have in California is we, every disaster or every threat that is known nationwide actually happens in California. So you have to be prepared for the, you know, there was even a hurricane back in the 60s, right? So from earthquakes to mudslides to floods to wildfires to a pandemic you will be faced with something that you were not planning for. And that's what makes this work exciting. Every day you come to work you really do not know what your job is going to be for that day. And to me that's exciting times. Sheila, this agency is really good about promoting from within. So if you're looking at taking a job at OES it doesn't mean you're going to stay in that job very long. The number two person at OES started as an intern here years ago and is now, so just talk about the ability to rise move around and take other jobs once you get your foot in the door. Yes. This organization has a lot of different patterns. So you have the upward downwards sideways. We also have a mentoring program here at this organization. So it really helps to support employees to build their career and really develop their goals. So you're not necessarily going to stay in office tech support for all of your career if you're interested in going down the analytical path for example. And then you move on to the supervisory path and then the high level specialist path. So there are a lot of different ways for you to move around in the organization. And then when you're ready you know we have the executive suite that you can go ahead and pursue. So you have the career executive assignment and then we also have our exam to pointies that are pointed by the governor. So there are a lot of opportunities here at this organization. It's not considered a large organization. It's about medium, about 1300. But in that organization it's as if we were as big as corrections with 60,000 staff just because of the different ways that you can move around and learn and grow and develop. So going back to the process how would you describe like the five steps? Are there five steps to this entire process or like the simplified checklist of what one needs to do from start to finish? Like Sheila mentioned before the first step you would need to do is to go on the Calcurs website to determine which exam you need to take what classification you want to go to you want to check the classification specs and see if you meet the minimum qualifications. And then once you take the exam then go ahead and apply online fill out your application put your job history in there and then once you submit it HR will get your application and we'll reach out to you if you're selected to participate in an interview. We know there's a lot of people looking for jobs right now a lot of people interested and because of that we reached out on all our social media and asked for questions. So we're joined now by Brittany Peterson our public information team as well has been helping us out throughout this pandemic in Brittany I know you've got some questions from people that have written in and asked what they want to know. Yeah, so our first question comes from Rianne who wants to know where do I find a list of current open positions? You can go to the Calcurs website and on there you'll find a list of positions you can filter by department so if you're looking at Cal-O-E-S you will filter it by department otherwise that website has all the vacancies throughout the state of California. So our next question is how many jobs does Recovery have hosted right now? Currently Recovery has about 10 openings right now but we're continuing to add openings throughout the week every day. We send announcements out daily to all Cal-O-E-S staff so everyone knows about all the recovery openings. Rianne what are you looking for when you begin an interview process to hire somebody? What are the main things you're looking for? Smart, innovative just comes to mind. I'm not looking for so much as the subject matter expert I'm looking for somebody that has that energy really good customer service really good persona about themselves and is just really excited about joining Cal-O-E-S and supporting the great state of California. Again it goes back to customer service. It does. And that's good to know that you don't need a degree in emergency management or recovery to be a good candidate for these positions. That is correct. Emergency management is fairly new. The last two decades a lot of people have been really putting a lot of energy in emergency management. It's a really exciting time to join emergency management. It's a really exciting time to join O-E-S. I think it's the best agency out there. Where else can you come to work? There is no nine to five job here. When you sign off on a policy or if you actually do an action you typically hear about it the next day in the morning paper because that's how quick your decision impacts the lives of many. Brittany, what else? So we have a question on what does it mean to be activated and deployed and how often do employees get activated? I'll let Jennifer answer that one for us. Sure. So Cal-O-E-S has a state operation center here at our headquarters building and so to be activated means that you're activated in a role outside of your normal job duties to support the state operation center usually in a role in planning operations or logistics. To be deployed means that you're serving in some other capacity outside of your normal job duty or even within your normal job duty but somewhere else in the state. Go ahead, Micah. So for your role you are currently in leadership in your division and you also have that adaptability and flexibility between response and recovery, right? Yeah, that's