I'm attending my first PMI event in Silicon Valley. (see previous entries about PMI). My PMP certificate expires at the end of the year in March 2010, and I need 60 Professional Development Units to renew. I have 28 units. Tonight's event, "The 10 most common mistakes PMs make when looking for work", is worth 1.5. There are 150 people registered and seven walk-ins. We passed a microphone around to introduce ourselves by name and company. Aside from the typical Silicon Valley (Sun, Apple, Applied Materials, etc), 3 are unemployed, 22 are looking, and 6 didn't give a company. This is probably the most diverse PMI crowd I've ever seen, in terms of ethnicity and gender (although still mostly male and majority white), but perhaps the least diverse in profession, spanning IT hardware to IT software with maybe 1% other.

The speaker follows, in my paraphrase unless otherwise noted:

I'm going to talk about the mistakes I see people making over and over and over. My background ... Air force ... staffing company. We put on a conference called LavaCon, in Hawaii, but in 2009 it'll be in New Orleans. And I have a Mardi Gras necklace here ... Tonight is about group participation. [He has a big bag of chocolate and is throwing chocolate to anyone who asks a question.]

Recruiters get many resumes every day. Your first job is to make the recruiter's job easier.

1. Most important: Summarize how your skills meet the requirements. E.g., make a table directly linking your experience to requirements.
2. follow the submission directions. "We'll say, 'please send me your resume and a summary of the IT projects you've done.' And I'll get a submission, 'here's my resume'."
3. If it's been 2 weeks and you haven't heard anything and the ad says "Don't Call", what do you do? Find somebody other than HR, and call with something reasonable, like, "I wanted to be sure my resume was received".
4. Should you send salary history if requested? Maybe. You could respond with: "Salary requirements commensurate with requirements of position". Or with a range. Joel's note: Extended discussion proceeds on how to deal with salary-requirements gates. I think this mostly misses the point since this implies going in the through the main screening door, which is mostly a lost cause. The presenter seems to feel the same way ("Uploading your resume to Monster and waiting for people to call you is not looking for work.") but takes a bit too long to curtail discussion, so I remind myself that I get PDUs here even if I don't get much immediate job help.
5. Try to get your resume to the right person directly.
6. Distinguish yourself from other PMs. Network at C++ meetings, Java meetings, instead of PM meetings. Look for the "High Tech professional council", "Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce" is good at listing high-tech companies in the area. "Web Guild." Write an article for the PMI newsletter, and interview people for that article. Send them thank-yous with "by the way, you mentioned you were hiring in June. Would it be okay if I contacted you then?"
7. Volunteer with PMI and other groups. Q: How do you decide which networking events to go to? Joel's note: figure out what you want to be doing, and who's doing it now, and what groups they would belong to.
8. You can't wait for your ship to come in if you haven't sent out a ship. You have to send out a lot of ships. Every time you go to a network event, that's a ship. Every time you hand a card to somebody you met at a Safeway, that's a ship. And it could take two years for a ship to come in.
9. Use the job sites to figure out who's hiring, and then follow up directly or via networking.
10. When getting to a decision maker via network, get your proxy to sing your praises, especially if you're not an exact match.
11. The order of qualifications in the list is significant. Do stretch a little, but stay in the ballpark.
12. Put your cover letter in your resume document so they can't be separated.
13. For full-time positions, apply with a chronological resume. For contract, a functionally organized resume.

End of presenter's material... We're already ten minutes over so I skipped out on the drawings for various prizes. I did ask one question during the meeting: How do you find companies that value your PMP certification. No good answer: companies that value PMP will post on the PMI website. Search for PMP on Dice or Monster.

PMI-SV in creating a new job search group, Friday mornings 7:30 am to 9 am, in Cupertino.

During the networking break, I talked to my seatmates, and got a nice reminder of the three elements of the PM's job: "People, process, tools".

Summary: good refresher on the basics. A few little things particular to PMs, mostly in figuring out who might need PMs based on other observed activity, but 98% generic. I'm already doing most of the good stuff and avoiding most of the dumb stuff. I picked up one interesting idea, which is to make the cover letter a direct mapping from job requirements to matching experience, the point being to save the HR person or recruiter from digging through my resume. I already do this in text, and I already stick with a pretty lean cover letter, but I like this idea of spelling it out. So, on the content it's a win, the guy was entertaining, I may steal his idea of dispensing from a bag of candy throughout the event (with an option for diabetics), and now I have 30 PDUs.