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Welcome to our first Episode of 2019, Marty with you here at Warehouse and Operations as a Career! Last year, it sounds so funny saying that, Last year in Q3 & Q4 we talked a lot about the importance of Planning and setting Goals for ourselves and how, using those incremental goals we can obtain the level of success, achievement and earnings that we want. With episodes 117 & 118, or the last two weeks we’ve heard from 4 young managers that had developed their plans and are each we’ll on their way to those individual goals they’d set for themselves and 3 Leaders in the Warehousing Industry share their thoughts on where Warehousing is heading, the Opportunities to be realized and how they try and instill Goals and Planning within their young Supervisors and Associates. I thought it’d be informational, or fun anyway, to share a couple of Plans that’s been shared with me over the last month or so.
Last week I was giving a class on Warehousing, kind of an introduction to Operations and all the positions and careers the warehouse and transportation fields have to offer. One of the attendees, I’ll call him Marcus showed a lot of interest in the Unloading, Loading and Driver Helper positions. As we went further into all the positions, I could see that the Electric Pallet Jack, or the rider jack had sparked an interest with him too. Now Marcus was really just entering the workforce, he was young, just wrapping up his GED, he had gone to a couple of courses at the community college but wasn’t planning on going to college. His work experience was with fast food, which he’d only worked a couple of months at. He had thought little about retail jobs but wanted to earn more than he’d heard those jobs offered. Talk about being energetic and motivated, this young gentleman was eager to get started and lunge head first into doing something. He didn’t know what, or how to get started but he was running forward anyway. I told him first we needed a plan. We sat down and put a quick one together.
Step one we created a Resume. Now he was quite amazed how we could be totally honest on it, even though he’d had some gaps in his education and only 1 job, and with that, only having a couple of months experience at doing anything. By wording it correctly and listing his interest, achievements and placing all the information in the right order of format I showed him how we could lead the recruiter or hiring agent in the direction we wanted to go when we had them on the phone for the phone interview. Now of course that’s contingent on us getting chosen for that phone interview. I showed him how to use keywords within our interest and implant our goals, so they’ll want to speak with us.
Next, we wrote a few answers to the typical interview questions that we know we’ll be asked AND we wrote a couple of questions for us to ask the hiring agent, something like, What do you think of the company & Do you feel there’s opportunity for advancement here? Remember, they hardly ever get to talk about themselves. Asking a few questions of them is a great way to be forefront in their mind. They want to hire an engaging individual.
Next, he really thought about his goal, which happened to be that he wanted to be a pallet runner using the electric rider pallet jack. So, we broke it down, both Unloaders and Loaders we’re easy positions to get hired on for. They both use the pallet jack, although usually driving only about 35 ft at a time buy hey, that experience will get us started.
So we started looking at positions with companies that are hiring Unloaders, where there allowed to learn and use the electric rider jack and that utilize Pallet Runners to carry the unloaded freight from the docks to the aisles for the forklift operators to put away. His plan is to be an unloader for 3 months, get some practice with the electric jack, the whole while letting his boss know that his goal is to be a pallet runner. He is going to be on time for every shift, stay late when needed and he’s written down about 20 topics to bring up at the daily start up meeting or Safety meetings, he’s going to get noticed and be engaging with his management team! His plan is to be a pallet runner within 6 months, and of course accept the additional responsibility and monies that come along with it and be in training or a backup forklift driver, if not an actual forklift driver in 18 months!
We had identified an agency to apply with that had just those types of clients and I’m happy to say he has his first phone interview set up for this week!
I love being around such enthusiasm.
I heard from another individual, she’s taking planning quite literally, she’s giving herself daily task to accomplish to ensure she sticks to her plan. Check this out.
Each morning, within 30 minutes of waking, I am going to write down what I finished up the day before and what I did not get done. She says I hope that list is very small each day.
She goes on to say. So, on January first, I’m off work. I am going to clean up my resume, make it more professional looking and write down 3 questions to ask everyone I interview with. I’ve been a packer for over 6 months now, with that experience I am going to look for a job in the Shipping department somewhere. I work nights right now and there’s no open positions in our shipping department, nor does it look like anyone is going to be leaving anytime soon. That afternoon I will look on every job board in my area, there’s 5 of them on Facebook, and I’ll be checking all the commercial ones too. I am only going to apply at places that have a shipping department and who work first shift.
She mentions she’s sending us her Resume and would like us here at WAOC to look it over, she’s not sure about properly using keywords and how well she’s explained her work history. We’ll certainly check it out and get it back to her ASAP, as she’s on a pretty tight schedule, here’s her day 2.
And on January 2nd I am going to be calling everywhere I sent my resume too yesterday and follow up on the applications I uploaded until 1 p.m. I am going to print out 15 copies of my new resume and after lunch I am going to physically go to my top 5 choices, I found on the 1st! Of course, allowing time to attend any interviews or calls that’ll start coming in from yesterday. I have added my email account to my phone, so I can respond quicker to any email’s I get from prospective employers.
On January 3rd I am going to be out the door by 8am and go by the other 10 of my top choices, in between appointments and interviews that are scheduled of course. And I’ll do the same on Friday the 4th. I am going to get me a new job by the end of day Friday as I have to go back to work on the 7th for my present employer.
You have to love her determination right. This is a great plan, I wish she had built in a little more flexibility, but you know what, with all that determination there’s no doubt in my mind that she’ll find just the job she’s looking for! That’s about all she shared with us, but I’ve asked her to keep us in the loop with her progress, who knows maybe I’ll be able to bring her on the show once she slows down after she starts her new job!
The New Year brings us so much opportunity. As you may know I look at it as a time to reboot myself, look at my goals, make any adjustments I need too. Life gets in our way sometimes and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with adjusting our timetables or deadlines. The point is that we are continually moving forward!
Let’s not forget about looking into our benefits too, things like insurance, our deductions for things like taxes and savings etc… Oh speaking of savings I read a suggestion on Facebook this morning. This is pretty neat:
If we save the dollar amount of the week all year long we’ll have $1378.00 by week 52 or the end of the year. So how it works is we’d deposit $1.00 into savings this week because it’s week 1 of the year. Next week we’ll deposit $2.00, and so on each week, meaning on the 10th week we’ll deposit $10.00, on the 18th week we’d deposit $18.00, on the 35th week it’d be $35.00 all the way to week 52 which would be $52.00. We’d have deposited $1378.00 into savings by this time next year! I mentioned it to a couple of people that we’re going to do it but run it backwards, so the larger amounts would be at the first of the year when there getting those income tax checks back and the smaller amounts would be during the Holidays at the end of the year. I think savings are really important, and I’d encourage us to do what we can. $26.50 is all we’d need to place into our savings accounts each week on our own to end up with that same $1378.00 if you’re not interested in that little challenge game. And as we’ve mentioned before, if we put any bonus money or increases, we may get throughout the year into those accounts each week we’ll have that much more come week 52!
We’ll happy New Year to ya and we here at WAOC appreciate you listening in with us each week, we’re going to try and bring you interesting thoughts or things to ponder all year long and we hope to help you with your Careers each week in some small way at least. We wish you a prosperous, productive and above all a Safe year ahead. Help explain Safety to a coworker, friend or family member, it’ll make both you and them live Safer lives!