6 Job Club Facilitators share Best Practices
This was a very unique and beneficial job club meeting because 6 very experienced Job Club Facilitators led a panel discussion sharing best practices for job seekers who attend job clubs.
Our panelists included Jim Fergle, Manager of Job Seeker and Job Search Services at workNet DuPage; Jennifer Weggeman, a counselor and workshop facilitator from workNet DuPage; Sarah Breithaupt, Director of Youth and Family Services at Lisle Township Job Club; Fred Johnson, a leadership and facilitator at the PATH Group from the Compass Church Ministry; Don Oehlert, a facilitator from St. Hubert Job & Networking Ministry and Managing Partner of eCareerCoaching.com; and Paul Cameron, facilitator of this Jobs Driven Networking Group (JDNG) as well as the Christ Church of Oak Brook Job Club, and founder of SpeedUpMyJobSearch.com.
We talked about what to bring to a job club and how to prepare beforehand. Everyone chimed in with advice about best practices for attending job clubs, as well as noting some of the least helpful behaviors we’ve seen at our clubs.
They also brought handouts with them, including a list of ALL the job clubs in the Chicago area, information about their clubs, and Jennifer brought some helpful articles as well. I was able to post most of them for you at https://speedupmyjobsearch.com/clubs.
I also referenced a few presentations the guests had done previously and that they could be found on this channel. To make it easier to find them, I put them on their own webpages for you.
Sarah Breithaupt’s presentation about Handbills can be found at:
https://speedupmyjobsearch.com/sarahb-handbills
Jennifer Weggeman’s presentation about Mindmapping is at:
https://speedupmyjobsearch.com/jenniferw-mindmap
Jim Fergle’s Halloween presentation can be found at:
https://speedupmyjobsearch.com/ferglehalloween
Update:
A panelist at this meeting searched the web for a couple helpful articles to hand out at our free-to-attend job club meeting. One of the articles was found on a public website, printed, and handed out. It was about the benefits of attending job club meetings (relevant to the discussion). As is our practice, all handouts from our meetings are scanned and uploaded to our website to make them available for those who want to watch the video later and see the handouts that are referenced during the talk.
Although it was a good article and proper attributions to the source author and URL were included on the handout, the author reached out to Paul Cameron personally, accused him of IP Theft and told him to take it down immediately or a “DMCA Takedown Notice” would be filed against SpeedUpMyJobSearch.com.
There was no malicious intent behind sharing the article, nor did anyone profit from it; we were just trying to help people in job transition which we mistakenly assumed was the intent of the article as well. To respect this author’s directive we have removed the article and will not make any reference to it again.
We apologize for not being able share those insights with future viewers. There was no discussion about the details of this author’s article during the meeting other than the single mention, “There’s also some job club articles about, you know, what are the takeaways and they used a couple different people’s experience and I thought wow, this is perfect for today.” That was our only reference to it in the meeting.
At the time of this author’s directive to remove the article, January 21, 2020, the video had been watched a total of 5 times, three of which were Paul while uploading the video and building the page, and we suspect the other panelists comprise the remaining two views; meaning, the author’s information remained confidential.
While we do not pretend to understand other people’s motives, we feel this presents a wonderful lesson for job seekers.
Even when you feel you are doing the right things, that you are following every instruction the employers give you through their process, that you’re fully qualified for the job, and you’re helping others along the way, keeping your network strong, and doing everything you can think of to land a position, sometimes, the people making the decisions have a completely different objective and you don’t get the job.
The key is to keep doing the right things, because they are the right things, and good things will happen. Trust the plan, and keep moving forward.
The purpose of SpeedUpMyJobSearch.com is to help people land jobs, not to profit from articles. We do charge for membership because this site costs over $600 per month in fees to host, there are additional monthly costs to us associated for each member, and the hours of time invested in keeping the site working and in adding new content are massive, and unpaid. Our enrollments help recoup those costs to keep this site going. Anything extra gets reinvested into helping more job seekers. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do. That’s a non-negotiable value to us.
The Lesson: As you search for a program to help you with your search, please remember there are some “coaches” out there who are coaching for profit, not because they really want to help you. They are so focused on profit that they are willing to threaten lawsuits against others if those people dare to help you by sharing a publicly posted idea of theirs without payment. This was an eye opener for me about the types of people that are out there preying on job seekers. It’s just not right.
If you decide not to use me or SpeedUpMyJobSearch.com as your coach, I am happy to refer to you other coaches who I know personally to be excellent at what they do and that they will sincerely try to help you because they care.
A Bigger Lesson: As you consider how valuable it is to hire a coach based on their motivations, think about the motivations that future employers perceive you to have based on your interviews. Can they see that you love what you do and sincerely want to help them? Or can they see that you just want a paycheck? It truly makes a difference.
