I made an extra effort this term to seek for jobs outside of the Jobmine system because there simply wasn’t enough jobs that is a good match for my interests, technical skills, and business experiences. My last job at Business Objects was, I’d say, the job with the widest set of responsibility that I could possibly ask for in a job. I was able to carry myself through all of the challenges on the technological innovation, user experience enhancement, and business improvement portions in an intern job that doesn’t feel like an intern!
What kind of intern position will let you play with business requirements, development tasks, documentation (I practically wrote a book during my time there), training, strategic planning, write some fancy code, and file a patent all at the same time? Forgetting my job title, what would you call this job? Product Manager? Program Manager? Software Developer? Documentation Specialist? Education Specialist? Liason? Interaction Designer? User Experience Researcher? or Technology Researcher?
Author’s note: This was written late at night before bed when I have time… it is not proofread for spelling or grammar mistakes.
Aside from the few positions that I was interested in on Jobmine, I applied to a number of jobs out in the wild wild world. I must say that I enjoyed the diversified experience I had at Business Objects but there must be other jobs like it… right? Well it’s certainly not the junior developer/tester, or assistant project management co-ordinator positions that you’ll find on Jobmine.
Well what’s a good source to look at for jobs? For me, having interest in the company and its products is really important, so I started with looking at the companies somewhere in the 200 feeds that I follow daily. Of course, this isn’t a one day effort. Over the past year, a few companies that I’ve read about had given me really good impressions on their product market potentials and work environment (a few of which can be found buried deep inside my del.icio.us, Netvibes, and Facebook shares).
Narrowing down to the companies that:
- Would hire a Canadian / Taiwanese (i.e. Helpful with sponsoring a visa application)
- Located in a major city (I don’t dig sub-urbs all that much)
- Builds innovative products with high potentials
- (or) Sells products in an unexplored market with high potentials
- Has an energetic team (or is likely to have one)
- Measures performance on quality (Not number of lines of code. Sorry IBM.)
- That I think I can either
- Do the job really well and contribute to the company
- Learn enough to do the job really well and contribute to the company
- That is a paid internship (An 8 month study term from January to August next year is a real burn in the pocket when I intend on staying off student loans. Otherwise, I would’ve applied to these guys too when they were looking for interns.)
- Utilizes as much of my skillsets as possible
It actually wasn’t that hard to list a number of companies to apply to. Here comes the hard part. Just how do I ask for an intern job with these companies? I’ve never applied to jobs outside of the Jobmine system. That’s something that our co-op program doesn’t teach me. There isn’t a huge resource of older students or co-op advisors to seek advises from for these non-Jobmine companies. When it comes to writing cover letters for these job applications, it is a complete hit-miss for these companies.
Reading some of the cover letters I sent out earlier in the term, I realized that I really goofed on some of them. One of my biggest challenges when I write these cover letters is being able to explain the skills that I want to emphasize on. Do I want to mention the fact that I am an ex-code-money? or can do really kick ass economic analysis? or the ability to deliver business plans?
I think the hardest skills to write about are the business and people management skills. (Oh, I have some really great stories about this… that I’ll save for another time.) How do you talk about kick ass skills in business risk aversion and risk analysis without mentioning anything about the business scenario and not sound like a pretentious claim? I treat the NDA agreements very seriously, going as far as not discussing any generic business scenarios that would suggest any product strategy or project activity. It is really easy for me to piece together non-obvious connections between observations, so I expect there are others with similar abilities.
Wow I wrote a lot today. So, the readers of the blog, what do you think? How does one go look for an awesome inter-disciplinary international intern job outside of the Jobmine system?