How Can Online Courses Help Your Job Hunt
Successful Fall Recruiting Requires The Right Kind of Online Course
You might be thinking right now, “do we need training about online courses? I know, I know! How much more Zoom University do we need?
Good online courses help you implement your job hunt. That’s the difference. It means nothing to your job hunt to work “exercises”. The value of courses is in actually getting the email sent, actually getting the interview, actually networking.
And when job hunting, we want access to training that gets us in touch with people, helps us develop relationships.
“How Can Online Courses Help Us ’Get There’?”
There are different modalities whereby you can learn something, and online courses have their place. Here, let’s talk about what I think online courses should deliver.
The Repeatability Factor is Critical
The first thing I think online courses should offer is repeatability. If something is said amazingly well and really makes its point and delivers results, then that material should be able to be repeated over and over again. And a lot of times when you’re applying, following up, hopping on calls, while the conversations and people are different, you benefit by repeatedly accessing how to follow the process.
The teaching can be said once, recorded, and then made available for many people and improve the lives of more than just one person.
And so online courses can be there for somebody like me who needs to hear something a second time. A lot of times I'll listen to something and I won't get it the first time - And it's really only when I listen a second time that I actually get it.
Having online courses there for me has been huge, and has really been transformative for me in my own learning and career.
And another reason repeatability is useful is that you might not “get it” until you've gone to bed that night and you're sitting in bed or you're brushing your teeth or making dinner and something just “clicks”. And you said, “Oh, that's amazing. I get it now. Let me go back and watch that again and make sure I got it”
Repeatability and its utility are clear when we’re learning how to network, and in my courses, we teach exactly what to do and say in a networking meeting.
“Today, one of the problems with networking is that everyone's talking about it but it's not well defined.”
Have you ever noticed that it's not well-defined?
In an online course, we can define it exactly – down to its art and science – and the script - what to say and do the before, during, and after a networking meeting how to stay in touch with somebody after a networking meeting – all of this can be explained online and then constantly referred to so it's repeatability is key.
Building your Ultimate Reference Library
Owning a set of online courses is like having your own library instantly accessible to you. In the online courses that we produce through The Career Accelerator Program, we're actually taking the guesswork out of the job hunt and producing material that is only exactly what people need. It’s not about how to pass a test. It’s about how to influence people and become the best version of your professional self.
For example, when it comes to resume training, a good online course will produce a perfect resume. To me, that means offering more than just templates. We see through the ultimate goal for the course which is to get the job.
"Therefore, good online courses will not only deliver the amazing template and the format, but it will produce appropriate accomplishment statements and prepare the student for the interview in the course of preparing the resume."
And when it comes to customization of the resume, what are the shortcuts that are available? An online course will deliver on that, too.
Another example of an online course would address how to message people in the course of the job hunt.
We know that this is not like a hundred years ago where we might ride a horse or walk and sit down with somebody face to face as the very first means of meeting somebody - or writing a letter and three weeks later the steamer ship arrives and someone receives our letter and six weeks later we get a response.
Today is the digital era. And so, more often than not, we're going to be stimulating this other counterparty in our job hunt with an electronic message.
“We want to be able to start with a message and then take them through a process so that we end up getting them to know us like us and support us.”
It's the latter parts of that sequence that are networking. It’s that initial part of identifying and reaching out to people that involves messaging.
I don't know what your calendar looks like right now, but if you're like a lot of people, you look at your calendar and you see that you don't have any networking meetings coming up.
In fact, it wouldn't be too crazy to have on average one per day or 20 in a month. 20 / month is completely possible, and it doesn't require an advanced degree or anything like that to get networking meetings on your calendar.
An online course relating to messaging will be able to tell you exactly what that messaging process is to get to that volume of networking activity (or ½ of that if that’s where you are comfortable starting). And in our program, we teach six precise steps, beginning with the initial outreach to then getting the meeting on the calendar to showing up for the meeting. In all, there are six steps there.
And in the case of LinkedIn, an online course should be able to deliver exactly what to say and do in a LinkedIn message with exact templates so you can get that information and constantly refer back to it.
Working with Stuart
What I love about what we teach here in The Career Accelerator Program is that we teach the equivalence of networking with interviewing. And when you think about what that means - to say that networking equals interviewing - that's putting the power of the job hunt back into your hands.
If you just send a resume, that approach is passive and disempowering. If six people and four computer systems don’t spit out a yes and give you an interview invite, you’re in trouble.
Whereas if you add networking into the mix, you can decide who you want to talk to and when and how, and you can take these people through a process so that you get these people on your calendar and you talk to them. You can even pair networking with applying online to juice and boost the applying online outcome.
“A good course addressing networking is going to teach you all of these things so that you can confidently walk onto that stage and perform well.”
And even if it's your first time, you've got the tools, you've got the practice sessions under your belt, you have, you know, feedback with the people in that community for that course to help you get to where you want to go and master networking.
Conclusion
While online courses don't replace coaching, online courses have a role to play in career training and you can create a library of different pieces of training relating to each part of the job hunt you need to implement: the resume, cover letters, messaging, introduction to networking, even how to master networking, and then you can also have the full process, the full system.
In our case, the full system is called The Career Accelerator Program. It’s the full system taking you from start to finish.
So online courses, while they can be not so great for socializing, they do have a wonderful element in the sense of their repeatability and their reference material aspect. And then if we're good, they're going to tell you exactly what to say and do. They’re going to allow you to implement.
To use an ice hockey analogy, when you think about the game of ice hockey, most of the game isn't played in the center of the rink.
Most of that game is played on the outskirts, on the sides, on the boards - probably just like a lot of other sports, but especially in hockey.
“Training in those more challenging spaces along with the boards is what gets that professional player ready for game day and builds their confidence.
Online courses do the same thing.”
Courses go to those spaces where work needs to be done, or maybe work hasn't been done, or into areas where no one is guiding you exactly on what to do in that environment, in that situation, and lays everything clear.
That's what a good online course does!
