PREPARING FOR THE OPENING

For this article, let’s consider the common opening interview question, “Summarize your background” and consider two different approaches to answer this question. Utilizing the resume that we have previously discussed, the first approach could parallel the following:

“Members of the board, I have 11 years of experience with this department. This experience includes the positions of firefighter, paramedic, hazardous materials responder, and an engineer. I have worked in the high-incident areas of the city and have been exposed to a wide variety of various types of emergency incidents.
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A Look At Work Relationships And Generation Gaps
By Paul H. Stein and Ettore Berardinelli

As we discussed in part one and two of the previous “Getting Along In The Work Place” articles, sometimes we just don’t understand our co-workers. The culprit is often the simple fact that we don’t appreciate the difference in generations and the values they have acquired while growing up. Remember “values”, as previously discussed, are beliefs that come from aspects in a person’s background. These factors include; where they grew up, their family and friends, their socio-economic status, etc. These factors create values that shape how a person looks at the world and reacts to it.
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Gordon Graham here with my first column for this great website in 2009. I have to get used to writing 2009 instead of 2008. It was always easy to do when I was a working cop because I would write traffic tickets with a court appearance usually six weeks out, so I was writing the next year on citations long before January 1 showed up and for some reason I did not often write down the wrong year when the new year came. But since I retired a couple of years ago, I note that I am writing the prior year in the date box more often – but that is not the end of the world – just a minor problem that I am working on.
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