How To Manage Your Career with the Help of The Job Forum
Diana Orantes is a Senior District manager in group health specialist at ADP.
Her goal is to help small business owners find a great solution for their human resource, payroll and health benefit needs.
Something impressive about Diana is that she has been promoted 3 times in just two and a half years with her current company.
How did she become such a “go getter”?
The Job Forum gives you a great start
Diana says, “A big influence on my life and on my career was the volunteering I started doing as a high school student with The Job Forum.
I remember that my tasks as a volunteer were to get more people to come to The Job Forum, to learn how to make cold calls, to follow up, place postings and messages about The Job Forum within various career related organizations.
But what I was really learning was broad and specific skills like these:
– the importance of following up with people
– how to make connections over the phone
– how to get referrals
– how to become a great networker
– how to be able to make outbound cold calls
I felt scared at first but working with the Job Forum leaders and volunteering, The Job Forum gave me more confidence in myself.
I became educated in how to be a service to help others.
This has turned out to be extremely valuable because it translates to my confidence and my ability to do my consultative sales job well today!”
Diana attributes getting her college job to her experience at The Job Forum too. She was employed at University of SF in their career center during her college years.
Early Job Boost from The Job Forum
When Diana landed her job at ADP she explains, “I was worried because I didn’t know how to talk to business owners. I didn’t know how to be a useful and valuable consultant to them. I didn’t know very much about what they had to consider – such as compliance rules and regulations, the development and following through on employee handbooks, so I thought I’ll go back and see who to talk to at The Job Forum.”
There, she says she was so fortunate to meet Job Forum member, Brian Kuepper who took some of his time and “mentored“ her.
“He runs a business helping small business people and he is so insightful about how to work with business owners. He is a real teacher. He explained so much about a range of different types of businesses (for example a restaurant owner may need an HR department and hire many people and need to do background checks whereas another company might be a one employee company).
It allowed me to imagine their businesses and know so much more about how to begin talk with them. He also advised me to join various networking groups and told me just the right type of groups to join in addition to regularly coming to The Job Forum.”
Diana gratefully acknowledges that Brian introduced her to the CPA he works with too so she could do an informational interview with that very helpful business person as well.
She says “All this advice and networking is so valuable and wonderful and you can’t get it anyplace as fully as you can at The Job Forum because of the breadth of managers who volunteer there !”
How others can benefit from The Job Forum
Diana says:
“I believe any adult or young person can go to The Job Forum and find ways they will help you too! They can help to speed up your progress as they have helped me!
One great networking contact from the Job Forum gets you started and can lead you to another! That is how I’m managing my career ”
Join the Job Forum
Offer to work as a volunteer or intern (in social media or marketing or research) or come to The Job Forum sessions every Wed evening to meet Bay Area managers who are there giving their time to help!
From time to time The Job Forum has special events focused primarily on career management (next one coming up is in Feb 2023) but you can come now to any Job Forum Wed night to discuss your career!
Interview with Diana Orantes by Janet Beach
October 2022
