Announcing the Inaugural SeaGL Career Expo

SeaGL is excited to announce a new feature for 2020. We will have a Career Expo Thursday afternoon, the day before our conference kicks off in full.

For the career expo, we will provide resume reviews and career guidance via private consultation. Counselors will be available for 30 minute jitsi sessions ( video optional ) from 13:00 to 17:00 Pacific time Thursday afternoon. In UTC, that’s from Thursday at 19:00 to Friday at 01:00.

SeaGL exists to support the FLOSS community. We’re starting the career expo to help people find and nurture careers working in and with FLOSS. Like other aspects of SeaGL, the career expo is dedicated to providing a harassment-free, inclusive experience that follows our Code of Conduct.

##Career Expo Enrollment

Please sign up using our Nextcloud form if you would like to book a session. There is no charge for participating in the career expo.

##Resume Review

It is beneficial if our counselors can review resumes ahead of the expo. We ask resumes be made available as soon as practical to allow our counselors to determine their own review schedule.

As counselors might wish to make notes, please provide resumes in a writeable free and open format such as LibreOffice ODT or plain text. We can also make notes on an annotatable format such as PDF.

##Day of Participation

We will open an IRC channel for participants the day of the career expo. Counselors will contact participants via IRC or email to schedule sessions.

The counselling sessions will be conducted via jitsi rooms. Jitsi provides in browser conferencing with a video option.

No account is required to sign up for counselling sessions or to use jitsi.

##Background

Hans started the Free Software Stammtisch career nights as a means of helping his students enter the field or further their careers. Thanks to generous volunteering from other counselors, the career nights have helped many people over the years.

The job nights led to working with the job board and career guidance events at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE). We found career guidance events such as “Ask a recruiter”, “What a hiring manager looks for” and “Resume reviews” to garner significant interest. Our first resume review event was scheduled for one hour, filled the room and ran for 3 hours.

At SeaGL we added a job board, but found it wasn’t sufficient for what we wanted to offer.

This year SCaLE added an Open Source Career Day thanks to RaiseMe.

Then, the pandemic hit and everything went virtual. As it turns out, the pandemic actually provided opportunity. Going virtual gives us access to assistance from counselors who don’t usually make it to Seattle.

Also, luckily for us, Lori B had aRaiseMe event at ShellCon 2020 a couple weeks ago. That provided an excellent example for running a virtual career guidance event.

We hope that our inaugural career expo will provide value to our community.

##Thank Yous

SeaGL wants to thank the career counselors who are volunteering their time for the career expo. We also want to thank our volunteers and sponsors who make SeaGL possible.

Thanks especially to Lori B and her RaiseMe program at ShellCon 2020 for providing a virtual event model for us to learn from. Thanks also to her for volunteering to help with counseling for our first Career Expo!

##Contact the SeaGL Career Expo

If you have questions or would like to help with career guidance, please contact us at CareerExpo (at) SeaGL.org.