careers

This is a time of unprecedented access to free support for your career and/or business (ED: think Chinwag's Careers Day this Weds).

Whether you’re a school-leaver or a graduate looking for a first job, an entrepreneur / freelancer starting out, or an employee looking to change direction, there is no shortage of individuals and organisations willing to meet, help and support you.

But what to do when you get that opportunity?

Based on a reasonably reliable mix of experience, observation and (occasionally hilarious) anecodotes from others here are a handful of things to help you make the most of the experience, and to leave a positive impression on those who might be helpful again later…

Come along to Chinwag's Careers Day at Digital Shoreditch next week (23rd May), where you'll be able to meet the industry's leading employers including agenices, top brands and exciting start-ups.

If that wasn't reason enough, you'll be able to improve your job-hunt with a brillant programme of advice sessions, with Portfolio Reviews from Vitamin T, CV Surgeries with Chinwag Jobs and Creativity & Ideas Workshops by Hyper Island.

There's limited space, so make sure you book now!

We thought we would give you a little taster of who you can expect to meet at Chinwag's Careers Day this month... With the likes of LBi, Bloomberg, Yammer and more, the day will be one you wont want to miss!

The fair is taking place on Wednesday 23rd May in the Digital Shorditch Big Top at Hackney House. The main 'big top' tent will be the exhibitor hall where you'll meet premier agencies, start-ups and brands, there'll also be a 'little top' tent, filled with how-to sessions, workshops and CV surgeries, so you'll have plenty to do.

So to give you a sneak preview of who can you expect to meet there...

We are very excited to announce the launch of Chinwag's first ever Careers Day on Wednesday 23rd May in association with Digital Shoreditch 2012 and supported by Vitamin T. 

Chinwag has teamed up with the lovely people at Digital Shoreditch to bring you the very first Chinwag Careers Day, focused around jobs in Digital. The day centres on getting a job and building careers including mentoring, CV/social media advice, portfolio reviews plus a careers fair featuring leading employers.

The Careers Day will be free for all you job seekers to come along to, just keep an eye out on @Chinwag and on our blog for the sign up form. 

As this year's Social Media Week London kicks off next week (13-17th Feb), I asked Lauren to scan the 150+ events that make up the schedule with an eagle-eye for events focusing on recruitment, careers, skills and social media.

She found some corkers, which are listed below, the majority of which are free to attend. The full schedule has an enormous variety of events covering subjects from Freedom of Tweet: Censorship, Government, Marketers and the Law (Tues 14th Feb, 1 - 5pm @ Design Coucil) to Collaborating on Cancer (Weds 15th Feb, 2 - 3.30pm @ City Hall).

Our love-in with infographics continues with this doozy from mindflash with a step-by-step Linkedin Bootcamp giving some steps to get the most out of the B2B social network.

Handy and practical whether you're on the hunt for a new gig, working a business development angle or just buiding your professional profile, it's a handy check-list. Check the full list below and click-through for the big version.

Employers and recruiters using social media, especially LinkedIn, will not be news to many people. But now professionals are turning to social media to proactively search for vacancies.

Anyone with a LinkedIn profile has probably received, and perhaps even say have been annoyed by speculative emails from recuiters with roles to fill. What may be news is that social media is now establishing itself as a media for professionals to use proactively in their search for a job.

If Zuck gets his way, every breathing moment will be automatically captured in a Facebook timeline. OK, so a slight exaggeration but ever more information is aggregated on social networks.

According to a recent survey from Reppler, whose service helps candidates manage their online reputation, 91% of employers are using social media to screen candidates with 67% making a decision based on the info they find, whether it's their personal triumphs to sordid bloopers.

It's that time of year - graduates are coming to the end of their university lives and school leavers are completing their final exams.  It's the perfect time to hire a fantastic intern - and we've noticed that many companies are already on the hunt.

We're big fans of intern programmes at Chinwag and have had a few successful candidates pass through Chinwag Towers.  We've recently seen such a strong interest, we've decided to gather the information together and summarise in a blog post, or something more industrial, if necessary.

The world of work, or rather the search for work, is under-going a revolution at the hands of social media. A recent study, Kelly Global Workforce Index, shows one in 5 of US respondents are using social media for their job hunt (see below for infographic).

The recruitment landscape is still dominated by online jobs boards, with word of mouth mouth, recruitment agencies and direct approaches proving the most widely used methods.

Whilst only 1% of the survey respondents found their jobs through social media (the survey ran Oct '10 to Jan '11), this looks set to change, with 24% of respondents searching for jobs using social media.

Facebook and students: A happy marriage, or a receipe for disaster?

As you'd expect, the answer isn't so simple. A study and rather lovely infographic (see below) produced by OnlineEducation.net ponders this question from several different viewpoints.

As those tied to email all day can testify distractions hurt productivity, and the same is true when studying. Unsurprisingly, flicking between Facebook and studying results in 20% lower grades. Sound obvious? Turns out 79% of students don't believe it.

They're also less likely to be paying their way whilst studying, with Facebook user's working less than 5 hours per week, whilst their social-media-phobic counterparts clocking in an impressive 16 hours per week. Still, that's what student loans are for, right?

When the UK UPA (UK Usability Professionals' Association) listed their careers event on Chinwag's events listings, we asked UK UPA Head of Professional Development, Leslie Fountain, to share her insight.

Our annual June Careers event this year was more than just about which employer had the flashiest displays or cupcakes. Our attendees weren't concerned with how many goody bags they could get, this year we got really serious, enter Speed Dating...

Getting that dream job, sometimes requires more than a straight-forward job hunt, application and nailing the interview.

As an extension of a marketing discipline, it's all about understanding your audience and targeting them with an effective campaign. That's exactly what Alec Brownstein did using ingenuity and the grand total of $6 on Google Adwords.

The result? A gig at Y&R New York. Here's how he did it...

I've noticed a steady increase in the number of roles on Chinwag Jobs that mention "social media" or "community" in the title. But what's it like to do the job? In this guest post, Rebecca Jesson, Social Media Manager at Sheffield-based agency, Quba shares her day...

One of the questions I get asked frequently is “What exactly does a Social Media Manager do?” As Kat French so rightly puts it “…because apparently, people think social media managers spend all day on Twitter/Facebook collecting followers and congratulating each other on getting paid to spend all day on Twitter/Facebook”. Her “day in the life of…” post covers a lot of the things I do all day, but I wanted to write one of my own. So here it goes...