@Daudi. I agree 100% with your points
I can't say i've had it the roughest. Or even state that i've had a bad life. I may not even know what that means or is about. In fact just day before yesterday i was sharing words with a friend ( also on this list ) who explained to me that a certain CEO
emerged from Kibera. Kinda made me feel like i've amounted to nothing. However, what i will share is a brief encounter of my life so that i don't get judged again regarding my comment about the internship application.
My family is not and has never been of anything higher than lower class. And i state this quite clearly. We had always been "without" certain things but never felt the pinch.
My parents when i was younger had saved up a sum of money over ten years and luckily, a corrupt conman found out about this little stash of money that was lying in the bank from somewhere, eventually swindling my parents of it.
A small property that once belonged to my family ( and i do mean small ) handed down from one generation as a legacy ( per-se ) was grabbed by undisclosed persons. And thus began a chapter in my story i'd like to call life.
It wasn't easy for my parents to conceal these truths from my brother any myself when we were younger but they did a damned good job of it. In order to keep our minds occupied and away from the constant battering of what they had to go through,
( this is my perspective ) my parents enrolled both myself and my brother to the Aga Khan Scouts. I never understood why he always asked for a subsidy on the cost our of camping or trips until i was able to understand the situation.
When i came of age, i took up a course at Aptech computer college and this not being my first choice , i went ahead and studied Web Application Dev't. After the course, i tool up an an apartment i rented @ Ksh 16,000. Got a job which paid me 10,000. and
obviously had other overheads such as electricity, water and food plus i started a course in New Media which spanned 2 Years. Needless to say, it wasn't easy coming up with the money. Food at times was more a privilege over a necessity.
What i have done to survive, i hope no one has to. And i say this knowing full well that i haven't had it as bad as a lot of people i know.
I've worked with all sorts of individuals, some good, some not so good. I've worked for what i'd like to believe are the best of Employers and quite frankly, some of the Worst i can think of.
My story is long, and i'm writing about it too.
It's been 10 years since and i'm glad to say i've gotten as far as i have, it's been a very long walk but there's been a good shepherd beside be all through. ( i'm a believer )
@ Kariuki Martin. Please don't judge someone because you assumed things came easy to them or because they said something that offended you. What i did was surely not the best way of going around things, but to say that i'd be doing him a favor by hiring him
is a lie. If he doesn't pick his socks up and get himself better written skills, it's not a walk in the park out there. take note of this :
Bill Gates:
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a
boss. He doesn't have tenure.
If you mess up,it's not your parents' fault, so don't
whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get
summers off and very few employers are interested in
helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
watchman
On 6/30/10 4:19 PM, Daudi Were wrote:_______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list
On 28 June 2010 10:26, Simon Mbuthia <simon.mbuthia@gmail.com> wrote:--
I believe the applicant is serious... but just ignorant. I guess the onus is on our local tertiary institutions to train their students on these matters, although they should also take the initiative to learn by themselves how to go about drafting such letters.
My brief thoughts on this.
1. Nairobits is doing fantastic work.
2. Simon - you meant primary not tertiary right? Formal letter writing is a skill that should be taught in primary school not at tertiary level. Perhaps I am displaying my age here but I remember having to demonstrate the ability to write a formal letter as part of the internal ENTRANCE tests to secondary school. At the very least by the first year of high school you should know the format and structure of a formal letter.
3. Many people on this list work to raise standards in our country. One reason I find Skunkworks valuable is because it is full of patriots of one sort or the other. To assume that we demand certain standards because we do not understand the challenges many Kenyans go through every day is ridiculous and petty. It is because we know the challenges AND we know what the marketplace and indeed what LIFE will demand that we are determined to raise the standards across the board. Asking us to lower standards because of this or that is doing a disservice not only to those looking to employ but also to those who are seeking employment.
4. You need to know how to communicate effectively to get ahead and to seize the opportunities that come your way in life. You can rant all you want, you can request to be removed from any number of email lists, you can assume that people do not understand where you are coming from or what challenges you face but at the end of day you need to be able to communicate effectively. Formal writing is a skill that is essential not only in getting a job, but staying in a job. Not only in starting a company but growing the company.
5. As Crystal says, this is growing problem across many sectors of society. Remember a good covering letter and well formatted and presented CV used to be the STARTING point of a successful application. Now days these are slowly becoming the determining factor of an application. We think "well at least this guy can write a letter". Remember not even 10 years ago when we would be told what font, what font size, what size margins, what length an application should be submitted in? Forget that we did not even have computers with word processors at home - but we found a way to get to a machine with a word processor and submitted the applications to the exact specifications. Most of these applications were unsuccessful but hey you kept pressing on. So we are NOT asking these applicants to do anything we did not do ourselves. Perhaps Rahim can share with us the hoops he had to jump through to become an official Apple Reseller.
Sawa - wacha I end there!
Pamoja
e:daudi.were@gmail.com
skype: d.were
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