Winning Futures – Inspiring and preparing youth to succeed through mentoring.

Archive for May, 2012

Winning Futures has been coaching students on the “dos and don’ts” of job interviewing now that the school-year is ending and many students are starting down their chosen career paths or looking for summer work. To begin this exercise, mentors and students wrote a 30-second interview pitch, a technique useful to “sell” the job applicant to their potential employer by highlighting applicable skills and attributes in a succinct and confident manner. Essential elements of this pitch are:

• Appropriate attire
• Proper handshake
• Good posture and eye contact
• Good voice tone and speed of speech
• Enthusiastic attitude
• Examples to back up strengths
• Avoiding negative comments
• Using Winning Futures in the pitch
• Using interviewer name and company name
• Thanking the interviewer

Next, students and mentors took part in a mock career fair where each mentor moved from team to team to hear students’ pitches and give them feedback. This enabled students to hone their pitches based on advice from a working professional – someone they may one day actually interview for a job with!

You too can use this process to help students get comfortable speaking about themselves and delivering their interview pitches in a natural and fluid manner. Many lessons like these that you can implement in your own classrooms and youth programs are also outlined in Winning Futures’ “Achieving Success” workbook. Click on the “Purchase Books” button at left to learn more.