One of our best staff writers, Dan Dorotik, has been on the ball helping victims of Katrina who have been evacuated to Houston get back on their professional feet. As we all know, New Orleans residents left home in a hurry following the levy breaks and resultant flooding. Now they are in Houston and other areas around the country and they are ready to get back to work.
Dan, whose residence is in Lubbock, Texas, is a Nationally Certified Resume Writer, and happened to be volunteering in Houston as part of the big Texas response to Katrina. The organizers had arranged for typists to set up computers to assist evacuees in preparation of resumes for job hunting, when Dan suggested something better – a “floating” professional resume writer who could move from group to group to assist in getting quality information down that the typists could format.
“If you could get the key contributions and details on paper, the typists could do the rest and you’d have much better quality resumes,” stated Dan, “I also suggested that each person had to have an email address and that they needed to sign up for a Yahoo!-based email account so that they could access their email anywhere.”
Dan wanted to emphasize to the evacuees that you could have tools for job search that you could take anywhere. It was his leadership that allowed a large-scale resume workshop to be organized and implemented within a two-day time frame. They assisted 500-600 individuals from all different backgrounds and industries get ready to start job hunting. Dan assisted people with career backgrounds ranging from interior design to manager of a health care clinic.
“The point of all this is that for assisting evacuees with quality, long-term solutions, it really benefits to have a careers professional taking care of things. Any one of us [career professionals] would have done the same as me; I just happened to have family in Houston, and it was a no-brainer,” Dan says.
To say that we as a firm are proud of Dan would be an understatement. You can read an account of the resume assistance and job situation in Houston at the Houston Chronicle website
The situation in Houston is being repeated all over the country as evacuees are flown to different shelter locations in order to ease the burden on Texas. Job markets will be inundated with new talent. As is the case in a normal world, those with special skills will have the best chance of finding work in new areas. Some evacuees may need to consider training in new skills to find jobs in their new areas.
I’d like to remind anyone who is a client of Career-Resumes® – if you are a victim of Katrina and need a copy of your resume, we have your files stored electronically. Simply contact us and we will be happy to assist you in updates or getting the files to you via email.
