Career Mentoring Workshop in Mumbai with Luis Moniz

Contributed by: Subash Iyer, CFA

IAIP was pleased to host Luis Moniz, FrontRunner Career Advisor, for an interesting career mentoring workshop in Mumbai. Luis is an Executive and Career Coach focused on developing middle and senior management professionals. The session was well received by the members.

Luis began the session explaining the typical lifecycle of a job. He broke it down into five stages explaining how the expectation, delivery from the company and individual changes at each stage. He urged participants to think beyond the brief specified in the job description and increase one’s influence in an organisation. He spoke of how the job markets have evolved over the last few years noting that job cycles were getting shorter and churn rates increasing. He also mentioned that at the very core the job market functioned based on supply and demand dynamics.

Luis reviewed the resumes of three participants and shared feedback on general best practices to follow while writing a resume. Some of the best practices include:

• Naming your resume as first name.last name.pdf. Do not include version names , industry specification etc on the resume
• Sending a PDF version of the resume
• Ensuring that there are no grammatical mistakes or typos
• Getting the resume proof read by a trusted friend
• Not revealing unnecessary information such as address, marital status etc
• Highlighting achievements at every job and not just your job description
• Highlighting career progression within same company
• Keeping the resume length a maximum of 2 pages
• Highlighting recent achievements a lot more

Finally he added that the resume must not be verbose and must be easy to read as most recruiters do not spend more than 30 seconds reviewing a resume. It was imperative to capture mind space in those 30 seconds.

Following the discussion on resumes Luis moved on to discussing the power of social media especially Linkedin w.r.t  careers. For a modern day employee/employer, LinkedIn was  a tool one must leverage to the fullest. He shared insights on how to use the free/paid version, how to use LinkedIn to conduct a job search and how to improve visibility within LinkedIn.

All in all the session was an interactive one with Luis highlighting various stages in one’s career and the steps one needs to take to achieve career growth.

• SI