How to Get Your Dream Job in Social Housing

About the Book

This book has come about as a result of the regular training sessions I run with students at Trans-Atlantic College, London.

The students I teach come from a wide range of backgrounds and attend a course called Advanced Practice Certificate in Housing and Welfare Management. This course is designed to help students change career and get into housing or welfare for the first time and indeed, many of them do. However, we recognised that we could greatly improve the success rate of our students by giving them some interview skills training too. It is simply not enough in these competitive times to just know your subject well - most jobs are filled by a process of advertising the role, selecting potential candidates via an application form and then interviewing them. This is a time consuming process, not least for the poor candidate, who will probably spend many hours of their own time completing forms and travelling to and from interviews, often to be met by failure.

We are only human, so inevitably some students simply gave up when this process defeated them too often. They cancelled their dreams of a housing career after a few negative experiences - after all, if you can't even get an interview then how can you get your first job?

So we introduced an Interview Skills Workshop into the course. Interview skills can be learnt just like any other skill we reckoned, so why not try and see if we could help improve people's success rate at job hunting by giving them some tips. The results were astonishing. In particular, people's confidence in their ability to succeed improved tremendously. We now estimate that over 80% of our students find work within 3 months of the course and the feedback on the Interview Skills Training is consistently rated as one of the top elements of their course, because it gives them hope and especially confidence that they really can succeed.

What do we do in this training that is so successful? Well, the main thing we do is try to get students to understand the employer's point of view. If you know what the employer wants, then you are obviously more likely to be able to give it to him or her. As a recruiter myself, I can share this information and let students know the major do's and don'ts.

The other thing we do is to concentrate on the thing which intimidates more students than any other thing when they are job hunting - how to overcome lack of previous housing experience. This consistently appears as their top worry in a field where many job adverts start with something like "successful candidates will have two years housing experienceÉ."

So you may want this book because you have already completed a training programme and you are ready to start job hunting, or you may be considering a career in housing and want to see how realistic it is for you. Whatever your reason for choosing this book, I will share with you the things that have worked for other students. If just one or two suggestions trigger something inside you that makes the difference between you getting a job or not, then it has been a success. There are no magic answers in here, but there are lots of practical, proven ways of significantly increasing your chances, not just of getting 'a job', but the exact job you want. The strategies in this book have worked for hundreds of our students. I sincerely hope they work for you too.

The book contains 4 main sections.

Part One covers the things you need to know before you commit yourself to a housing career. For example, explaining what social housing is and the type of jobs available to you in the sector.

Part Two deals with the various routes into housing including training courses, voluntary placements and applications for jobs via adverts, recruitment consultants and speculative letters. It will explain to you where to find jobs and help you plan the best route for you into your housing career.

Part Three covers the actual process of applying for jobs and marketing yourself as the best candidate. You will learn how to create a successful CV, complete application forms so that you will get interviews and, most importantly, how to be impressive at the actual interview. This section is useful to delve into as a reference guide when you are actively applying for jobs, because it helps you deal with each distinct stage and helps you overcome any potential problems you come across.

Part Four looks at some of the key areas that crop up time after time in interviews and are also vital to understand these once you have started work. This section covers Discrimination and Equal Opportunities, Health & Safety, Customer Service and Data Protection and Confidentiality.

Finally, at the end you have a list of useful names and addresses to help you further.

About the Author