Transcript
Hey everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of the Online Roadmap podcast, which is WVU Online’s own podcast series. This is Tammy, and today I am joined by Eric Minor. Eric is the director of Student Careers and Opportunities with the Reed College of Media. Welcome to our show, Eric, thank you so much for having me.
We are really excited to have you here today. Eric, would you give us a little bit of information about your background and your role here at domain? Sure. I've been at the at the re college of media for almost nine years now. Prior to that, I worked in broadcast television and I'm a graduate of what was then the Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism.
I graduated in 1995, worked for a couple of television stations in broadcast journalism. And then in 2013 got an online master's degree. Through WVU’s Integrated Marketing Communications program and started to explore the idea of getting into education. And this job came open and I was fortunate enough to land it.
My role here at the Reed college is to kind of day-to-day manage our internship program. But I also am a board-certified career coach and use. Skill to assist students with answering big questions. Like, what am I going to do with this degree? Where am I going to go next to helping them sort of figure out you know, where their entry-level jobs going to be.
And also working with our alumni to help them as they kind of make their way through the workforce. So that's, that's, that's in a nutshell, I am fortunate to be able to work with a pretty small college and. Interact with all of our first-year students during their first year, as we start to talk about careers and professionalism.
And of course, We kind of already got into the next question, but explain how a resume really should change over the years, you know, beginning, even in, right out of high school, going into college through graduation, and you've touched on some of the things that you can add into it, but would you elaborate on it a little bit more?
Yeah, I think you definitely want it to evolve in it's sort of in sort of slides. Your you know, your, your age is probably the wrong word, but your progression through professional life. And I have worked with a lot of students who believe that the minute that you get onto a college campus, you have to sort of jettison everything you've ever accomplished in high school.
And that's not the case. I talked with lots of people in hiring positions who are really interested in talking to somebody that maybe was an Eagle scout or had some role in student government. Certainly within the college of media students that are aspiring who were editors of their school, newspaper or anchors for their school newscast.
That has relevance because it shows a progression. What I usually tell students is that by the end of your sophomore year, we should start to think about replacing some of those high school experiences with more up-to-date experiences. And, and that's not that those are. Irrelevant or that they are embarrassing or that we shouldn't be thinking about our high school glory days.
But hopefully by the time you reached the end of your sophomore year, maybe you've started to work at the, at the student newspaper here, or you've gotten involved in the student run advertising agency here. And you have had the opportunity to replace those experiences with, with new either student organizations or internships.
And so the idea should be to kind of refresh. Constantly not just once a year, don't revisit your resume once a year, but revisit it all the time. And constantly be updating it with the new, the newest thing. Again, it's a very journalistic approach to writing a resume, but that, that style is you know, I think really works and keeps it fresh.
So the next question I want to ask is just something for fun. So. Tell us who your favorite college sports team is? Well, I feel like I would have to answer the WVU mountaineers, but I, I, that would be, that would be true, even if it weren't the right thing to say on a WVU bypass. My parents are both WVU graduates, so I was raised as a Mountaineer fan, I guess.
The, the way I'll try to make this answer. Interesting. More interesting is that I'm a big fan of WVU used club hockey program. So it's not a varsity sport but these are men and women that are working very hard to represent the university in a really demanding sport that I happen to love.
So I guess my answer would be all WVU Sports, but with a special place in my heart for, for WPS D1, D2, D3, and women's hockey team. We've touched on it a little bit, but are there any tips that you can give for targeting your resume to a specific job? Yeah, I mean, I kind of touched on it a little with the, with the reading, the job description as a call for help and what you want to do.
And this is especially important, by the way, if you're applying for positions online many resumes will pass through what's called an applicant tracking system or applicant tracking software which is an algorithm that's going to be looking for. Key words. And so, you know, you want to be really careful.
You don't want to just repeat back the keywords that you see in the job description. But what you want to do is make sure that you are answering their question. So if you see a job description that says, must have experience with this piece of software, or must have experience working in high pressure situations, read those as.
As, almost as interview questions. Tell me about how you learn, how to use the software. Tell me about a time when you performed under a high-pressure situation and try to reflect that in the bullet points of the resume. So, you know, this is the other thing too. We talked about how, what jobs to include the bullet points that you include beneath each experience or your educational experience or your volunteer experience or whatever else you're, you're calling on.
Neither. Reflect relevance. And not just to get past the resume scanning software, but again, to present yourself as a solution to the problem that is stated in the job description. So if you're filling your resume full of things that you feel are, are expected of you, but they don't necessarily connect to the job description, then you're probably not.
Positioning yourself as well as you could. This comes up a lot. When we talk about how do I include a job maybe in retail or a job in the service industry or a job that, you know, I always tell people I was a dishwasher in a cafeteria when I was a college student. And, and did I include that on my resume?
I did, because I wanted to show them that I was, was industrious enough to be working my way through school, but I didn't need to give them the minutia about the dishwashing machinery that I operated or, or, or that sort of thing. Although as an aside, it did come up at one point in an interview for a job in television, and it was a job that I eventually got.
They asked me you know, tell us about your first job outside of. Journalism and I, it was operating this industrial dishwasher, which required me to be feeding, you know, dirty dishes into this machine and then getting them out the other side in a timely manner. And I said, that's really where I learned multitasking.
And it was, it was sort of. You know, it was, it was, it was one of those moments that we all kind of got found humor in it because it was not directly related. Of course they don't need me to wash dishes in a television newsroom. But it was, it was one of those things that I could say that, you know, yes, you don't need me to operate a dish washing machine, but what you need me to do is to be able to focus on multiple demands that are coming at me from multiple angles and not break the dishes.
And so that. That worked. So yeah, just be asking yourself, you know, if, if you had a customer service position, does operating the cash register really reflect your ability to interact and be a good customer service person, or is there something else that we could touch on? That really is transferrable to the job at hand.
And so those customer service skills, those, those people skills, those quote unquote soft skills that are essential to being a good retail worker or working in. Gosh, working in construction, working in, in landscaping, I mean any of the kind of summer jobs that we've had babysitting summer camps you know, talk about those, those life skills that you gained from that.
And that's how you really make those things shine. So Eric, I cannot thank you enough for meeting with us today. And I feel like we covered a lot of great information that I think will really help out students as they're looking at their resume and as they're looking to the future. So thank you all for joining us today.
I hope you turn into future podcasts. Have a great day!