SCLA Part 5 - Job Search Products on Discus

I had already been through one job-search-related session, but I figured another one couldn't hurt.  Also, my only other reasonable choice was the one on selecting Christian fiction for children.  Well, first of all, I don't purchase books and, secondly, I'm not a Christian, so I'm unlikely to do any programming using this genre.  Also, what passes for Christian lit for one group doesn't necessarily work for another group.  For example, there's the Left Behind series which is eaten up by one segment of the Christian population and derided vociferously by another segment.  In the past we've solved this problem in our area by putting "Christian" stickers on books from the various publishing houses, such as Bethany, and then hiding under the desk.

This was an excellent presentation, and also just in time for my Homeschooler program!   I couldn't believe my little eyeballs!  The presenter went over the products that we have available on our library's Discus* links that I was totally unaware of.

Ferguson's Career Guidance Center is a Facts On File product.  This seems to be mostly useful for those incredibly boring school assignments on careers, which they used to make kids do all the time but I haven't had a request for recently.  There is a cool "Career Interest Assessment" test that I'm dying to take.  It's 180 questions to determine where your interests lie: are you artistic? nurturing? etc.  I can't wait to find out that I should have been an Investment Banker.  I'll have to wait until I get to the library because I can't seem to access this from home - it's requiring a username and password.  Rats.  There is also advice on job hunting skills.

LearningExpress Library requires you to set up an account, but that's so it can save information for you and where you stopped on the practice tests.  It was suggested that you could use your library card number for setting up an account if doing this from outside the library - but, dang!, that's a really long number.  There is a resume creator and mini-courses on all those things you might be tested on, like math, the GED, ASVAB, SAT, ACT, all those acronyms, and some courses in Spanish to serve that demographic.

The last bit was about the NetLibrary Career e-Book Collection which also requires signing up.  Each title only has eight spaces for readers ... so if eight people are trying to read the same book at the same time, the ninth person is out of luck and has to ask for a notice to be sent when a space is available.  That might seem to be an unlikely event, but I imagine that those eight spaces are available to the whole state.  We used to subscribe to NetLibrary and I had a username, but it got too expensive and the state later provided Overdrive.  Anyway, I imagine that username, whatever it was, isn't any good anymore.  It would be nice if these things were more dependable.

I think the Homeschoolers group will be very interested in LearningExpress Library and its courses and tests.  Okay, maybe the parents will be interested.

*Now with the exciting new SmartSearch which searches all the websites in Discus at once!