The Path to My Perfect Job
Why do some employers choose one candidate over another? Here’s the experience of one technician, Anthony Smither, who offers advice based on his recent experience.
Changing careers is never easy. But at 49 years of age, and having spent many years working in warehouses slogging away at manual labor jobs, I’ve always dreamt of being coveted by employers for my brain rather than my back. So with my wife’s encouragement, I chose to make my dream a reality.
Having had some prior military electronics experience, I enrolled in the biomed program at a local technical college in Georgia,and eventually accepted a biomedical equipment technician’s position with a great company in February. Perhaps, some of what I learned might be helpful to others.
Before enrolling at Chattahoochee Technical College (CTC) in Marietta, GA, I met with the head of the program, Dr. Mike O’Rear. I gathered as much information as I could about the biomed field and how the program could help me accomplish my professional goals. After this session, I realized how eager I was to become a BMET.
At CTC, I quickly became immersed in the program and participated in volunteer extracurricular activities. I became a greeter at school functions, manned a booth for career day, and participated in a leadership program that recognized outstanding students of technical institutes.
Little did I know at the time that experiences like these would bolster my chances to eventually land a job.
To qualify for the award in this leadership program, I was required to deliver a five-minute presentation before a panel of 10 members of my school’s faculty, who would then ask me questions and grade my appearance, delivery, and content.
To help prepare for the program, my wife, Lee, spent hours peppering me with questions about my presentation. When it came time to deliver my presentation, I was extremely nervous. I gave it my best effort, ended up making a few mistakes, and unfortunately didn’t qualify to advance to the next round of the program. But that didn’t matter. I had just had my first real experience with public speaking.
After this experience, I completed an internship at Tanner Medical Center in Carrollton, GA. I put everything I had into that internship, because I knew it was a stepping stone toward obtaining my perfect job.
This internship helped me secure a telephone interview with ARAMARK Healthcare. After I answered a couple of the interviewer’s questions, he made a rather unusual request. He said, “Just talk, and let me listen to you.”
So I decided to tell him my life’s story — about serving in the Air Force, going to school for my associate’s degree in pre-engineering technology, and working full-time to support my wife and young children. As I noted during this phone interview, I had planned to return to school, but our debt had accumulated and our financial commitments simply made it impossible to stop working.
“Seventeen years later,” I said, “I finally had the opportunity to complete our original plan to go back to school.” I closed by telling the interviewer of my dream of being in demand for my brain rather than my back.
A week after this call, the company asked me to come in for a face-to-face interview and treated me to lunch. I was ready to be grilled on my technical background, but amazingly these questions never surfaced. At the end of the interview, I thanked my potential boss for meeting with me and told him how much I appreciated his time. At the end of my presentation at the CTC leadership program, I had failed to thank the panel for listening to my presentation, and that was a mistake I didn’t plan to repeat.
A few weeks later, ARAMARK offered me the position. So what put me over the top? Why was I selected for this job over several younger candidates interested in the same job? I asked my boss, and his answer fascinated me.
He told me that during the phone interviews, the other applicants had given very short answers and volunteered little information about themselves. He told me that they took me to lunch to observe my “people skills,” because, as he said, “a major portion of the job is dealing with people.”
So I asked him, “what about technical knowledge?”
My boss surprised me again. He said that most new graduates have essentially the same skills, and that they can be trained in technical aspects of the job. But he said that people skills are critical.
After this conversation, I thought back to the experiences I had as a greeter at school, manning booths on career day, and participating in the leadership program. I realized that these types of activities helped me develop the skills that eventually landed the job of my dreams.
—Anthony Smither
SOURCE: AAMI News: Vol. 41, No. 04, April 2006
