I was in a café some time ago, having a little pause between meetings with clients. I noticed a man at a table near me going back and forth between his telephone and a newspaper. The newspaper was opened to the want ads. He was obviously looking for a job.
My neighbor, who I will call Charlie, was expending a great deal of energy, looking up information about companies on his telephone and marking up the ads in the paper. At one point, he put everything down with a deep sigh and took a long swig from his cup of coffee.
Networking for Jobs
Charlie glanced in my direction and seemed to notice me for the first time. Out of the blue, he asked me, “Say, do you know of any jobs available?”
Since my clients do have openings from time to time, I asked Charlie what sort of work he was looking for.
Charlie let out a slight groan and said, “I’ve been out of work long enough that I am not really very picky about the type of job. But I really need to find something.”
What is an attractive employee?
“That’s not much to go on,” I replied. “But let me ask you. What do you think makes a job candidate attractive to an employer?”
“There are a lot of things that should be important, like having good experience, being a team player, having initiative to try to make things better, being open to learning and developing new skills…It depends on the job but that’s a good start.”
Surprising number of kanban jobs
“I agree with you,” I responded. That sounds a lot like someone who knows how to use kanban.”
“What’s kanban? I never heard of that.”
“Well, before I answer that question, let’s try a little experiment. Find two popular job posting sites on the web and do a search on the key word kanban.” He did so, and after a few seconds his eyes became wider and his lower jaw started to drop in amazement. “There are dozens of jobs that have come up in just this region,” he exclaimed, “and they are with really interesting companies!”
High Value, Low Cost Kanban Training
“So, if those companies think kanban is an important skill, shouldn’t you think about getting trained in using kanban?”
“Sure! But I don’t have a lot of money for expensive courses.”
“It happens,” I explained, “that you can learn about kanban with an eLearning course that is very reasonably priced and you can follow the lessons and do the exercises at your own rhythm, whenever you have a few moments free.”
I gave Charlie the address for our Kanban eLearning course, https://www.3cs.ch/kanban-eLearning/. A little while later he signed up for the course and completed it in little more than a week.
Not long thereafter, I noticed on one of the professional social sites that Charlie had a new job. His career is back on track thanks, in part, to his knowledge of kanban.
The article Find a new job with kanban, by Robert S. Falkowitz, including all its contents, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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