For example: your age (optional); present job and/or studies; your qualifications (or if you are a student what you hope to do in the future); a description of your recent work experience.
The job
For example: mention the skills and personal qualities that make you suitable for this job.
Refer to you CV
Ask the reader to look at your CV/Resume, and focus on one or two key points.
Final comments
For example: say that you hope your application will be considered; say who will give you a reference; say when you are available for interview; say who you can be contracted.
Standard final sentence
Formal ending
Dear Sir/Madam
With reference to your advertisement on the JobFinders.com website, I am interested in applying for the post of tour leader for Italian school students.
I am 26 years old and I am currently for a diploma in Tourism at Naples University. After that I hope to follow a career in the travel industry. During the last few summer holidays I have worked as a youth leader in Italy, and I enjoyed the work very much. Next summer I would like to do something more varied and challenging, and for this reason I am interested in the job of tour leader, taking students to London.
I feel that I would be well-suited for that job as I enjoy working with young people. I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm and I am also responsible and reliable.
I have attached my CV as a word document. You will notice that I have supervised children on a range of sports and cultural activities as well as dealing First Certificate grade A.
I would be grateful if you would consider my application. You will see from my attached CV that two people can be contacted as references, one is a university professor and the other is from the summer programme where I worked last year. I am available for interview in Naples any weekday afternoon, and you can email me or telephone me on the number below.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours faithfully
Andy Worhole
Appendix 2
Writing essays
Writing tips
Essay questions usually ask you to do one of three things:
1. Compare two or more things and decide which is the best.
2. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of doing something.
3. Discuss a problem and suggest a solution.
Organizing your essays
You need to present your ideas in a clear and organized way. It is helpful to organize your essay like this:
1. Introduce the subject by the thing you want to discuss. Say why the subject is important.
2. Describe the main points of the situation or problem in a sensible order. Organize your discussion into paragraphs. Each main point should have its own paragraph.
3. Always use clear, short sentences. Use common words that you know well but avoid very informal words.
4. Give a summary of the points you have made and present your conclusion.
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Useful phrases
If you understand and learn these useful phrases, it will help you to organize your essay and make your argument clear.
| Introduce the subject | It is a well-known fact that Many people believe that It is often claim that By way of introduction, I would like to point out that There are several ways of looking at the problem of One of the most important issues in society today is |
| Start the discussion | First of all/Firstly/to begin with/in the first place Let us begin by looking at First of all, let us consider The first thing that should be noted is It is worth starting from the outset that |
| Continue the discussion | If you want to continue discussing one side of the question: Secondly (NOT Second or secondly of all) As far as is concerned / As regards/ As for This brings us to the question of (whether/how/ who etc.) It should also be noted/stress that If you want to show the other side of the questions: However/Nevertheless The opposite may also be true. There is more than one way of looking at this problem. |
| Present a conclusion or solution to the problem | Lastly / finally On balance, To sum up / in summary/conclusion, it would seem that This brings us to the conclusion that To conclude, it seems likely that |
| Express your personal opinion | In my opinion, My personal opinion is that My own view of this is that It is my opinion that |
Link your ideas
You can link your ideas by using these words at the start of each sentence: Firstly, Secondly, Thirdly,
Remember that it sounds unnatural to do this more than three times. Do not use fourthly and fifthly.
If you use On the one hand , you should also use On the other hand in the following sentence or paragraph.
Try not to use these words or phrases more than once in the same essay. Find words or phrases which have a similar meaning. For example, here are some other ways to say also: furthermore, moreover, what is more, besides, in addition. Use these at the start of a sentence.
Writing a summary
You should use the following points for rendering the articles (the texts) or writing a summary.
