USM MBA opens the 2019 Seminar Cycle with a conference on employability
Mr. Lionel Valenzuela, Director of the Commercial Engineering Department and the MBA Program, was in attendance together with many current and former students of the MBA Program. Innovator and Entrepreneur.
“The Labor Market in Chile and Salary Guide 2019” was the title of the seminar offered by Carolina Contreras, Manager of the Robert Half Division of Finance, Accounting and Financial Services, at the USM Vitacura Campus. The conference was organized by the Enterprise Management MBA Program of the Commercial Engineering Department, Federico Santa María Technical University, with the support of the Association of MBA Graduates.
Robert Half is a North American recruitment company with over 70 years’ experience worldwide, close to 400 offices in over 20 countries, and 15,000 collaborators around the world. The company has been in Chile for eight years and from its local headquarters works for the rest of Latin America, especially Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico and Panama.
Hiring trends and challenges
During her presentation, Ms. Contreras did an exhaustive analysis of the needs of different industries and her forecasts of 2019 hiring.
“Companies in general are prioritizing better-trained professionals with leadership skills, who are flexible, autonomous and creative. But aside from the specific technical abilities required in an industry, aspects of behavior and soft skills are acquiring growing value in the different industrial areas.”
During her talk, Ms. Contreras recommended three ways to look for work that are in step with the times. The first one she mentioned and the most efficient according to Robert Half's studies, is networking: “Information on 60 to 70% of all job openings in Chile is coming out through networking. In this way we can find out what's happening in the market, where people are being scouted to fill certain positions.”
Her next suggestion was to use the network LinkedIn, where searches are done mainly for the English enabled, and the expert advised posting one's job profile in both Spanish and English. Besides, “LinkedIn's search engines look for key technical words, so your profile should be extremely technical for it to come out in the searches,” Contreras pointed out.
“The third way to look for work is through headhunters. In Chile there are over 200 of them. We recommend you go to several, because each one holds a piece of the market pie, and so the more ground you cover, the more options you’ll have to find out what the available openings in the market are,” the speaker indicated.
This event was part of the seminar series that will take place in 2019. The conference ended with an extended Q&A, during which attendees shared their questions, comments and impressions with the speaker.