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Colin Green asked how his brother could get clerical-work temp agencies to
give him a chance; David Berg wrote "the usual solution is to take on
volunteer work to build up experience and a portfolio. Another _possible_
option, if you can find it, is to sell yourself cheap, if someone will
take you on."
I would be wary of that approach. If anything, I would guess that the
agencies feel funny about hiring an energetic, project-manager-ish
30-plus-year-old-man to type other people's memos for eleven bucks an hour.
(I think that that same man, pleading for an internship with
word-processing portfolio in hand, would look like something out of the
Twilight Zone to them.) I don't know about perm clerical jobs, but the
*temp* assignments tend to be of the follow-simple-directions variety: make
30 photocopies of this set of documents, collate, assemble in three-ring
binders, apply labels, and then report back here for further instructions,
etc.
I did temp work in my starving-student days and mostly saw two types of
temps: (1) women who aspired to secretarial careers; (2) twentysomething
students temping for rent money until they managed to land jobs in their
real fields. Hate to perpetuate a stereotype, but I think that's what temp
clerical agencies are used to seeing. I wonder if they'd trust someone
outside of those categories, especially someone with obvious leadership
qualities, to fit smoothly into a low-level temp-worker role.
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A landmark hotel, one of America's most beautiful cities, and
three and a half days of immersion in the state of the art:
IPCC 01, Oct. 24-27 in Santa Fe. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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