1. The head line of the text.
The text is head-lined
The head-line of the text under discussion is
The author of the text
The author of the text is written by
The author of the text is
The main idea of the text
The text is about
The text deals with
The text touches upon
The purpose of the text is to give the reader some information on
The contents of the text
The author starts telling the readers about
The author writes (states, thinks) that
According to the text
Further the author says that
In conclusion
The author comes to the conclusion that
Your opinion of the text
I found the article (the text) important/dull/too hard to understand
Useful phrases
If you learn these useful phrases, it will help you to organize your summary clear.
| This The | text book article | is about deals with touches upon | (the) the problem of the question(s) of |
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| This | is of presents | much some great no | interest importance use | for those who | study/ are interested in/ etc. | |
| The problem/ question /subject/ fact | considered discussed in question under consideration | |||||
| The author | points out states makes it clear draws our attention to the fact | that |
| It is | necessary interesting important useful | to | bear in mind emphasize mention say | (in this connection) | that |
| There are The author gives | some two (three) many | good and interesting useful | examples illustrating the |
| It should be | realized made clear pointed out borne in mind mentioned | that |
| The author arrives at the following conclusions: |
or:
| To sum up In conclusion | Id like to say | that |
Appendix 3
Me plc
Hired Guns
What do Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers, Karl von der Heyden, former CFO of PepsiCo., and twenty other top executives at Fortune 500 companies have in common? The answer is they have all been interim managers, hired on a temporary basis to come in and revitalise a firm with their own special brand of magic. And then leave. In fact, such short-term employment contracts are now becoming the norm at all management levels. And if they're good enough for the likes of Jobs, they're good enough for the rest of us.
Employability
Provided you can stand the insecurity, there has never been a better time to get a job. The old smokestack industries of mining, shipbuilding and steel may be gone, but with the arrival of the New Economy, what we're now increasingly seeing is highly paid project teams created for particular assignments for a specific period of time. Once the project is completed, the team is simply disbanded. No hard feelings - just thanks and goodbye. There's no promise of more work, but if you've done a good job, you've added to what human resources people call your 'employability'. You've enhanced your career prospects with another firm on a similar short-term basis.
The Corporate Ladder
In the past it was different. You worked hard, pleased an insufferable boss - you had a job for life. True, you were little more than a wage slave, but if you stuck to the dress code, played by the rules and made a few powerful friends along the way, you could climb to the top of the corporate ladder by the age of fifty, take early retirement at fifty-five and drop dead at fifty-six.
Re-engineering
Then along came the re-engineered 90s and changed all that. According to Jerry Yoram Wind and Jeremy Main at the world-leading Wharton School of Management, big companies like AT&T "finally woke up in 1995 and said 'Oh my goodness, we have 40,000 people too many'." Mass redundancies followed. In April 1997 Newsweek ran a cover story entitled Corporate Killers, the Public is Scared as Hell. The killers were giants like General Electric and IBM. Now managers were kicked out at forty-five and on the scrap heap at forty-six.
Empowerment
The tables have turned. The forty-three million jobs lost in the United States alone since 1979 are more than compensated for by the 70.2 million jobs created in the same period. Now it's our employers who are afraid we'll take our expertise elsewhere. With so many job opportunities, severe skills shortages in many industries, fewer barriers to entrepreneurship and easier access to start-up capital, we've never been so empowered. Never mind the corporation. What about me?
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Telecommuters
In a study carried out for Management Today by RHI Management Resources, sixty-seven per cent of managers put a job for life at the bottom of their list of priorities. Amongst the under-35s the figure was seventy-seven per cent. Ninety-one per cent of those younger managers said career development was the responsibility of the individual. Fifty-five per cent of them wanted to retire at fifty-five or younger. All of them wanted the flexibility to work from home or even telecommute. All of them said they would dump their present company in an instant if they were offered something sexier by another employer.
The Rat Race
Mark Albion, founding partner of You & Co., and co-founder of Students for Responsible Business, approves of this new opportunism. "You learn where you fit in by not fitting in," he says. "You learn what you want to do by doing what you don't want to do. If you're offered a big job, take it. You might love it. But you might not find it as satisfying as you'd hoped, and it will be a jumping-off point for what you really want to do." His simple message seems to be: "Don't get really good at something you don't want to do." And remember to get a life along the way. For, as comedian, Lily Tomlin once put it: "The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat".
Entrepreneurs
The ultimate risk is not taking a risk.
Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes the dynamic, the cautious and the greedy. But all of them hold an equal fascination for us. How do they do it? Whats their secret? Some of the worlds biggest corporations would like to know, too. For enterpreneurism is in. And these days everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.
