Author name: Dr Maxwell Ampong

Oh no… I’m not self-promoting for your employment. Please, there’s a far simpler explanation for the header and headline: it’s clickbait. This is a much more attractive heading than ‘ways to apply for a job’. I expect this article heading to stand out and make you want to read at least a couple lines. THIS is the kind of attitude that I feel is needed in these dire times if you seek a hire. It’s an absolute fact that if you seek to be employed during a pandemic, impressing your prospective employer is a definite must. Remember when many Ghanaians joked “June deɛ kwata kwata”? Yeah well it’s July. The threat of coronavirus is still very much alive and many business sectors are still unsure of how this pandemic will affect sales in the coming months, even years. Most employers are much more concerned with survival than expansion. Most employers are much more concerned with reducing salary expenditures and how to beef up or maintain sales numbers.  You (or your business) now more than ever need to stand out. Unemployment rates have skyrocketed around the world and these last few weeks, we’ve had way more people walk into our building asking to meet our officers for some “urgent business” only to realise it’s to plea for employment. I have personally met more than a couple. Still, BUSINESSES HAVE NEEDS even during COVID-19 and if you concentrate on those three words (“businesses have needs”), all you have to do is convince the guy signing the cheques that you deserve one, and yes even during a pandemic. Alan hired this very expensive sales manager and I was so confused until I realised it was for only one reason: the guy proves to be able and actually is beefing up sales numbers. So you CAN get hired during these times. There’s a pandemic. The default answer before you ask is a big NO. So if you have the chance at changing it to a yes, recognise the opportunity in the context of present times and make the most of it. Here’s what I think impressed me or would have impressed me during the last few weeks. Practice before we meet. I realised many of them did not know what to do; with their hands, with their briefcase or purse, even with their heads. This awkwardness gives you away as being uncomfortable in the setting. If you have one shot at a meeting with a would-be employer, prepare, practice practice practice every move, every detail, and nail that meeting. Breathe in, sit down, adjust your balance and make eye contact. These things are easier when you practised it many times before. Many might say “…but with time I will be better”. Not many have been willing to take that chance before all this, how much more now. It’s this kind of thinking you should do away with. Others were very fluid in their speaking but you can clearly sense the “I was just passing by and decided to try my luck” vibe. That leads me to my next point. Customise the message. What our Group would requires in, say, our Business Development Department, would be different from other companies’ needs. Don’t generalise the message. Don’t sound like you’re reading from a textbook. This isn’t your usual job market. Something is different and it’s that many more people are saying what you’re saying to who you’re saying it to. Find a way to convey the message of “I was born to work here” and it’ll increase your chances. I don’t mean to say do that the arrogant way. I mean, let employers know that you know the company more than the next guy. Don’t make simple, avoidable mistakes. One guy had his resume dated July 2019. That threw me off. I didn’t even know resumes came with dates at the top-right corners. Grammatical errors are total turn off as well. Again there’s a much greater need that you stand out. Simple avoidable mistakes like this give your application a bad feel. Answer the simple question of “what can you do”. The keyword there is ‘can’. In a tumultuous job market, what you have been doing and/or what you prefer to do should all take a back seat. What CAN you do? Weaponize your other abilities if the present ones you’re used to don’t work. My wife, through online courses, got some IT training many years ago and she kept building on it. Working from home due to the pandemic freed up some time and I am surprised to find out she’s getting paid for IT work on the side, because she’s in Finance. If you have other abilities, start bringing it to the forefront. Show me the money! Instead of telling me to try you and see, why not lead me to exploring exactly what I will see within a specified time frame. I believe that’s what Alan’s new Sales Manager did. “Do not pay me now, but let me work with you and within one week, if I am allowed to do A and B, I believe I bring the company C and D”. Use this tactic if you are sure you are THAT good and only need one shot to showcase what you have. Because most often, nobody knows, and nobody cares like you do. Speaking of this… Nobody knows what you can do. Nobody cares like you do. It’s a harsh reality. A few of them spoke like if I googled them I would find everything I needed right on page 1. Well, as good as you might be, I probably don’t know you. And in these times, most employers are distracted with keeping the ship afloat. Like I earlier said, in these times, the default answer is NO. In order to beat this situation, you’d have to empathise with the guy sitting in front of you. Place yourself in the shoes of someone that doesn’t understand that he or she needs you. Take your time to explain what your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is. Beforehand, take your time to craft what your

