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Podcast Summary:
Meet Tou Yang, a Transition Work Opportunities Navigator at State Services for the Blind! Tou helps students explore career options, build resumes, prepare for interviews, and find summer jobs, internships, or volunteer experiences. Learn how tools like Career Index Plus make it easier to research careers and job markets. Tou shares tips for tailoring your resume, answering interview questions with confidence, and job shadowing opportunities. Whether you’re heading to college or the workforce, Tou and his team are ready to support you every step of the way. Opportunity starts with taking that first step!
Full Transcript
Jeff: Please welcome Tou Yang.
{Music}
Tou: That’s usually one of the first things that we work on a resume. If you don’t know, it’s basically a document that summarizes your job history.
Jeff: Transition Work Opportunities Navigator at State Services for the blind.
Tou: The site that I like to use is called the Career Index Plus. In a nutshell, they have a lot of different jobs listed, and they have profiles arranged where it’s really easy to read and understand.
Jeff: And now here’s Tou Yang. We hope you enjoy.
Tou: Help them navigate careers, navigate job search and navigate college pathways and majors. We’re really here as a support to project students towards the right direction.
Jeff: Welcome to Blind Abilities I’m Jeff Thompson. Today in the studio we have Tou Yang and he is the transition work opportunities. Navigator at State Services for the Blind in Minnesota. Tou, welcome to Blind Abilities.
Tou: Thanks for having me.
Jeff: I should say welcome back.
Tou: Oh that’s right.
Jeff: So summertime is coming. And students, you know, they’re finishing up their classes or ready to start thinking about their fall classes too. But summertime is a great opportunity for students to enhance their opportunities. Why don’t you tell us what you do during the summertime with students?
Tou: Yeah, my name is Tou, Transition Navigator at SSB State Services for the blind. And in a nutshell, at least summer wise, students and I, we get together and we essentially do our best in the job search process. Together, we try to streamline it as best as possible, do some best practices, and really just try to apply for work, prepare for interviews, and hopefully get that summer job.
Jeff: Such as internships and other opportunities.
Tou: Yeah, whether that be an internship, a paid or unpaid paid volunteer or job. Really. The idea is to just get out there and do something, whether that’s a program or a job. We just want our students to be involved and gain skills.
Jeff: Now, I remember last year at the STP program, the Summer transition program, I was there and you were talking a lot about kind of an app where you can put in and search for jobs, see what the jobs, the prognosis for the job in the future, the pay amount and all sorts of stuff. It was really interesting and all the students that were on there were kind of excited about that. Can you tell us about that?
Tou: Yeah, for sure. What you’re referring to is what I call the labor market information Bank on this site. The site that I like to use is called the Career Index. Plus, anyone can go there and create an account for free and access the information. In a nutshell, they have a lot of different jobs listed and they have profiles arranged where it’s really easy to read and understand the information that’s been aggregated, and it’s just easy for normal, regular people for us to understand and see what careers are all about. We can learn about how fast our job’s growing, or are they actually dying, and see how many number of workers there are in Minnesota, how much they get paid median wise annual. So there’s just a host of information that’s really useful for individuals to know before they jump into a career field. For that site, though, it’s more so career exploration, but it’s still useful to know as you try to look for work for the summer.
Jeff: I’m sure it’s a big decision in a sense, because as you begin your college years, you don’t want to be going down an area that’s a dead end. And having this information is a very useful, especially in the beginning.
Tou: Right? I have this conversation a lot with my students. An individual has a lot of different values that they might have when they make decisions. One of the most common value conflicts that people have when they choose a career is they oftentimes really like to do something, but they also like to eat and have a house and be able to have essential necessities, which essentially means you got to get paid, right. But you can like to do something. But what if you don’t get paid to do that? Or it could be the opposite. You could get paid to do something. But what if you don’t like to do that? And so just understanding yourself and the market is really important to understand before you commit to a career pathway.
Speaker3: One thing they offer is career exploration. Basically, what that entails is you’ll meet with someone who will help you kind of figure out basically what you want to do as a career. It helps like break down what you’re interested in, what careers might fit your interests, what careers fit the lifestyle you want is there.
Jeff: Opportunities for students to meet someone that may be in that field that they’re looking forward to, like shadow them or just to converse with them?
Tou: Yeah. Most definitely.
Speaker4: When I was learning about, like becoming an instructor, I did actually go with the career exploration person and we went to Vision Loss Resources to meet with their O&M instructor there in person. And then I got to see, like the O&M instructor working with a student. And that was really cool.