But an entrepreneur is not what you are, it's what you become, and real entrepreneurs exist only in retrospect. At first, nobody takes them seriously. They're crackpots, dreamers, unemployables. And by the time they've finally earned the respect of the business community, they've already made it. So cancel the classes on entrepreneurship and throw out your business plan. For the road to entrepreneurial success can't be mapped out in advance. You get there one sale at a time. In the beginning, only the entrepreneur needs to see the goal, nobody else. And the goal is quite simple: you get an idea; you identify your customer; you make a sale. Then you make another and another and another until your office in the spare bedroom has turned into the tower block in Manhattan you always wanted. Forget about marketing strategy at this stage. What you need first is a steady cash flow. Bide your time. Focus on the little things. That's how it works. Big companies are just small companies that got bigger.
Take Richard Branson, for instance. For the founder of Virgin, the first ten years were a struggle, with his company suffering some cash flow problems until as late as 1980. By then, the Virgin Group was running eighty different operations, none of them making large amounts of money and some of them losing money hand over fist. Yet in 1992 Branson's music business alone sold for £560 million.
Or take Nicolas Hayek, the man who invented the Swatch and brought the Swiss watch-making industry back from the dead. Hayek took on Japanese market leaders, Seiko and Citizen, and beat them on quality and price. Today the Swatch Group, which includes many famous names such as Omega, Longines, Calvin Klein and Tissot, sells 114 million watches a year. With annual sales of over four billion Swiss francs and a twenty-five per cent share of the global market, the group is now by far the largest manufacturer and distributor of finished watches in the world. The Swatch was a 20th century icon and some of the highly collectable early designs are now classed as art and fetch more than £20,000 - not bad for a plastic watch!
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So what is it that makes a good entrepreneur on the scale of a Bill Gates, a Jeff Bezos or a Michael Dell? Clearly, not the same thing that makes a good manager. For good managers tend to come from fairly conventional backgrounds. They're the bright kids everyone knew would do well, born organizers, who rise through the ranks to reach the top of large corporations. But the budding entrepreneur is more likely to be an outsider, a troublemaker, a rebel who drops out of college to get a job, discovers a flair for building companies from nothing, gets bored quickly and moves on. Most of all, the entrepreneur will be a master of risk-management. For risk doesn't mean the same thing to the entrepreneur as it does to the rest of us. The king of corporate raiders, Sir James Goldsmith, summed it up best: The ultimate risk, he said, is not taking a risk. And that's probably how he got to be a dollar billionaire.
Dot-con?
Hype
The IT industry has a tendency to exaggerate. Take Y2K, the supposed Millennium Bug. It was widely predicted to wipe out seventy-five per cent of the world's computers in the very first second of the 21st century. Planes were going to fall from the sky, hospitals to be thrown into chaos and anarchists to take to the streets as the lights went out on the stroke of midnight in the civilised world. Over an eighteen-month period of corporate panic, programming experts, called in to debug doomed mainframes, amassed vast fortunes in consultancy fees. In the end, little more than minor technical problems were reported with two pocket calculators and a Gameboy.
E-volution
So it came as no surprise when those same experts announced the death of business as we know it and the arrival of the New, Weightless, Wireless, Connected Economy. Welcome to the Age of the Network declared Fortune magazine. E-business: What Every CEO Needs to Know said Business Week. There followed a frenzy of financial speculation not seen since the American Gold Rush. For a while, it seemed like every post-adolescent with a laptop and a business plan written on the back of a rock concert ticket could get access to unlimited venture capital. Popular domain names like business.com and houses.com were snapped up for millions of dollars. Then came a flood of more exotically named start-ups like ScreamingMedia, Egghead and AtomicTangerine.
Dot.bomb
Bust followed boom. In the race to outgrow the competition, most e-businesses burned up capital and never turned a profit. At one point e-shopping site, letsbuyit.com was getting through three and a half million dollars a month. Normally conservative organizations like Goldman Sachs, who had poured $850 million into groceries-by-Net company Webvan, saw their investment reduced to zero in two years. The prestigious Janus Mutual Fund lost a similar amount on health site WebMD. Hungry for further capital, the more dynamic dotcoms decided to issue shares. The stockmarket flotation of lastminute.com, to take one example, raised $ 175 million overnight and made the company's founders multi-millionaires. But shareholders were less fortunate. On April 14th 2001 more than one trillion dollars in market capitalisation was lost in six and a half hours of corporate madness on Wall Street. The dotcom phenomenon was over.
