#TBCResults: Landing a co-op job in Canada in 34 days in a new field and a new role

#TBCResults - 049 - Jade: Landing a co-op job in Canada in 34 days in a new field and a new role

Jade’s Problem:

"To find a coop job before May 2024 that is related to quality engineering management/chemical engineering"

Jade had a 2-part problem for me to solve.

She had < 3 months to land a co-op job in her city and in her exact field of study. And she had a ton of experience but it was all in different roles, industries, and countries. Nothing directly connected to what she was looking at though, so she was confused on what to talk about in her resume and interviews.

“So, her goals for us working together were:

1/ Beat a short deadline for her to sign an offer.

2/ Organize all sorts of information about herself so that she can get an offer.”

Also she was in Canada, but this is no problem to me. I've helped many foreigners in Canada get jobs; at this point, I even know what visa they'll be issued for the role.

Jade was committed to doing the work and felt strongly that I could help her solve both problems. When a student has a seemingly impossible goal (in this case a strict deadline), but they demonstrate a lot of willpower and commitment to achieve it with my help during our initial scoping call, I am more than happy to commit to the work and timelines as well.

And so, we decided to work together.

The Bumpy Career’s Proposed Solution:

I showed Jade the regular job hunting strategy process I teach, and then I showed her which parts she needed to turn around quickly if we were to get her into interviews ASAP.

Other students normally take minimum 3 weeks to go through my process, because they overthink or procrastinate the homework I assign. With the right motivation though, I've seen students finish it all in 5 days, and told Jade that that was our moonshot goal. But ideally, if she can turn it around in < 2 weeks, then we'd easily meet her deadline.

She understood, agreed, and immediately went to work.

 Because Jade already knew exactly what she wanted to do, the main work was to see what was her skills gap between her current self and these ideal roles. Then work on closing those gaps quickly with my advice and instruction.

The other big chunk of the work was documenting everything she had done and putting it all in 1 place. That way it would be easy for us to categorize what she needed to keep, delete, or rewrite for her resume and interviews. This took the most amount of time, because she had done a lot prior to moving to Canada.

Once we had both pieces, then we could move on to repackaging how she would talk about her prior experiences in such a way that made her the prime candidate for whatever role she was interviewing for. That is where my expertise comes in.

 I can easily identify how we needed to rewrite certain points of her experience to highlight why she was the best possible candidate for these roles. I also trained her how to respond to questions that she didn't have the exact experience for, how she would figure out what skill they're looking for and bridge it with something else on her resume. 

Timeline and Deliverables:

Across 12 days, we had 3 1-hour calls to check her progress as we:

🧪 Redid her entire resume and how she presented her different work experience for the quality assurance roles

🧪 Built a job hunting tracker that made her ideal roles super clear to us both, and what experiences she needed to highlight to be noticed for them

🧪 Launched her LinkedIn properly

🧪 Interview practice

🧪 Rewrote her communications to recruiters, from introducing herself to following up to informing them she'd accepted another offer to reconnecting with them

🧪 !! Most important !! Worked a lot on how she talked about herself in interviews, as she initially thought of herself as a junior, less experienced candidate just because she didn't have the exact experience they were looking for.

 Here is where I think an outside perspective is best. Sometimes we need someone else to tell us that we're practically overqualified for the roles we're looking for.

Outcome:

Jade worked on everything in parallel. As soon as I finished approving her resume, she scheduled our next call for interview practice and started sending out applications that same night.

My top advice to her was schedule any interviews to be after our interview practice call, to give her some time to get better. This gave her a strong sense of urgency in getting everything done.

9 days after our interview practice, I checked in with her to see how it was going and found out that she already received an offer.

A pleasant surprise for me! We spoke a bit more about what she'd do now that she had so many interviews lined up but already accepted an offer. And also talked through how she'd turn down these offers but keep in contact with these companies for when she was looking for a job after.

I was quite proud of how quickly she got it done, all because she had the willpower and commitment to sit down and follow through on my instructions.

Jade asking me for insight as she faces a new problem - having a lot of interviews lined up:

So if you're looking to get a job quickly and you don't know how to present yourself as the best candidate, reach out and let's see what we can do to make you their first choice~

***

The Bumpy Career is the career coach for the confused high achiever.

Meaning you're the type of person that if you know where to go and what you had to do, you'd be number 1 in an instant. But you're a bit confused today on exactly that: where to go and what to do.

That's where I come in.

We'll work together to give you a actionable roadmap to make your career live up to your expectations. If that sounds great to you, then book a call here and let's talk soon~