As a college student in a small town where there aren’t a lot of opportunities for me to grow in my career of choice, I have found a lot of resources that I use to add more experience to my resume.
1. FLIK
FLIK is a community that connects and empowers women at all stages of the female founder pipeline through apprenticeships. You can create a profile on FLIK and add all your hard and soft skills, your desired skills and what kind of apprenticeship you are looking for. The portal helps you look up women founders based on different filters, and you can approach them or they can approach you based on your skillset to have a contract-based apprenticeship. The best thing about FLIK is that it’s contract based, and they ask founders up front to consider that the apprentices are students and can only work 10 hours per week for 3 months.
2. Parker Dewey
Parker Dewey is an amazing resource that helps you get micro-internships that you can add to your resume. Micro-internships are essentially short-term internships with work for a set amount of time that a company wants done. You can do the work a company cannot give time to, and you get to demonstrate your skills and add to your resume, all while having short term experiences.
SUNY Oswego has their affiliate link with Parker Dewey that can help you set up your account.
3. Girlboss
Girlboss is a community of women that can join online collectives in their fields of interest and connect with other women that they find intriguing. You create your profile and add whatever information you feel comfortable with and “admire” women you think would be good for your network. You can join multiple collectives where there are many opportunities for you to network as well as get experiences. With collectives like Job Searching, Emerging Entrepreneurs, Women in Engineering, etc. it is a great platform to seek relevant experiences and meet women with similar backgrounds and interests as you.
4. LinkedIn
LinkedIn has so far been my best resource in terms of learning and adding qualifications to my resume. I have taken multiple courses on LinkedIn Learning, a free service through the oswego.edu email, and gotten multiple certifications that are added directly to my profile in my fields of interest. I have also taken skill assessments for software that is important in my field of work and have gotten LInkedIn verification that I am good at using those softwares. LinkedIn Groups and hashtags are also important in networking and finding opportunities. I found a group that was relevant to my line of work, UX design, and now have a community that is helping me solve issues I’m having. I have also gotten opportunities that have helped me boost my resume because I was able to engage with people and attend seminars and programs that would’ve otherwise flown under my radar.