Tou: I’d say most professionals are open to meeting with young people. In my work with students, most of my contacts has been cold. For example, there’s a student that I’m working with right now and they’re exploring to find something. In Physical Therapy Assistant. We’re looking around the Apple Valley area. We found a provider and we just called them up and said, hey, we’re interested in shadowing and learning more about a PTA. Can you guys host us for a little bit? And they said, sure, come on down, the price is right. Low and behold, the student is. I think it might have just been yesterday where they went down there and shadowed them for a day. They came with some questions prepared for a follow up informational interview afterwards. So it’s kind of like A12 punch. And it was from a cold contact. And it just really comes down to the initiative. You know what you kind of want to look for to see if there’s any providers nearby that’s related to the career that you want to do for this student. It was just a couple of miles away and just called them and made the connection, arranged the time, and then now they’ve got that experience done.
Jeff: Well, that’s a great example. So when you’re talking about internships and summer jobs, what if someone needs coaching. Is there opportunity for that as well?
Tou: Yeah for sure. Sometimes students or adults needs a little bit more support in order to just learn the job or reach their full potential at the workplace. Sometimes I could be that job coach person. In the past, I’ve been able to help students or help a student at a packaging company. That was pretty interesting because their shift was a night shift, and so I was there helping them become more familiar with the workplace at night. But that’s kind of those rare instances. But if I’m not available and then we have another staff member at SSP, we do have a dedicated job coach where if the employment specialist like myself, if we’re not available, we can connect with them and they will do their best to meet with the individual and kind of see where they’re at and be able to help bridge them to reach their full potential at the workplace.
Jeff: Well that’s great. That’s a great opportunity to find out if they really like the job, if it’s possible, and if it might be just a little hurdle, they’ll probably figure out a way to overcome that and lead to a successful summer job.
Tou: Right, exactly.
Jeff: What about interviewing? You’re talking about looking at these jobs and finding something. But there’s the interviews and there’s resume building. Where do they learn about that?
Tou: Yes. Let’s talk, I guess resume first. If you think about a recruiter and they’re looking at job applications, they usually have check marks. And so one of those check marks could be did this person submit a resume. And so if you’re looking or applying for jobs and you’re not submitting a resume, that means you’re not checking one of those check boxes that recruiters are looking for. When I work with students, that’s usually one of the first things that we work on a resume. If you don’t know, it’s basically a document that summarizes your job history. And so if you don’t have any past jobs, maybe this is your first job you will want to talk about maybe your school and the different projects or clubs that you’ve been involved at school, or even if you don’t have that experience at school, you will want to talk about things that maybe you’ve done in your personal life, maybe for your uncle, maybe you helped out at the farm at Aunt Jane, maybe you did something at church. But whatever that you’ve done, you can probably think of something that you can put down on your resume that you were able to help out somewhere. So you can create this document to submit along with your application. That’s resume wise, and that’s something that SSB we can totally help with, whether that be myself or another employment specialist or the counselor, if they got time. Resumes is definitely a essential item that you will want to have when you submit a job application. Because again, when a recruiter is looking at this and they’re kind of weighing the differences between one applicant versus the next, they’re probably going to lean towards the one that did submit an application with a resume because oftentimes their thought process is this person that submitted the application with a resume, they probably put in more time to apply for this job. Why would I give this job to someone who didn’t even put as much time into this job? They’re not even that much interested. This is just a job to them.
Jeff: You may not even get that interview right.
Tou: That’s exactly right. They want a person who they feel is invested, and if you don’t submit some of these documents, they’re going to think that, hey, person’s not invested. Why do I want to even interview them? This person doesn’t really care. This is just some job to them.
Jeff: Another thing about the resume is having someone look it over because we none of us really fill out a resume once a week, twice a week or something. It’s something that we revisit doctor up a little bit more, dust it off a little bit and bring it up to date. I think it’s always good to start a resume and build upon it, right?
Tou: I would even argue that it is best practice to actually try to tailor your position to every job that you apply to. And so that’s definitely more true for adult professionals than it is for young people. I think for young people, students or high schoolers, it’s okay to get around with a general resume. But as you begin to approach your career field, it’s more and more pressing, I think, to tailor your resume towards the position that you’re applying to. Essentially, what I mean by tailor on that word comes from a tailor, which is a person that makes clothes fit better for a person, right? Essentially, when you tailor your resume, your resume may be as it stands, is baggy, right? And when it’s baggy, it can fit more people, right? Generally. But when you tailor it, it’s meant to fit only one person, ideally yourself. Right? But in this case, in the analogy of job search, you want to tailor it to the job that you’re applying to. And so if you’re applying to a, let’s just say some restaurant, right. As a cook, maybe you had a little bit of experience in the past in that, or maybe not. Maybe you just helped out at home or whatever the case, you really want to talk about those things. You want to tailor it onto your resume so that when they do read it, they can see and understand and say, oh wow, this person does have some experience that we’re looking for, right? That’s the feedback that we want from them. And so if we were to write a general resume, some of those parts might hit. But for a tailored resume, most of those parts should hit that. That’s the idea of the tailored resume.
