Tag: informational interviews

Creating a Job Sim

~ ssolin1

Creating a job sim can feel like a difficult task if you don’t have much experience in the field. However, by using the template and interviewing a professional, writing a sim can be engaging and informational.

The job sim template lists many questions for the professional, so it’s important before doing the interview to review the template and familiarize yourself with the structure of the sim. Use any background knowledge you have about the field to shape the questions to the career field in question. For example, if you know the sim requires scientific information, be prepared to ask the professional for external resources. Ask yourself what you would want to know as an entry-level worker in that field.

During the interview, take notes! If it’s okay with the interviewee, record your conversation so you can reference it later. Ask for clarification on any topics you don’t understand. Remind them that the task is intended to take only a few hours – this can help focus the activity the interviewee selects. Don’t worry too much about formatting the sim at this point. Just keep your eyes and ears open to collect as much information as possible.

At the end of the interview, make sure to ask the professional for their contact information, and let them know that you may be in touch with any additional questions. Start working on the sim as soon as possible after completing the interview so that it’s still fresh in your mind.

While writing the sim, focus on being as clear and legible as possible. Use action verbs, and don’t get bogged down in explanations that are specific to the task in question. Keep in mind that the sim should be comprehensible to a beginner.

When you’ve completed the sim, step away for a day or two, so you can return with fresh eyes. While revising your draft, you may want to compare your sim with a sim in a similar career field. Reference the job sim library for examples. When you have completed a draft, send it off to the professional with a list of specific questions. Keep in mind that your interviewee is a busy person, and probably doesn’t have the time to check all your work.

Creating a job sim can help you understand the many career paths that are open to you. Have fun with it! Remember when you were a kid and you would play firefighter or veterinarian? Try to approach creating a job sim with the same energy, enthusiasm, and spirit.

-Serena, copyeditor, job sim developer, and website specialist for InterSECT

How’d I do?

~ thiwin

Oprah once said that one unifying behavior of her guests all those years hosting her show was that once the cameras were turned off, they asked, “How’d I do?”.

So it turns out that graduate students and celebrities are similar (well, in this way at least). “How’d I do on this job sim” is one of the most common questions we hear as career advisers from graduate students who have completed job sim deliverables. It’s also phrased as “Can I use this exercise as a tool to assess my competency?”

We designed the InterSECT library for career exploration: to help you explore your interest in building skills for each career field. The job simulations are intended to serve as a bridge between an informational interview and an internship or course. If the job sim sparked curiosity (you found yourself in a google black hole, opening dozens of tabs, because you had to know more about the task at hand), we encourage you to pursue additional training or education in that career field.

“But am I on the right track?” one student asked me after I gave her this response. If you are eager to know how well you did on an exercise, we encourage you to set up informational interviews and ask the professional to discuss the tasks you worked on. Here are some sample questions to ask the professional:

  • How do you know if someone does a good job?
  • What do you look at when you are evaluating an intern’s progress on this type of project?
  • (show the simulation, if they have the time) This was the data set in the job sim. Would you look at a data set in this way? What different resources or methods would you use?
  • How do I develop my skills and get better or faster at this?

For more suggestions, check out the Info Interview Guide part of the website.

-Thi

InterSECT Success Stories

~ thiwin

When I’m introducing the idea of job sims to grad students or postdocs, I share stories about different ways grad students or postdocs have used and benefitted from the experience. One of my favorite stories is about a postdoc who completed a job simulation and found it useful, so she developed one for this online collection. To develop the sim, she talked with industry professionals, synthesized the informational interviews and wrote a draft. We worked with her to edit the final version, and published it on the website. She had a product to share, a concrete example to add to her resume, and co-copyright for her contribution. She updated us later that she talked about the experience in an interview to demonstrate how she can quickly gather knowledge in a new field, and explained that she is confident she can pivot in her career from an academic postdoc to an industry position. She got the job. I love this story because it demonstrates how InterSECT job sims can be a place to explore career options, and also a place to gain experience to in preparation for your career transition.

To read more stories from graduate students, a postdoc, and a research associate, check out the Science article about InterSECT: “Like virtual reality for careers: A new online resource helps scientists explore job options.”

-Thi