Did you know that more than 75 per cent of job openings are never advertised?

Sixty per cent of job openings are filled by word-of-mouth referrals and by contacting employers directly, according to JIST Publishing.

J. Michael "Mike" Farr, the president and CEO of JIST Publishing, has an abundance of advice to offer job seekers. Farr is considered an expert in the field. His company sells books, videos and other educational materials and tools that help people choose career paths, find jobs and successfully move up the ladder.

Farr's job-search and career-planning books have sold over two million copies. His book, The Quick Resume and Cover Letter Book, spent 10 weeks on the National Business Employment Weekly's best-seller list. It was named one of the best three business books by the Publishers Marketing Association.

JIST titles also include The College Majors Handbook and The Young Person's Guide to Getting and Keeping a Good Job.

In a recent interview with Career Explorer (CX), Farr shared some of his ideas and thoughts about helping young people define the type of work they want to seek. He also offered some tips for those who counsel young people about potential careers.

Are there specific skills that teachers and counsellors should be focusing on to help make young people more marketable?

If you look at research from employers and ask them, "What is important to you in making a decision in hiring one person over another?" Or if you ask them the reverse of that, "What kinds of criteria do you look at in terms of who not to hire, in terms of eliminating people?" Those things are really important to start at and give you a lot of insight.

What employers say is that many of the people who come to them, and we are talking about a high percentage of people, do not do a good job at all in terms of explaining the skills that they have to do the job they say they want.

The language of skills -- what is it that you are good at -- is a very, very important issue for young people and for a whole variety of reasons. Language is where we begin to identify who we are. If you can't say, "Here is what is important to me" and "This is what I am good at," you are really handicapped.

If you can't say, "This is what I really want to do," and "These are the reasons I think I will do good at it," then we have a big problem. What you just said is, you don't know what career path you want to take and you don't know what you have to offer anyone.

It is really important for young people to look at what they really like to do. That could be school courses, extracurricular activities or leisure activities. Spending time with that may not seem to have anything to do with career stuff. But it has everything to do with it. Without that, how do you select a career path?

Q: Do you think there is any specific educational tract or field of studies that is important for all students to be competent in, regardless of the field they wish to enter?

A: There is some good research on this from surveys of employers and from the U.S. Department of Labor and other groups. Part of it starts with basic academic skills. If you don't read well, write well, communicate reasonably well, the odds of you handling more responsible positions is limited.

All the research is that people who don't have adequate, basic academic skills earn less money as a result. Basic academic skills are really important.

The other area is computer skills. That may seem obvious. But what is not obvious to a lot of young people is that if they go to work in a warehouse or become an automotive mechanic, if they don't understand how to interact with a computer, they are going to have a harder time finding a decent-paying job.

Computers don't always mean keyboards. It means technology. It depends on the context. In an office environment, that is keyboards. In other environments, manufacturing and others, having technical skills, which begins with understanding how computers work and not being afraid to use the Internet, become increasingly important.

Do you think technology has changed the way people look for jobs?

Q: Do you think technology has changed the way people look for jobs?

A: It is clearly important for certain types of people. For example, if you are in the technology field and you are sending out resumes by mail, then you have a problem. Technological-oriented employers don't want resumes or information to come to them any other way than e-mail or electronic format.

Since more and more people are using Internet resources to find, locate and communicate, if you are not out there, they are never going to find out about you because a lot of them are not advertising in newspapers, for example.

Q: What do you think counsellors or teachers can do to help bridge the gap and help bring young people together with potential employers?

A: Most young people go out and find summer and part-time jobs. And in that sense, the schools don't have to do much at all.

However, one of the interventions that could be made is if young people can be made to begin to understand what it is that they are good at and what interests them. Then the counsel could be to ask them what kind of a position they would like to do longer term.

Then help them put themselves in that environment. If they really like music, then knock on the door of every place that has anything to do with music in the city. Maybe that is an entry-level job selling CDs, but it is their passion and they will learn things they don't know about. They will be working with other people, they will be talking about music and they will be in that environment.

That is the counsel I try to give people about summer jobs. Look at longer-term career interests and then try and plug those into shorter-term part-time jobs.

Q: Is the resume still the appropriate way for young people to present themselves to employers?

A: Yes, it is. For young people, now we are talking high school, the research is that applications are more effective with that age group than with the older groups. Applications end up being pretty important for those entry-level positions.

My sense of a resume requires a person to know what they are good at and have a relatively clear job objective. So they put down a job objective. They put down, "I am looking for this type of position."

Then they put the skills and the experiences they have -- not necessarily always work experiences -- but they articulate that in their resume. So we are going back to the skills identification thing. So, yes, the resume is important.

Q: Are there any trends that counsellors or teachers should be aware of when preparing students for a job search?

A: I think most schools do a terrible job of understanding that many of the students, we are talking about 75 per cent, will not go on to a college and finish a four-year college or university degree.

Some teachers have an enormously negative bias toward anything but a college degree and they communicate that in all kinds of ways. The problem is that there are a lot of talented plumbers in their classes. There are a lot of talented medical technicians who don't want to go to college and aren't interested in going to college.

The teachers put a negative spin on these careers and I think that is too bad. So what happens is for many of the kids, they therefore get very bad counsel. Instead of someone asking them if they are interested in the trades,...they get discouraged and leave school without any plan at all for post-secondary training.

There are apprenticeships and military training. There are all kinds of things people can do that don't necessarily require four years of college.

There are those that should be encouraged to go on to college, but I think everyone should be encouraged to go on for additional training and learning after high school. I think that is important, but not necessarily going on to traditional four-year college.

Q: In The Young Person's Guide to Getting and Keeping a Good Job, how did you modify your career development advice for young people?

A: An adult who has been out in the labor market for a while has at least begun to have a sense of what they don't want to do and what they do want to do. A younger person really doesn't have that advantage. They have very little reality testing.

And yet, at the same time, what is often asked of them, with very little life experience, is what they want to be doing for their career. That is asking an awful lot of a kid who really doesn't know much about a lot of the jobs. What they know about being a doctor, for example, may be from watching television.

So I have a little different perspective on this. It is important to do long-term dreaming. What would they really like to do -- be a physician or an attorney or an astronaut? Well, why not? Allow them to learn that and study the reality of what they have to do in high school to be prepared for that.

To be an astronaut, you are going to have to understand physics and have to really excel in math, etc. So let them go out and research these things. So it isn't asking them to make decisions, but really allowing them to dream.

The motivation should be to find out more about that and what it takes. Because what they might end up doing, after some time, is working in a related industry.

So ask them what they want to do next, instead of what they want to do in 20 years. Take the occupational daydream and tie that into encouraging them to get more information about their long-term goal and think about what that means. Then bring them back to now. What can you do next? What can you do for a summer job?

Somewhere along the way, they might change their mind. But by asking what they want to do next, it gets them to make a more concrete decision. Things seem a little more possible.

Net Sites

JIST Publishing

Find out more about J. Michael Farr and his company

http://www.jist.com

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