Marketing You

Welcome back to my blog, lately in PGP we have been learning about our future careers and everything that goes into planning for that. Throughout this part of the course we learned about Career opportunities, Finances, and Marketing yourself. For each of those sections we focused on a different driving question that connected to the topic. 

We started this off by finding out what careers we even wanted to go into. To make this easier we made a MindNode with two sections, one for dream jobs and one for realistic jobs. When I was first deciding on careers that I would like to do I was stuck at first. I had no clue what I wanted to do and did not know what my choices were. I knew that my options would vary depending on the high school courses I have been taking and what I was planning on taking going into grades 11 and 12. I started researching different jobs and was looking at the requirements for each one. The long list of requirements not extremely helpful because it completely depended on what univerity or college website you were looking at. But after a while I landed on a few options and was able to continue to research and make a list of potential choices I would have to make now to go into that and a list of decisions that would have to be made along the way. To organize all of this information and have it in one place I made a craft document naming it “Creating Opportunities”. 

As we continued to work I added other sections in this document for the work we were completing. Those sections include “Education Bank”, and “Finacial Future”. In the section “Education Bank”, I planned out my grade 11 courses for one of the realistic and one of the dream jobs I wanted to persue. Then the “Finacial Future” included the jobs that I could get this summer and what I would get paid for all of them. I made a job application and made an estimate of how much money I would want to put into savings by the end of the summer, I ended up at about $1200. I think that planning out my finacial future, or at least for this summer was helpful as I was about to pick out the jobs I would enjoy doing and fill out the needed applications for. Of course when it comes to applying for jobs you need a resume, which I will talk about next. Click on the attachment down below to learn more about my opportunity bank.

Next we learned about Marketing you, we did this by creating series of marketing documents that were up to date and ready to use whenever needed. All of the things we created were a resume, a business card, and a email template that would be easy to just copy and paste to send to whatever business you need. First I will talk about the resumes. We learned about the essentials for a resume by created a fake resume in small groups to get the feel of what the layout should look like.  Then we were ready to start created our own. Going into this I already had a resume from the previous year, but it definitely needed updating so I was about to revise it. When creating our resumes we needed to make two different ones, one of them had to include a head shot and the other didn’t. Heres the one with the headshot, the second copy is the exact same just without the photo.

Then we made business cards which were pretty easy to be honest because they didn’t need to include very much information. Lastly was the email template, I think this will be helpful when it gets closer to summer because I will be able to easily just insert the business and or the name of the hiring manager. 

Towards the end of this project we had the chance to create a mock interview. We started this off by researching popular questions that could potentially be asked during a job interview. Then we had to write up our own responses to those questions to later on film creating a mock interview. Since interviews typically have someone asking the questions (interviewer) and of course the person answering the questions (the interviewee), this was a partner project. I think we could have revised this video to sound more energetic when answering our questions. If you watch the video you can tell it kind of seems like we’re reading off a script which could have been hidden better. Check out me and my partners mock interview down below ⬇️

Lastly in the end of the project we came back to the “Marketing you” section and completed an Uber simulation to learn about the ‘Gig Economy’, if your intrusted in reading about my experience with this simulation then you can read more in my reflection below ⬇️

Overall I think I learned a lot in this section of PGP. I felt it was really helpful to look ahead and plan for everything to save time in the future. But the part I felt helped the most was the “marketing you” because now I’m ready to start submitting job applications to make some money! Thanks for reading about this post and I will be back with more soon.