Desensitisation, in this regard, is the phenomenon where the same people in our Ghanaian society that were very much concerned about the impact and threat of the novel coronavirus on our health and livelihood at large, have developed a much weaker emotional response to current COVID-19 issues. This is definitely partly due to the fact that, when we receive continual messages about the dangers of the COVID-19 over a long period of time, this inadvertently contributes to our desensitisation. I fell victim to this yesterday… to the desensitisation thingie, not coronavirus. This is an opinion piece. I remember Foster telling me how he had shopped for two whole months’ worth of food in preparation for the lockdown, and me thinking “well that means I have to shop for three months’ worth of food if he’s is shopping for two… gotta be extra prepared”. This was late March, when COVID paranoia was at its peak, and for good reason too.  The first day I returned to the office after the lockdown got lifted, I was in full hazmat-mode: I had gloves on… and spare gloves for my spare gloves for my other spare gloves… I wore an N95 face mask with an additional half a dozen spare masks on standby for if someone were to touch my worn mask… and about a gallon of hand sanitizer in very short reach for good measure. Got hospital grade disinfectant for the office too. I mean, you can never be too careful in these times, right?  Right. Fast forward to yesterday and I instinctively got slightly frustrated when Alan’s receptionist insisted very firmly that I go back and grab a face mask from the car before going up to see him. Why was frustration my initial reaction and not gratefulness for reminding me to safeguard my own life? During my walk back to the parking lot, I wondered the extent to which we as a people are getting desensitised to the threat of COVID-19. Over the weekend, the President of Ghana mandated the Police to enforce the wearing of face masks in public. This is in response to the recent spike in the number of confirmed cases, amongst other matters. We need to all follow this instruction because a lot of people have been paying much more attention to the sanitiser part of the solution than the face mask part, moi inclusive, regrettably. Sanitisers are good. They keep your hands clean and as long as you don’t touch your face, and contaminated surfaces that you come into contact with do not get to infect you. That’s all well and good. Still, you need the face mask, maybe even more than the hand sanitisers. Let me explain. When someone is infected, the virus responsible named the Sars-CoV-2 virus will hijack the cells of the living person and begin to replicate itself. As it continues to make copies of itself in the infected body, it will eventually reach the cells in the lungs. When multiplication of the Sars-CoV-2 virus in the cells reach a certain point, the newly made viruses will burst out of the cells and become suspended in your bodily fluids. An example of your bodily fluids is whatever watery droplets that come out when you cough or speak. When an infected person coughs, they are basically spraying tiny infected droplets known as aerosols into the air, and that’s not even the scary part. One single cough from an infected person can produce up to 3000 droplets. So unless both your nostrils come with its own naturally-made sanitising filter that protect you against the tiny infected aerosols suspended in the air that you might breathe into your lungs, WEAR YOUR FACE MASK! It gets scarier! There have been reports that asymptomatic transmissions contribute to about 50% to 80% of COVID-19 confirmed cases. It means infected people that are not actively coughing or showing any signs of illness are transmitting the most. We have been so desensitised that we seem to forget easily that these should trigger us to be more vigilant. You won’t be able to readily tell if someone is sick. It gets even scarier!! Valentyn Stadnytskyi, Philip Anfinrud, Adriaan Bax and Christina E Bax. These four published a study concluded that COVID-19 can, in some instances, be transmitted through speech… THROUGH SPEECH!! Study showed that just uttering the words “stay healthy” sprays thousands of invisible droplets. Why wouldn’t you want to wear a face mask? Protect yourself. Sound out “stay healthy” from your own lips and you’d find that it is very possible to spray very tiny droplets saying those two words. At this very moment as I’m typing these words, which is Friday 19th June 9:21am, the Ghana Health Service website reports of 12,929 confirmed cases, which will surely rise to over 13,000 confirmed cases by the time this gets published Monday morning. THIRTEEN THOUSAND is very far from the just TWO confirmed cases that Ghana’s Health Minister Kwaku Agyemang-Manu announced on the 12th of March. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has this clipart that showed how one infected person infects 2.5 people on average in 5 days, and 406 others within 30 days. I believe the current spike in the number of confirmed cases is as a result of us not following the recommended safety measures like social distances and the wearing of face masks. The Government of Ghana is experiencing her fair-share of a beatdown due to the pandemic. Less than a year ago, Ghana was continuously touted as the rising shining star from West Africa, literally one of Africa’s fastest growing economies in the region. But due to this pandemic, businesses were closed and with that came a myriad of fiscal issues. The recently published Fiscal Developments Report of the Bank of Ghana showed that our country lost out on GH¢3.6 billion during the months of January, February and March. The figure came from the estimated national revenue and grants inflow of GH¢13.9 billion as against the reduced actual inflow of GH¢10.4 billion. GH¢3.6 billion could have funded a lot of national projects. I also think the aviation sector has taken the worst beating