Jeff: The perfect fit.
Tou: That’s right.
Jeff: That’s good. And now for interviews. How do we get past the anxiety that 1st May feel about going to an interview?
Tou: Yeah. And so interviewing equally as important as a resume, resumes to get you through the door. But now that you’re, I guess, quote unquote in the door, right, to have that interview, how do you do? Well, in that interview, in the interview, there’s lots of different questions that gets asked. But I think it essentially boils down to maybe 4 or 5 types of questions, and maybe we can go over them really fast. So the first type of interview question that you will probably encounter is what I would call the first question. Right. So pretty easy to remember that one. So the first question might be something like, hey, tell me about yourself or why do you want to work here? So those are maybe two classic first questions. So to answer the first question, if you’ve already done your homework, like say your resume, then this question is very easy to answer because to answer that question is to basically summarize your resume right, and then talk about why the things on your resume matters to the job that you’re applying to. It might sound something like, I’m really excited to work at this job because I have experience in the kitchen. I’ve been able to help prepare food and wash dishes and keep the place clean and sanitized. And I had this experience at X, Y, and Z, and because I’ve had this experience, I think I would be a really good fit here.
Tou: That’s just a very simple way to answer the first question, to summarize your resume and talk about why you think it matters. The second type of question is what I like to call the basic question. So the basic question are essentially a lot of the what they might say. What is your greatest strength? What does this mean to you or just what do you bring to the table? Something like that. To answer these types of questions, I like to use a simple formula called a, which is you want to just answer the question to what you think makes sense to you, and then you want to give an example. You want to give an example demonstrating your answer, and then you want to, ah, relate back about why your answer and example matters. So an example might be something like hey do what is your greatest strength? And then two might say something like, well, I’m really good at technology and if I wanted to, I could just stop there, right. But that’s not really good practice. But that’s what most people do. They stop without giving an example. And so when you answer one of these basic questions, you want to go past the answer and go provide an example to I’m really good at technology. For example, in my work at SSP, I’ve created a host of multiple types of documents and excel sheets to help calculate student progress. And I’ve done that for the past seven years, right? Something like that.
Tou: And so if when you answer something, you want to back it up with an example to really give meat to your answer. Otherwise, your answer is going to feel hollow and light like something’s missing. And then it’s just going to sound like, uh, trust me, bro. Like, yeah, I’m good at technology, but that’s not really the case in interviewing. You really need to elaborate why your answer matters, and to make it sound like it matters more. That example is really, really important. But the R part that relates, that’s just icing. I’d say that’s usually more optional. It might sound something like, and because I have this experience and technology, I feel like I’d be an excellent fit for this position. I can see that my skill and technology would benefit for this position, and I think the team would be able to thrive more when I bring in this skill set. And so when you combine these three things for the basic question, it gives it a very well rounded response for the interviewer to listen to. And so that is the second type of question we’re getting by. But the third type of question that’s often asked in an interview is what’s called a behavioral type of question and a behavioral question. It’s really important to understand how the behavior question is structured. It is fundamentally structured differently than a basic question, but it is asking almost the same thing.
Tou: But the way that it’s asked, it requires you to answer the question differently. And so let me explain. So for a basic question, the question might be something like what is your greatest strength? Right. But for a behavioral question, the question might sound something like, tell me about a time where you demonstrated your strengths in a past position or in a past role. And so the way that we answer the basic question, we can’t really say the same thing anymore. We have to really think about a specific time, right? So for the basic question, the example was optional, right? But then now for the behavioral question that example is now required. Essentially it’s the example is basically the full answer. And so to answer the behavioral question we want to talk about essentially three things. We want to talk about s the situation. We want to talk about a the action that you took and then we want to talk about are the result of the action that you took. So let’s say for example, the question is hey two what is your greatest strength. And then two is like, oh yeah, you know, my greatest strength is in working with technology. And so I might talk about a specific time where working with technology really matters from a past Situation. I might say something like, there was a time where I was working in the office, and one of my coworkers came to my cube and say, hey, dude, I’m experiencing this problem.
Tou: Can you help me out? So that’s the situation. And then two, we’ll continue to add by saying, I went over to their cube and I was able to diagnose and test out a few things, and I was able to figure out the problem and did a few things. And so that would be the action, the A action. And then moving on to the R part, we will want to talk about what happened because of the action that you took. And so after doing those actions, I noticed that the computer for this person, the coworker, started to work again, and they were very happy that I was able to help them out. And so in a nutshell, when answering a behavioral type of question or when just giving an example, the SA is a solid formula to follow when And talking about an example. So moving on to the fourth type of question, this is what I would call the disability question. And so the disability question is definitely a hard one to navigate. And so I would say there’s several camps I guess you can say about where the disability question lands or where it should land. And I guess I won’t dive into that too much right now. But the disability question is essentially, can you do the job with or without reasonable accommodations? And so the disability question is essentially a behavioral type of question.
