IT Happens : May 2004
Monthly News Notice of IT Happenings
Issue - 35

Career Special

Feature Of The Month
GOOD BYE TO RESUMES- NOW HAVE AN E-PORTFOLIO
Resumes are a fixed piece of document. An 
E-Portfolio is a continuously upgraded document with information and direct endorsements from references given by the portfolio holder. 

An electronic portfolio of, a student is created using a template and HTML authoring tools and posted to the portfolio server. The in-house software allows a faculty member to select the student's name in the lower window and that student's portfolio appears in the upper window of a web browser. The faculty member would review the student's work (in the upper window) and complete a scoring rubric, which appears in the lower window. E-Portfolio also allows the student to maintain some individuality and control over the “look and feel”.

This e-portfolio mechanism allows continuous assessment by the references (Faculty in case of Students) and accordingly upgrade the portfolio on the portfolio server. The portfolio-keeper however has the final control over the overall presentation.


(Source: www.electronicportfolios.org)

Quote

Remember that hiring is a business decision and that the boss tried to choose the best candidate. Someone just looked better than you did. At some point, you'll be the one who looks better than everyone else. 
It's the way the system works.

Personality Of The Month

Mr. Rajiv Khurana is a Management Consultant, Trainer, Newspaper columnist, Author, Career Coach, TV and Radio anchor. He is a Certified Management Consultant and a Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants of India. He is a winner of the national award for consultants. 

He has pioneered the use of pre-nursery games and toys for management development programmes. His first book, "Sweet and Sour Soup for the Executives" was picked as the "soft management" book of the year 2001. He has dedicated the royalty earned from this book for the benefit of the under-privileged children. His second book "Your first job" has been released recently. This facilitates the student to move smoothly from campus to career. 

IT Snippets
AskSam Resume Tracker

askSam Professional, is an award winning text database, and the following pre-defined applications; Resume Tracking, Contact Management, Employee Skills, and Job Requisition Tracking. These applications are designed to help recruiters manage all the necessary information for matching the right candidates with the right job openings.

askSam RTS is easy to use. It is easy to customize the predefined applications to meet the specific needs of company. Type, scan, or import resumes into searchable askSam databases. The askSam RTS includes applications to track job requisitions, employee skills, names, addresses, and more. Once your information is entered, askSam's powerful searches provide lightning-fast results. Locate any resume instantly. Search for any word, phrase, number, or date.

The uniqueness of this tool lies in its revolutionary search methodology that allows to find matching resumes based on proximity search, fuzzy search apart from AND, OR, NOT conditions. For. E.g. you could find a matching resume where a person has not changed jobs frequently, with more than 10 year experience with 3 years plus in internet designing and 5 year plus in graphics with a home-town near the company's head-office. Reports give you an overview of your information. askSam RTS comes with predefined reports listing: applicants, job requisitions, open positions (by company or by location), experience and more.

(Source: www.asksam.com)

Aframe Professional

Aframe Professional is the software application used by teachers, trainers, HR and Compliance Managers to author the assessment items which are deployed to candidates in Aframe Enterprise and Aframe Viewer. It's intuitive and easy to use functionality enables basic IT users to author assessment items containing combinations of text, images, audio and video.

Authors can create a variety of question types including multiple choice, short answer, long answer, true/false, information items etc, as well as determining the parameters of the assessment. This includes automatic marking, setting time limits, variable marking, word limits, random or sequential presentation of questions and more. You can also customise the colour scheme, format and branding of the assessment items to give them your organisations distinct “look and feel”. 

(Source: www.aframestore.com)

Web Watch
http://www.byu.edu/ccc

This web site launched by Brigham Young University is a comprehensive resource center for career counseling. This web site reflects the broad vision of moving into the Internet way of computing all activities connected with career counseling.
The architecture of the web site consists of the following main components:
Academic support-relating to time management, study skills, academic standard and GPA calculator. 
Career placement giving information about full-time career job, internship, recruiting career advising and workshops.
Career planning : helps in finding a meaningful career , career exploration resources, Online career tools
The database is regularly updated through an automated process. A variety of other links which help student find a meaningful career are available. Like test taking strategy, career games, latest workshops on career planning etc. On the whole web site serves the useful purpose of finding jobs for students.

IT Humour

Does your organization struggle with the problem of properly fitting people to jobs? Here is a handy hint for ensuring success in job placement. 

Take the prospective employees you are trying to place and put them in a room with only a table and two chairs. Leave them alone for two hours, without any instruction. At the end of that time, go back and see what they are doing. 

If they have taken the table apart in that time, put them in Engineering. 
If they are counting the butts in the ashtray, assign them to Accounting. 
If they are screaming and waving their arms, send them off to Manufacturing. 
If they are talking to the chairs, Personnel is a good spot for them. 
If they are sleeping, they are Management material. 
If they are writing up the experience, send them to Tech Pubs. 
If they don't even look up when you enter the room, assign them to Security. 
If they try to tell you it's not as bad as it looks, send them to Marketing. 
And if they've left early, put them in Sales. 


IT Quiz

  1. What is MAPP ?

  2. What is meant by PDF format ?

IT Quiz Solutions

  1. MAPP stands for Motivational Appraisal of Personal Potential. This refers to special appraisal using online      testing technique that asks a set of questions to assess your potential and motivation to suit a certain type of job

  2. PDF : an acronym for portable document format is a standard format from Adobe. This crisp format allows image & text integrated into one single document that can carry any no. of pages with full search capabilities. Remember that this format is supposed to be virus free and thus preferred as an attachment over DOC files by companies receiving resumes from career seekers.