Béliveau grad enjoying job with tech giant

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This article was published 21/08/2017 (2942 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Have you ever checked out Google’s career website?

If you’re looking for work and you’re wondering where to find jobs, you may want to have a look.

There are over a thousand jobs up for grabs. And many of the jobs are located in exotic locations such as Taiwan, Dublin, San Francisco, Moscow, Singapore, Tel-Aviv or New York.

The jobs are not the conventional engineers, nurses, accountants, teachers and lawyers with which we are accustomed.

Google’s cache of work offerings include full stack engineers, customer experience advocates, voice user interface designers, data science analysts, automation strategists, cloud editors, inclusion/diversity managers, UX writers, and  people operations directors.

These jobs aren’t found on conventional job search engines like Indeed or Monster.

High school students and career counsellors typically deal in traditional career paths. Most have no idea of the tech world’s constant demand for skilled workers.

Some students, however, take matters into their own hands in their search for a career.

One such student is Collège Béliveau grad Nicholas Candaele, who began working for Google in December 2016 as a Grade 12 student in LRSD’s Propel program.

“I wouldn’t have known about Google’s career website without the extra personalized career prep and advanced résumé work offered in Propel,” he says.

 
He was shocked when he received a phone call from California and a follow-up email setting up a 30-minute online interview via webcam.

Nick recalls a challenging online exchange with three interviewers, during which he had to demonstrate his coding and video game skills in a series of problem-solving exercises.

Soft skills are very important to Google, and fortunately, the 2017 grad could access diverse community experiences to answer questions about leadership, teamwork and communication. He has worked with Dakota Family Foods and SilverCity St. Vital; and volunteered with the Winnipeg Humane Society, Winnipeg Harvest, the Teddy Bear’s Picnic and Agape Table.

The interviewers took special interest in participation in LRSD’s Tigers’ Den Entrepreneurship Conference, the Duke of Edinburgh Leadership Program and solid French-speaking skills.

He accepted a position as a customer service representative and completed 20 hours of online training where he learned how to solve problems for Google users.

The job is very flexible. For the past six months, he has worked anywhere with wi-fi and at different times of the day.

After completing more hours in this part time gig, Nick earns a visit to the head office in Mountain View, Calif. to consider further possibilities with the tech giant.

For now, it’s off to the University of Winnipeg in the fall to begin a three-year computer science degree with the hope of becoming a programmer one day.

He recommends that high school students “think about the future and build skills that are in demand, especially in a world of automation and artificial intelligence.”

You can check out Google job offerings at https://careers.google.com/jobs

Adriano Magnifico is a community correspondent for St. Boniface. You can contact him at amagnif@mymts.net