Tou: When we’re confronted with a disability question, we want to talk about a time where maybe the disability might have been a challenge, right. That would be a situation. And then we want to talk about the action that we took to overcome that situation. And then we want to talk about the result that happened because of the action that we took in regards to the disability situation. And so when we’re confronted with the disability question, it’s a really good way to still follow the behavioral formula to answer that question. And so the thing about the disability question though, is there is one more step on top of the standard behavioral response, which is now that you’ve talked about it, the next step is you have to or I would strongly recommend that you have to demonstrate it in real time right now that you talked about it happening in the past, you also have to do what I call a performance, right? A performance response, which is if you said that you were really good at using the computers and you talked about a time that you used the computer as a person with disability, and then you should demonstrate that in real time for the interviewer to see. So you’re demonstrating exactly what you had just talked about that you had an example for. And so it’s definitely I guess it kind of sucks that a person with a disability would have to do one more step in order to answer this question, right.
Tou: But I would say that it’ll provide a lot of ease for the interviewer that, hey, this person really do know what they’re talking about. They just gave me an example, and they just showed it in front of me before my eyes, like this person’s got it. And so that is the disability question. And then the last question or the fifth question, I think we’re at number five now. The last question is the last question. That’s what I call it at least. And usually the interviewer would say something like, hey, do you have any questions for me? And so you definitely want to be able to ask questions so that these questions could be questions that maybe you asked or you had written down before the interview. Maybe during the interview you were writing down some notes of things that you noticed. Maybe there was something on the job description that just really didn’t make sense to you. Or maybe you want to ask about that, or maybe you just noticed something about the interviewer, or you want to just ask the interviewer something, but you don’t want to go about that question without asking a question. It just doesn’t look as good. That is essentially the interview prep that I would recommend to go over when I do with my students.
Jeff: Well, that’s really a great opportunity to alleviate some of the anxiety that someone might have, and to build some confidence by sitting down with you and going over some of these tricks that you mentioned air answer, example, relate and SA situation, action result. Then for the disability question you add on the live demo, those are really great tools to keep in your back pocket because you can pull them out when you need them. Great stuff too.
Tou: Right, exactly. You know, most people, when they’re scared or when they have anxiety, it’s usually because it’s the unknown, right? You don’t know something and you fear something because you don’t understand it. But once you begin to learn about it, practice it, and become more familiar with it, that anxiety just naturally goes away. It just disappears. It becomes less of an impact for you and your, um, your performance, your thought process. It might still be there, but it’s a lot less because you have that practice and that experience now.
Jeff: That’s great. So getting services from you as a work navigator, this is just an added part of what state services for the blind can give to a student to know that there’s opportunities here to learn, rather than just going into college all on your own and trying to figure it all out. There’s resources at state Services for the blind that can help them navigate the work opportunities.
Tou: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Myself too. And my other coworker, navigator Randy. We’re both here for students at CSB to really help them navigate careers, navigate job search, and navigate college pathways and majors. We’re really here as a support to project students towards the right direction, right interview prep or resume building, or whether that be committing to a career pathway and exploration by learning about the labor markets. We’re there to help students navigate those things. Even if students doesn’t want to meet with us SSP, we can still send them resources. Send students resources through email or, I guess, a text to so that students can explore those things on their own time. And if they have questions, they can send us email messages and we will be able to respond to them and help point them in the right direction. And so if students are ready to meet with either myself or Randy. They would need to talk to their counselor, and their counselor would refer them over to Randy and I. Most students should know who their counselors are, but if they don’t, they could probably ask who they do know at CSB. And that person could probably point them to their counselor, and then their counselor would discuss whether or not it’s a good time to meet with the navigators. You know, myself or Randy. Once that referral is made and that we can begin to work with them.
Jeff: Well that’s great. It’s really great to find out so much more in depth about what is really available to students as they embark upon their career, their work, what they want to be doing, resources, and with all your experience, it just gives them a I don’t know, is it a leg up? You know, gives them that step, that one step that a little bit further. So it’s not as hard to, uh, go about all these decisions that are being made. So Tou, thank you so much for coming on the blind abilities and talking about what you do at State services for the blind.
Tou: Yeah. For sure. Thanks for having me.
Jeff: It was a great opportunity to talk to Tou Yang and to find out more about the opportunities available for students. To find out more about all the programs at State Services for the Blind, contact Shane.DeSantis@state.mn.us that’s Shane.DeSantis@state.mn.us.
Be sure to contact your State Services for the Blind, your Voc Rehab, and find out what they can do for you. Live, work, read, succeed.
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…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities