There are lots of reasons why people, sighted or blind, are fortunate enough
to have their jobs, and in like manner, there are numerous reasons why
people, sighted or blind, aren't so fortunate. Since we are all legally
blind here on this list, I will share my observations with you that
contribute to why some of our blind friends are not among the fortunate
holding jobs:

1.	They do not have marketable skills; i.e. they invested several years
in a university degree program for which there is absolutely no demand

2.	 They refuse to move to where the jobs are.

3.	They have extremely poor communications skills; e.g. I know one
university graduate who could not spell the word Christmas and wrote entire
paragraphs without any punctuation.

4.	They exhibit extremely poor personal hygiene; e.g. I just returned
from the ACB convention wherein I experienced several people who were
wearing smelly clothing that smelled like it had been left in the washer
souring for days and/or they reeked of nearly overpowering body Oder. 

5.	They have no job search skills; I know people who send out lots of
resumes and get no responses and wonder why, never utilizing any kind of
networking or follow-up strategies. Further, I suspect many, if not most, of
the resumes are poorly written, lacking creativity. Interestingly, I am
currently in the process of assisting one person with the rewriting of his
resume, and one of his problems is that he has not been tailoring his resume
to the particular type of job for which he was submitting it. With our
computers and programs, like MS Word, it is relatively easy to slightly
modify one's resume to match the type of position one is seeking. Along
these same lines, it is important to think very creatively when constructing
one's resume for different types of positions for which one considers
him/herself qualified. In my personal case, if I were seeking another
professorial type position, I would emphasize my teaching experience and
teaching awards if it were a college or university that emphasized teaching.
However, if it were a research-orientated university, I would strongly
emphasize my research and publications. If it was a graduate level position,
e.g. MBA or PhD., then, I would place more emphasis on my experience
teaching graduate level courses and working with graduate level students. If
it was a position primarily teaching, say, marketing research, I would
stress my experience teaching marketing research courses on both the
undergraduate and graduate levels. However, if I were submitting my resume
as supporting documentation for a consulting job working with, say Sony
International, I would emphasize my business experience, especially the
other firms for which I have served as a consultant, followed by the firms I
have personally owned and managed, followed by those firms of which I was an
employee, and then, after that, I would include, with less emphasis, my 
Experience as a university professor. Why in that particular order? Because
I know that is the order the person I'm submitting my resume to is
interested in reading. When seeking practitioner type positions, my business
experience is much more valuable than my professorial experience; in fact,
some business people even consider my professorial career as a negative, not
a positive, often referring to professors and Ph.D. types as "ivory tower"
types, not real-world types. In some situations, I would have to agree!
<Smile>

How is this ham radio related? I'll tie it into ham radio by telling you
that in some types of situations, I have included a section on the end of my
resume or vitae called personal information in which I very briefly state
something like:

I am married with three grown offspring, two boys and a girl. I have lived
in Michigan, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, and Kentucky and have traveled to
many other states and countries. I love to fish, read nearly 100 books a
year, dine out, socialize with friends, and have been in ham or amateur
radio since I was 13 years old.

What does a section like that do? It does several things, but most
importantly, it makes me seem totally normal, like them or like their
sighted friends, like any other sighted person they know. I do not emphasize
my blindness by including my extensive activity in the American Council of
the Blind. Such a section also lists things with which the reader might
identify and even serve as conversation points in an interview. To
illustrate, once I was exploring that possibility of a pretty massive
consulting job for the 3M Corporation. The fellow who was interviewing me
saw that I was a ham; as it turned out, he, too, was a ham, and we invested
the bulk of the time talking ham radio, including over lunch. We talked
about how we got into ham radio, all the gear we had over the years, all of
the weird antennas we tried, etc., etc. I got the consulting job, and
frankly, it probably had as much to do with my being a ham and it did being
a competent marketer with years of hands-on, experience, having consulted
for several other Fortune 500 firms! So, you just never know!

Sorry for being so long, but I wanted to make several important points
without being abrasive in the process.

Ron, K8HSY

  




-----Original Message-----
From: For blind ham radio operators [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Howard Kaufman
Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2013 1:13 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: 990, jobs and such.

I haven't experienced anybody being looked down upon on this list, if they
do what they can to be productive, respectful, and to represent the rest of
us well.
Rudeness, profanity, disrespectful attitudes, and poor spelling destroy the
credibility of the wimpy pittypot sitting miserable so-in-so.
For people who do everything they can to stack the deck in their favor,
being unemployed is a different matter.
As I said earlier, you couldn't pay me to employ a person with a potty
mouth, who has no social skills, and who has a chip on their shoulder as big
as a mountain.