Watching how my two children use the Internet is like reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
For my kids, it’s the best of times, the worst of times, but they’re having a dickens of a time in their adult lives.
My daughter, Amanda, relies on the Internet for a substantial part of her education. Yet, she’s quite adamant that the Internet causes many individuals to isolate rather than mingle with peers.
My son, Sean, is a teacher and while in college had been led to believe that Internet sites listing teaching jobs here in California would make job searching an easy task.
The reality was far different than what my son was told. He spent hours looking at and responding to job listings and after one year had not found a gig. As a parent watching the process I became very alarmed. It didn’t take me too long to figure out that school districts were using the Internet to build large files of resumes.
My daughter also used the Internet to find jobs. But she used a much different strategy and as a result, she’s achieved many of her goals. What my daughter did differently was focus in on a job she wanted, provide the basic requested information and then show up in person with a copies of the same data and sell herself to get an in-person interview.
Talking to some soon-to-graduate college students earlier this month, I was dismayed to find out how many s relied on the Internet as their primary source of job leads. Looking at this group I was struck by my daughter’s belief that the Internet often depersonalizes things that over the years have worked best in one-to-one settings. And as I listened closely to the students I soon realized that they were unable to connect with a potential employer as anything more than a web page. At the close of one class, I asked a group of bout seven students to find out the name of the person who would hire them in an individual organization and then tell me how they planned to get an interview with that person. As I did this I was vividly reminded of how depressed my son had become when he wasn’t able to make contact beyond a web page.
I am very concerned that the Internet has created an entire generation of young people coming into the workforce that may not understand that hiring decisions are made by people, not web sites. The best way to get the job you want is to by personal contact, not resume mass mailings to so-called job sites. It’s dismaying to me that in this day and age, the idea of one-to-one contact is going the way of the high-buttoned shoe.
And to bing this full circle, I'm' happy to report that my son is now teaching, after getting an in-person interview with a school district he had originally applied to on the Internet more than one year ago.
Why back in the “old days” after graduation, some of us got in our cars anx (in my case) drove 400 miles overnight for that first opportunity to press the flesh and meet a potential employer in person. And guess what? That strategy worked.—Jim Forbes—04/29/2008
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