FutureWorks & Painting

Yes I’m still unemployed and for the first time in my life collecting EI as it is now known. Some folks have stumbled by here and others seem still in the dark that I am unemployed and looking for work. I updated my Facebook profile and LinkedIn profile right away, but I never emailed every single person I know… I’d get marked as a spammer for sure if I did that.

Today I took the second step in enrolling in the FutureWorks run Targeted Wage Subsidy program. There are a few stipulations but basically once in your lifetime, the government will pay a portion of your salary back to your new employer if you are elligiable for EI. You have to work in Science & Tech or certain other fields to qualify. They have a website, even a blog which I best subscribe to.

After the info session you have a brief 1-to-1 chat with one of their staff, my guy is Michael. He was quite frank and echoed what that last professional recruiter said when he contacted me about a Business Analyst position, I’m going to have to tailor my resume more, highlight certain skills, mention more the six co-op workterms I did with companies like Shell, General Dynamics Canada, and both the provincial and federal governments. I mention that stuff briefly at the top of my resume. However I need to revise that further it seems and come up with a more specific summary to give them for their newsletter.

The other jobs I’ve been applying for and getting the odd inquiry about are Online Marketing positions. I have over a decade of experience working with Internet technologies and I’m quite knowledgeable about search engine optimization and social networks. That is on my resume too, but I’ve added some specific bullet point examples from my time at BOB.

I’ve applied to the odd Financial Analyst position but despite having an MBA, good grades, and working towards the CFA® Charter it is tough to break into that field with basically little experience. I’m quite good at NPV, cashflow projections, market size estimates, and costing things in general. It helps being a pessimist sometimes, studies have shown we are much more accurate estimators than optimists. I also worked really hard after finishing my MBA becoming something of an Excel guru. I even made a bunch of Excel spreadsheets available online as proof of competency, of course someone stole one of them, again.

Cheaters appear to prosper more than hardworking honest people these days, well until they finally get arrested, but by then they’ve ruined many people’s lives. Can you believe I wrote the previous sentence over eight years ago before the whole Trump campaign, election, presidency, probe. I’m not even sure what to link to, I guess I’ll go Wikipedia. I still am having a hard time finding a job.

I also apply to unique jobs and Michael seems to think I can talk someone into creating a job just for me and my skill set, I’m not so sure about that. Here is a take at a new brief summary for FutureWorks:

An MBA graduate with a strong background working with technology. Experience with business plan development, market & industry research, market entry strategies, pro forma accounting, NPV & ROI analysis, project management, Gantt charts, UML, database development, case studies, software test plans, content management systems, customer relationship management systems, website development, search engine strategies, online marketing, and social media.

Hobby Update

I also went to Metrotown today and saw an old friend. He wants me to come back tomorrow and to enter a Warhammer Fantasy Battle painting competition. Despite doing a lot of painting recently, I don’t really paint for competitions. I’ve painted a lot of Plaguebearers and Night Goblins recently, but they are just rank and file common models. The only hero I’ve done is one Night Goblin shaman back in 2006 and over ten years ago I painted Slim my Demon Prince of Nurgle. The model I should really enter if I’m serious about winning is Leperous, he has the Kharne backpack on, but other than that he looks straight out of Warhammer Fantasy. I don’t think he’s ever been entered into a painting competition.

Miniature Painting in 2022

Considerable time has passed, a lot of it was spent searching for a job. Now I have basically been forced to take time off from work, after working throughout the ongoing pandemic. I didn’t paint much during Covid-19, but I did paint some Night Goblins and Nurgle models. As 2021 comes to a close I’ve been updating old blog posts about painting miniatures.

This post was more about my never-ending job search, but then it had a brief hobby update at the end, so I guess if you have thoughts on painting miniatures or searching for a job you can leave them below.

This entry was originaly posted on August 3rd, 2010, it was last edited on December 19th, 2021 and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: Job Search, Miniature Painting, Self Marketing.