Over the past two weeks, I’ve given two workshops at the EDD (Employment Development Department) offices in Concord, CA. Glen Zamanian helped organize these sessions with the nice people at EDD and East Bay Works. Thanks to Barbara Vineyard and Claire Marchiano for your encouragement and thanks to EBW for allowing us to use your computer labs!
Barbara Vineyard, Glen Zamanian, Walter Feigenson
We were over-subscribed for both workshops! All together, 40 people attended these hands-on sessions. We are trying to put together at least one more session for the people who couldn’t get into the first two.
This workshop is hands-on – by the end of the session, everyone had learned how to set up LinkedIn properly, join appropriate groups, do advanced searches and much more. Everyone also set up GMail, and Google Reader with an RSS feed from Craig’s List and Indeed. Some people also added TechCrunch. Finally, we took pictures of everyone, put them on a Flickr site for download, with instructions for how to pop the pictures into everyone’s LinkedIn profile.
The purpose of this workshop is to show people how they can improve their Personal SEO activities, so they can push the results they want people to see in Google searches (push down things they don’t want seen by pushing new things up past them). Ultimately, this improves the job seeker’s chance of being found by a prospective employer and getting pre-vetted by a hiring manager.
Walt –
Nice job sharing your knowledge with those who need it most!
Cheers,
JP
Walt,
Amazing work! This is exactly the kind of workshop that needs to be done across the country. I’m so glad that you are actively going out there and spreading the much-needed knowledge of online personal branding to job applicants.
Me and my team at http://Brand-Yourself.com are gearing up to do similar workshops for students at Syracuse University, the first workshops (to my knowledge) on this subject on this campus. We will have to trade notes on the best ways to implement these workshops: how to structure them, handouts/takeaways to provide, etc.
I will definitely be in touch!
– Pete Kistler
CEO, Brand-Yourself.com
Pete, thanks for the nice words! Thanks to the Kerry Jones’ efforts at Experience Unlimited, we’ve been able to schedule another workshop on February 11. We’ve been getting so many new people in the local job support groups that the demand is almost unlimited.