You’ve created your mind map and spent some time pondering over it, now, time to apply what you’ve learnt about yourself to land that first internship/corporate opportunity!
I can tell you out of personal experience, the immediate gratification you get out of completing this exercise, is a new sense of confidence about your capabilities! I better know now my strengths, weaknesses, and unique value add. I am ready for those upcoming interviews!
Below are the steps to follow to take yourself from zero to hero with purpose, clarity, and game! (LLMs are useful here)
Preparatory Phase
1. Create a seperate document with the analysis of yourself. You can feel free to split it into multiple quadrants or keep it in a listed format. As supplementary material, take out your phone and just record yourself speaking about yourself. Be as specific as possible here!
Voice memo should include your goals, needs, pain points, interests, motivators, skills/experiences, and ideal job characteristics.
2. Save the document as well as voice memo and upload them to an LLM of choice.
3. Begin by asking the LLM what are somethings you understand about me? What are unique skillsets and traits I could bring to a company? What might hold me back? Get those knowledge blocks in one place.
4.Upload your current resume and ask the LLM to give you insights into its strengths, weaknesses, and whether it speaks to what you know about yourself now. If not, you know you have some work to do!
High Performance Phase
5.Start looking for company internship postings on LinkedIn, Indeed etc., related to key words around your areas of interests. The key here is search in multiple platforms!
Ex —> Areas of interest: Finance, Technology & Writing.
Internship postings that might come up: Financial Reporting Intern, Investment Analyst Intern (with a tech focus) or Financial Communications Intern. These are great starting points to do your further research.
6. Go to the company websites and download all the wordings related to that job posting. Save them in the same place you saved your document and voice memo from step 2.
Wrap-Up Phase
-With all this rich knowledge blocks about yourself (both written and verbal forms), as well as your current resume and interested company profiles, upload them to the LLM and develop a scoring system as to which job profile you are the strongest suited for and why, what areas to include into your resume to make it richer, and how to advocate for yourself when you land that interview! Ensure these items are in a centralized, easily accessible place for you.
Words of encouragement:
After all this hard work even if you don’t get that internship you were looking for, the wealth of knowledge you have developed about yourself and interests will come in handy and help you when applying to some competitor firms! Think about it, if you didn’t land into Company X due to A, B and C reasons, at least you have some knowledge about Company X and its needs, and can better advocate for yourself in Company Y. It’s all about approaching the game in a strategic and safe way!
I’ll post supplementary pieces to follow, helping you understand how to execute the steps above.
……Let me hear those success stories below!
Terminologies:
LLM - Large Language Models (ie. Claude, OpenAI, Anthropic etc.,)
Knowledge Blocks - self-contained units of knowledge focused on specific concepts, ideas, or competencies.
Knowledge Credits: https://www.trustinsights.ai/
We might complement one another.
https://open.substack.com/pub/salminella/p/risk-is-the-board?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=60xde1