Advertising your Availability
When I began searching for a summer internship, I knew that
even though I had several years of independent computer experience, my real
work experience consisting of cooking and snack bar jobs that wouldn’t get
me any special recognition. I
knew it would be difficult getting into a company where I could actually
work on computer programs, so my first goal was to just land an internship
anywhere, and work on getting what I wanted later.
I updated my resume that I had made in a class, and then
started attacking the job market. I
went to a job fair at George Mason University and dropped off about 25
resumes, sent resumes to people I had met at various other events, and
registered on several online resume sites.
Finding Out About Job Openings
In order to apply to the Department of the Army jobs, I used
www.cpol.army.mil.
Every major government organization has their own jobs website, which
gives access to a database of job announcements, and usually an automatic
resume system. Department of
the Army uses a system called Resumix, where you enter your resume
information and then you can simply click on a job announcement to send your
resume.
Landing Your Internship
I actually got the job by talking to someone in
the organization, who was one of my father’s friends that I had met at
picnics and other events years before.
Even with this contact, I still had to apply using the CPOL website
three times before I got hired. The
reason for this is that the Civilian Personnel Office (CPO) governs hiring,
not by the agency. The agency
contacts CPO and says they need a certain job to be filled.
CPO then looks in their database, pulls a list of people using
keywords to match the resume, and sends the list to the agency.
Once the agency reads all the resumes and decides whom to hire, they
contact CPO, who in turn contacts the applicant.
For my position (GS-3 Office Automation Assistant), there was no
required interview.
