Knowing the right method!
NAME: Brendan D.
NICHE: Valuation Associate
DESCRIPTION
It was a struggle for Brendan to choose a specific niche and industry. He was targeting a lot of people, networking with a lot of managers but failed to land a job successfully. Learn how he was able to overcome his struggle with the job search and how he found the best career path and the first steps in achieving his career goals.
I found this program very helpful if you don't know the direction or if you don’t know the method how to find a job.
TRANSCRIPT
Hey everyone. My name is Brendan Du, from the career accelerator program.
Currently I am a Validation Consultant for an Accounting Firm, valued for the private and public companies. Prior to this month, I was an Equity Trader for 5 years.
Today, I wanna share two reasons why I think this program might be good for you.
First, this program teaches us a lot of topics including networking, interviewing and many other things. But the most important thing I think I have learned is finding the right direction by using the right method and keeping the right attitude.
Two years ago, I received my CFA charter and I really wanted to switch from trading to research. I didn’t know what kind of research I wanted, I didn’t know if it should be researching economy, mutual funds or individual securities. Also, I targeted a lot of people. Networking made a lot of managers willing to help me but I couldn't figure out what I really wanted to do. So I did not manage to land a job successfully.
Then, I joined the career accelerator program. During this year I narrowed my job search to find the right direction, to only find out if I’ll go to research or evaluation jobs. Later, I found the evaluation job successfully. I was actually given a senior evaluation consultant offer even though I don’t have a rough experience of evaluation before, but I was constantly practicing my modeling and stopped (picking/making) excuses to myself. As I was sending my stories, the interviewers knew I was really really passionate about evaluation even though I did not work at evaluation jobs before.
So I would say, finding the right direction and using the right method and keeping the right attitude is very important and if you don't know any of the three important/other topics then this program is good for you.
Second, I was a part time MBA student and I would go (to the career) center very often while I was looking for jobs and all those career coaches are very nice wonderful people and I made a lot of (friends) on like how to write a resume, cover letter and many other things. And some of them would become good friends later on. I wanna say that a career accelerator is really complementary to a career center because the career accelerator has an online community which I think is (worth and most to a program). People share their experiences no matter good or bad so that we can learn from each other and also we can encourage each other as well. Which is very very very valuable and sometimes we don’t know how to draft a message to pressure employers and how to send thank you notes to specific situations, or draft messages and get a feedback from Stuart and also we can see that his straight feedback and messages is as we know help to know how to write different messages and how to deal with different information and in that online community.
And on top of that, we also have an online course that targeted different topics about how to conduct networking calls, how to reach out people from LinkedIn and how to write a thank you letter and how to do interviews and many other things and dozens of uses we have in the problem.
So to summarize I wanna say if you are a full time student, I will encourage you to go to a career center as often as possible but also consider the career accelerator as a complementary to the career centers because at least I found it very useful from both career accelerator and the career centers. Both of them were very helpful to my job search. And also if you’re full time as a professional, just like me, I also encourage you to consider this program because I found this very helpful if you don't know the direction or if you don’t know the method how to find a job. If you have questions feel free to add me or Stuart. I look forward to seeing you in the programs and good luck on your job search.
