Career Success Story – Paige
Paige has had a wonderful success after switching her career after being laid off.
She wants other job hunters to benefit from what she learned along the path to her new, more technical and exciting job and career.
Paige says she hopes every determined Bay Area job hunter will come to The Job Forum. She thinks the encouragement, useful ideas and insights, and sharing that happens with others going through a job search are just invaluable!
Paige says her experience is that the generous volunteers at The Job Forum are going to help you to make your job search much more successful. You will learn so much and it is a much more positive experience to search for your new career while truly being supported by managers from local companies who are giving their time to help job hunters at The Job Forum meetings. They become part of your network outside The Job Forum too! She is so grateful!
Here is what happened to Paige:
She was in a career as a graphics designer. She was laid off from her job with Sprint in 2018.
No worries turns into a challenge
Paige did not worry much at first. She knew she was good at her job and she thought it would be easy to find a new job. She says she was mistaken.
Looking back on it, she thinks the media and news environment weren’t telling people the truth about the economy. She had a great amount of difficulty finding opportunities to continue her career as a graphics designer.
Temporary staffing agency work helped
Paige comments that she looked for temp work while conducting her job search and was so fortunate to land a temporary assignment with a staffing agency. She became a graphics designer for a party supply company via The Creative Group, part of Robert Half. This job ended at the end of 2019.
Now she was open to trying something else.
Job search services make a big difference
Paige was still very optimistic about her job search and she got busy and started looking online, looking for graphic design jobs and trying to focus on her most positive skills.
She was very driven to be successful and so she was quite proactive looking into Meet Up groups and Eventbrite events and using keywords to find job search services that she thought might lead her to her next job.
Finding The Job Forum
In this way, she came across The Job Forum and she came to one of the Job Forum Wed meetings. The Job Forum Wednesday meetings are the core service of the Job Forum. (This is where Job Hunters come to share their job search challenges, hear ideas and get suggestions and networking contacts from local Bay Area managers who volunteer and help job hunters be successful in finding their next jobs).
Paige says it was fantastic to hear other job hunter stories. She realized that she was not alone in looking for a job and finding it much harder and taking much longer than she had expected! Paige says she found it remarkable that she got so much “personalized” help that really focused on what she was dealing with and her particular set of skills and capabilities. She also drew from the very good advice and comments made to help other Job Hunters at the meetings.
Paige started coming often to The Job Forum, not just on Wed Job Forum weekly meetings, but also to the special events on Job Forum Thursdays.
Paige marvels still at how knowledgeable and effective are the volunteers who share their business experience as hiring managers. She says “At The Job Forum the volunteers are also kind and go ‘above and beyond ‘ to help job hunters”.
She mentions many volunteers at The Job Forum whom she got to know who helped her on her path to get a new job including Kathy Mark, Robin Pille, Jean Lyu, Alexandra Belosic, Jusdon Walsh, Debra Mugnani Monroe, Haroon Ansary, and Ellie Dailey.
Paige says these people gave her strength and encouragement as well as great ideas and real help. She is particularly impressed that so many well recognized companies like Salesforce and Linkedin and other leading companies are part of The Job Forum. These companies have managers with whom you can follow up and get practical suggestions while you keep searching for your next career step.
Paige says she literally couldn’t have asked for any more helpful support and advice. She learned so much. She got new referrals and she was encouraged to conduct informational interviews and to talk to everybody in her network about the new career she was now contemplating.
She says it was significant that she got to practice talking about her skills and accomplishments. Paige thinks The Job Forum really helps you in two other important ways: to sound and to be more professional. You practice talking about your career and your goals and this prepares you to be more comfortable and actually get better at confidently making the case for why you should be hired.
Isolation vs.a team to get your job
Page points out that coming to The Job Forum often gives you positive energy of being part of a team working toward your job goal. This energy is what you need to combat isolation and to keep presenting yourself on a professional level and practice speaking in a polished manner.(This is especially true she says if English is your second language).
The Job Forum events also combat the unintended discouragement of pressures you may feel from family and friends who may undermine your confidence and give you the sense that you are taking way too long to get hired. The Job Forum volunteers treat you like a professional and give you useful, real world, insights about the realities of looking for a job nowadays.
New career in marketing data analytics
During her job search activities, and with her persistence, Paige began to focus on the combination of her marketing experience as a graphics designer and her growing interest in technology and the possibilities for using data, analyzing it and applying it to business problems and needs.
In this way, she discovered the field of “marketing data analytics” and she became interested to try to find a job in this new field. Her thought was that it would be economically stable and that it was a job about the future, about technology, using data, and applying it was a way to work in technology!
Paige knew it was a challenging field to get into but decided to use what she learned at The Job Forum and conduct lots of informational interviews and to follow the advice. The Job Forum teaches job hunters how to tell everybody you know what are your goals and be specific about what is the job title you are seeking. Paige started to do this!
She found her job through her network of personal contacts, via the sister of someone she knows. The sister talked to her about the company where she herself works which is an infrastructure firm, working on railroads, bridges, roads. Paige told the sister specifically what she was looking to do. Fortunately a job related to “marketing data analytics” came up there. Paige let her contact know she “ saw the job”, her contact recommended her for it internally, and Paige applied for the job to work remotely (They are an international company headquartered in Pennsylvania) After some successful interviews, over 3-4 weeks, Paige was the candidate who landed the job!
Success and advice for others
Paige has now been working in her new field of Marketing Data Analytics for 7 months.
She says the thing she has learned is that by meeting regularly with others and articulating what you think you might like to do next – even if you are a bit vague- you may find that there are fields you don’t even know exist!
Paige tells other job hunters that “ Something someone says at a meeting at The Job Forum will often trigger and guide you in how to keep trying and you will learn how be more effective and to move your thinking along.” You get so many new skills such as how to do informational interviewing and you will be able to start to clarify your job objectives and be better able to move ahead to the next successful step in your career.
Next step – volunteering
Paige is very grateful for all the encouragement and practical input and guidance and time that she was given by the volunteers at The Job Forum.
One next step for Paige is she plans to “pay it forward “ and she will volunteer and offer some marketing data analytics to The Job Forum non-profit.
What a wonderful circle of success this is!
True stories such as this one about Paige and her success, are why so many high quality managers volunteer with The Job Forum to help job hunters and why local Bay Area Companies support The Job Forum’s mission and good work.