The current set of circumstances create an ecosystem that happens to be the perfect condition for some enterprises to thrive and thrive really well. But that’s like discussing all the benefits of fire while your house is burning to ashes. It wouldn’t be the best time, would it? Nonetheless, The New Normal will catalyse many pending changes that was told to be forthcoming while sparking the innovation of many brand new ways of conducting business. Take automation for instance. The trumpet on automation replacing the jobs of millions was sounded a long time ago. After seeing how this pandemic affected human resource, there’s no stopping it because the sense it makes has now gotten more evident. Machines can’t catch a virus. And this is only one instance of why people need a Plan B for their source of income or a more strategic Plan A. The New Normal will prevail even after this coronavirus. Companies will not stop using Zoom and Microsoft Teams for correspondence. If some things worked well during the pandemic, they will be retained as norm. Everyone is now fully aware of the indisputable fact that the world will never be the same again. It is the people who get a workaround to the issues of this novel coronavirus that will come out on top. One way of coming on top is to start pursuing avenues that are hot right now because of the current set of circumstances creating an ecosystem that happens to be the perfect condition for some enterprises to thrive and thrive really well, as mentioned earlier. It’s simple, really: in a time of need, people have… well… needs, needs they otherwise wouldn’t have, be it an increase in the number of already existing needs or the emergence of new needs. If you fulfil any of the suddenly abundant needs as a service, you get to help others and also get paid in return. A double win! I’m not selling sure-bankers. These are all facts, and this is an opinion piece. ______________________________________ CONTENT CONSUMPTION: Ghana might have lifted the partial lockdown but around the world, most countries are still very much inside. During these lockdowns, billions around the world have started consuming more content; Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, TV Shows, Books, you name it. The increase in demand also meant that people create more content now and there has been the emergence of new content creators that are creating for the first time. They are going to need help. If you possess the requisite skill or can direct your services at them, then helping these new content creators can be a new line of income. They’d need help to better focus their content. Editing is another big way of improving on the work of first-timers. One could offer services that repurpose content for more varied consumption. We are definitely going so see an increase in the number of services that help content creators. You should get in on it now.  STRUGGLING ARTISTS: Shatta Wale has been very vocal about how the industry isn’t helping artists like musicians. Well, he’s worth millions of dollars and currently doesn’t qualify for the tag of “struggling artist” but artists are struggling. Artists have been struggling and during this pandemic they’re struggling even the more. Artists do have one sellable commodity in abundance: talent. If you can create a medium (app or others) where various artists teach others their craft, there’ll be a huge audience you can pander to. During this pandemic, many have upped their consumption of electronic content. Many are using this time to learn new things and the opportunity to learn from a talented artist would be enticing. Don’t forget that famous artists will offer an already existing set of customers that’ll eagerly engage with your medium for access to their favourite artists. By putting on other artists that need this source of income, it can be a win-win for everybody when your paid-service offers them just that. UNEMPLOYED GRADUATES: This category of the population have their main problem already concisely explained on their label: they’re educated but unemployed. The pandemic barely affects their employment status. But when you have to start looking at The New Normal and how it has changed corporate protocols, you’d realise many companies are suddenly very ok with remote work. With those companies on one hand, look at the other hand of a very big pool of academic talent that would otherwise have had trouble breaking the shackles of unemployment. Lightbulb, cha-ching. This is the time that companies will be open to remote work solutions. With the number of graduates out there with bankable skills and no money, you should be able to shop their skills to companies open to remote work. They get quality yet affordable human resource, the graduates get work and you should be able to get some work done in the middle of all of that.  If you can reach skilful graduates willing to work, and companies open to remotely employing for their kind of business, through a medium you create, it could work out great. PUBLIC SPEAKING: The pandemic has hit professional speakers badly. I should even add speakers at religious gatherings like the Pastors to this category, and Comedians. After the partial lockdown was lifted, that on gatherings remains in place. International Speakers cannot travel because of flight restrictions as well. Speakers need help. The biggest meeting location has always been the internet, the web. Now, it’s like that’s all we have. But not many old-timers understand how to harness it’s power. With a lot of their followers flocking to the web, you can earn decent amounts of money helping speakers book virtual gigs if that’s something you’d be interested in mastering. There’s a lot of virtual conferences happening right now and you getting them such gigs will be something speakers will be ready to pay for. Or, think bigger and help speakers create their own conferences and other events. Or think even bigger and turn some of their past speaking engagements into books. Most of these speakers say