Generation Futures: My First Job Search

Generation Futures - Future professional career Jamboard

Hi everyone, my name is Shilah Hang (SHY-LAH), I am a 9th grader that goes to Community School of Excellence. I attend Generation Futures with Spark-Y, which is a wonderful program that can help you with your future. For example, they help us write a resume, set goals for ourselves, and job search. Generation Future is a great start for learning how to get a job. They have great leaders to help guide us to success. I joined Generation Future because I want to learn how to find a job for myself. I wanted to be able to write a resume to help me get a job without being confused about how to write one. I want to start off my career with good help from great teachers.

One lesson I enjoyed and learned from at Generation Futures, is how to job search. It was my first time job searching because it was something I've never tried doing. I was very excited and it was interesting to see all different kinds of jobs there are. What I learned from this experience is that it is hard to start a career with your dream job immediately because you need experience. You can start with a job that is a good start and then work your way up to your goal. One of the Generation Future leaders, named Kata (Spark-Y Education Director), said before she worked at Spark-Y, she was working as an educator on a boat and then she came to Spark-Y and is now helping people like me. This is a great experience and is a great opportunity. It was cool to hear all the different jobs the leaders had before working at their current job. I have met wonderful people. I highly recommended joining a program like this, trust me it will really help you.

My dream job is doing music. I want to do music because it is always something I wanted to do. I want to sing, write, play all kinds of instruments, and produce music. What I learned from Spark-Y is that I could start off on an entry level job and work my way up to what I want to do. I learn to set a goal for myself if I want to do music. It benefits me to motivate myself to try harder and never give up. It benefits me if I can find a job easily and when I need help I can email one of the teachers. Getting this experience is important because finding help like this is hard. Sometimes you might struggle and might not know what to do. It is important that I experienced it because the teachers have shown me ways to get experience so I can start to achieve my goals.

First Step: Resume - Next Step: My Future!

Hi everyone, my name is Jubilee, I am in 10th grade, and I go to Community School of Excellence high school. I am in the Generation Future program with Spark-Y where we meet online and work on learning new skills and becoming leaders to help our futures. I joined Generation Futures because I am focused on learning new expertise to get myself out there. I wanted to learn how to work with a team, learn job skills, and learn communication skills. Spark-Y stood out from all the other after school programs, because we get paid to participate and work together in our session meetings. It also looked challenging and fun!

A couple of weeks ago we worked on building our own draft resumes. We usually start off the sessions with an ice breaker. The week we talked about what we were most grateful for. I said I was most grateful for being able to learn new job skills, meet great staff and peers, and be a leader. Then, we started talking about resumes. I have never done a resume draft or anything like this so when we did make them I was excited and knew it could help out a lot with our real resume later in the year. Something I learned is that when you write a resume you want to make sure that your work experience is up to date. And when you write a resume you want to put down your work experience and skills so that when you apply for a job they can see how far in experience you are and if you qualify for it. I learned that formatting matters too! Spark-Y staff and my own peers helped review my resume and gave me feedback which helped me a lot.

Visual of guidelines on resume review!

When working on a draft resume or any draft it helps your understanding on how to actually write your real resume. In Generation Futures, staff help us work on skills so that it will be more simple and easier for us and also benefit us for our future professional career. Next week, we will be working on our hopes for our future professional career, which will be talking and figuring out what we want our career to be and look like. This helps us be ready and prepared and helps us set our goals on what we want our career to be after high school. I’m very excited to see what else we will start learning and working on because without the Generation Futures program led by Spark-Y it wouldn't be easy to do this alone. Spark-Y has helped me with my leadership, communication skills and job skills that I didn't already know how to express. And it also helped me learn skills that I will use in the future, like how to set good examples for my partners and how to lead others.

Jubilee, 10th Grader in the Generation Future Program

Resume configuration slide

Words Generation Future students contributed about what leadership means to them

Jubilee in the virtual Generation Future classroom