Best of the Co-op Blog: A Year-End Roundup
Posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2017
We have come to the end of 2017, and the end of the fall semester. It’s been a full year of blogging for us here in the Co-op Department—in fact, we’ve written somewhere around 84 posts since January, which work out to something like 67,000 words this year!
With all those posts flying around, picking out the best ones to help you with your co-op experience can be tricky. So, to help you find the information you need to make the most of the next semester, may we present (in no particular order) our top 5 posts from 2017.
The Definitive Guide to Managing Your Online Reputation
“Google your full name and see what comes up. Anything incriminatory? Try your name plus your city. Your name plus your middle name. Your name plus your high school. Think of any keywords an employer might find on your resume and use to find you.
This is a good way of identifying problems with your online presence. If your personal Tumblr or that angsty blog post from when you were 14 shows up, it may be time to do some cleaning.”
Published way back in February, this post does exactly what the title says. You’ll learn how to clean up, update, and manage your online presence—all of which is important to ensure there’s nothing there scaring employers away.
The Student’s Complete Guide to Branding Yourself
“The number one way of maintaining your brand is to live up to the hype. As we said at the start, your reputation will follow you, so it’s your job to make sure you meet the expectations you’ve set forward.
By continuing to embody the strengths that you identified at the start, you will grow your brand and earn yourself a great reputation.”
Branding yourself, your past work experience, and your skills is a super important step to creating strong job hunting materials. In this post, we walk you through the process step by step, to help you understand why your brand is so key, and how you can leverage it to find great opportunities.
Transferable Skills and How to Find Them: The Complete Step-by-Step Guide
“Transferable skills are every bit as important as hard skills, and they are massively marketable.
These kinds of skills set you apart from everyone else in your class and everyone else in your industry. These abilities are things you’ve learned outside the classroom and carry with you in your everyday life—your own personal toolkit of expertise that will help and benefit whichever organization you work for.
Transferable skills differentiate you from the competition and put you above the rest. You need them on your resume.”
If there’s one thing we’ve learned this year, it’s the importance of transferable skills to your job search. Knowing your transferable skills, and being able to describe how you use them, helps make every aspect of your job hunt stronger—from networking to resumes to interviews. This post is a step-by-step guide to making that happen.
How (And Why!) To Use Your Class Time to Build a Professional Reputation
“Luckily, when you’re in school, building a positive reputation isn’t actually very hard. Remember: reputation isn’t about being a genius or top of your class. Reputation isn’t even about your grades.
Instead, your reputation is about your behaviour and characteristics. You don’t need to be the smartest in the room. You just need to show that you care. And there are some very basic, powerful ways to do just that.”
Your reputation is the most valuable thing that you have. And while it can be easy to fall into student stereotypes like coming late to class and not handing in work on time, putting in the effort to build your reputation while still in school is super worthwhile. In this post, we show you how.
The Secret to Writing Strong Work Descriptions on Your Resume (And a Formula to Make It Easier)
“Here’s the magic of this approach: by using this formula, your work descriptions will always be clear, concise, and strong. Here it is:
[task] + [skill] + [outcome]
You should write your work descriptions by stating the task you were expected to do, the skill you used to do that task, and the outcome of your task. This shows employers exactly why your experience is valuable specifically to the role they are advertising.”
Writing work descriptions is the hardest part of building your resume. It’s also the best place to show employers why your past experience makes you such a strong candidate now. In this post, we give you an easy guide to writing powerful work descriptions that catch employers’ eye.
And that’s that! Those are our top posts of 2017, and this is our last post of the year! Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back in the New Year.
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