right. So I normally serve as an executive in the recovery directorate but for the last two months I've been serving to support response in the executive level and now back to our study state but outside of my normal job duties helping to support all of recovery. So very adaptable. Absolutely. And then we have another question asking what training opportunities are available? Sure. So there's a lot of on-the-job training that's available. You get a lot of training going to these different when you're activated or deployed but there's also training available online. There's ICS training that you can take if you're working towards an emergency management certificate or if that's a goal of yours. There's state sponsored training and also FEMA sponsored training that is available. I think also the people you work with are also good people to talk about to help you be better skilled from all the different experiences and the different disasters in state, the different trainings. So aside from formal training I think who you work with day-to-day is also a good resource to further your skills and knowledge. Yeah, I would agree. Just talk about adapting even while we're in this emergency while we're in this pandemic having to constantly reinvent ourselves, this agency and this state. The ability to adapt to change is the most that is the skill set you have to have. That's what we've been discussing today and just the willingness to learn. I personally try to learn something every day and I could tell you I learned about 15 things every day in this recent pandemic. There's nothing that we could have planned for you would never plan for a global shutdown but you have to be prepared when there is a global shutdown how do you respond to that? How do we get everything turned back on? How do you go from working 8-hour days to 15-hour days and still have that lifestyle? It's tough but all of us here in recovery and OES as you all know this is what we want, this is what we strive for, thrive for and the more that you can learn from these incidences we just this is why we have the best emergency agency in the nation is because every single day we're doing something new every single day we're learning from something we didn't know and we're able to move forward. I want to go back to Sheila. Sheila, if you were to give one tip to someone who's thinking about applying what is that piece of advice that you want them to have? I mean you really want to learn a lot about what this organization is about to make sure it's something that you really want to do the folks that are here that are mission driven and dedicated to the work this is really what they want to do we've mentioned before this is not your typical 8-5 job at all if that's what you want you probably want to pursue something different this is for those who want to make a difference in people's lives help them to rebuild and get back to their normalcy after a disaster so this is really a different kind of work but it really makes that impactful change on your life and others so that's really what drives people to kind of want to work here. The one phrase that we hear we at OES hear from our director most often is one team one fight he says that all the time and I take that to heart because and Jenna want to ask you this the team word in that one team one fight it doesn't take long to be in this environment to realize the team that is here the team aspect it's a family we all are in the trenches together whether it's here in the building or anywhere in the state talk about that team feeling that family bonding that we have here yeah it's so true I mean you're going through some really difficult things you're dealing with some really difficult scenarios you're experiencing people who have lost everything and that's difficult as a person to deal with so the people that you work with are very much like family and it's even outside of Cal OES it's our federal partners that we're dealing with that is the team so it could be just Cal OES or it could be the whole the whole nation right now we are one team one team one fight that's for sure can you give us that website one more time the website is calcareers.com alright Brittany do you have one final question for us before we close out yeah our last question why should I consider and choose a career at Cal OES so I think if you have a desire and a willingness to serve and you want to feel ultimately fulfilled in your career by helping others this is the place for you ever been a day Ryan at the end of the day you said what am I doing here absolutely not every single day I wake up excited to come to work knowing my calendar is probably going to change as soon as I drive in and it's pretty amazing and plus the team recovery speaking of team it is a family we spend a lot of time together in the officer in the field and just the relationships that you have with your colleagues is amazing and it just makes it a very exciting place to work that ultimate job satisfaction alright thank you all for passing on this information thank you all for being here with us today we appreciate you talking with us about all of these opportunities so if you out there were watching if you're interested in joining Cal OES or any of the other many jobs that we have please be sure to visit OESnews.com we will have a lot of information and links to help you get started this virtual job fair will remain posted there indefinitely so take a look at any time you need to with all the different tips and links and if you have any questions feel free to email recruitment at CalOES.ca.gov and on behalf of our entire team all of us here at CalOES thanks for watching take care