Return of the Dotcom
Or was it? Some say the dramatic fall in share prices reflected more the instability of the market than the commercial potential of the dotcoms themselves. New technology always leads to some kind of market correction. The same thing happened when the railways first went public. The truth is that of the 10,000 start-ups to attract major funding in the late 90s, 9,500 are still in existence. Some have morphed into new companies with new names and new management. Significantly, those whose success is built on technological superiority have survived. So too have those who added bricks to their clicks like bancol.net, Brazil's first virtual bank, which finally decided to open conventional highstreet branches in response to customer demand.
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Part of the dotcom disaster was that the media focused on the retailers, or e-tailers, like eBay and Amazon. But worries about security have prevented most of these e-tailers from ever breaking even. Less than one per cent of consumer sales are currently conducted through the Internet. In the US people spend more on dog-food than they do online! Only seven per cent of SMEs even attempt to carry out online transactions. Consumer sales, B2C, were never going to be exciting. The real growth area was always B2B. Business-to-business trading between suppliers, manufacturers and distributors over the Internet is forecast to reach $20 trillion by 2010 and, for once, the forecasts may be right. For production and logistics departments the friction-free environment of the Internet is the answer to their prayers.
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E-pitaph
But what about all the dotcoms that have failed? A successful industry has grown out of them, too. At NetSlaves, for example, you can visit a virtual museum of dead dotcoms. Steve Shah, the co-founder of e-business health-checker DotCom Doom.com says business has never been better. And at dotcomfailures.com you used to be able to buy up dotcoms on the verge of bankruptcy, but unfortunately that is no longer possible. A short while ago dotcomfailures.com itself... failed.
Brand Wars
Coke versus Pepsi; Nike versus Reebok; Nintendo versus Sega the battle is on amongst the worlds top brands.
Aggressive comparative advertising has now reached fever pitch; extra millions are pouring into R&D, and the market leaders are under constant pressure to slash their prices in a cut-throat struggle for market domination. When Philip Morris knocked 40c off a packet of Marlboro, $47-and-a-half billion was instantly wiped off the market value of America's top twenty cigarette manufacturers. Lesser brands went to the wall. And that's just one example of how fair competition within a free market has rapidly escalated into all-out brand war.
Own-label products
Yet, in spite of the efforts of the corporate heavyweights to win market share, when it comes to fast-moving consumer goods, more and more consumers are switching to the supermarkets' own-label products. And brand loyalty is fast becoming a thing of the past. The once unchallengeable Nescafe and Kellogg's are actually losing sales, as their higher price is no longer automatically associated with higher quality. And in many supermarkets across Europe and the States own-labels now account for over fifty-five per cent of total sales. Their turnover has never been higher.
Lookalike Coke
Of course, the big brands are not giving in without a fight. When British supermarket chain, Sainsbury's, led the attack on Coke by launching its own similarly packaged product, it managed to secure fifteen per cent of the total UK cola market in just two months. But Coca-Cola was quick to respond. Sainsbury's was told to change its packaging fast or Coke would cut its prices to rival supermarkets and leave Sainsbury's hopelessly overpriced. Some people say the Sainsbury's cola tastes as good as Coke. But they're the ones who underestimate the power of the brand.
Big Brands - Big Business
Brand names are still the reason Omega can put a 300% mark-up on their watches, the reason Nestle spent a fortune buying Perrier, the reason investors are prepared to pay up to twelve times the book value for a company's stock. Big brands remain big business in the City.
Brandstretching
Brandstretching is another way in which the household names are fighting back. By putting their familiar trademark on attractive and fashionable new products, companies can both generate additional revenue and increase brand-awareness, hence Pepsi Maxwear, Virgin Cola, Camel Adventure Gear clothing and even jewellery by Cadbury! The high-life image suits companies like Philip Morris, for whom, as the restrictions on tobacco ads get tougher, brandstretching is the perfect form of subliminal advertising.
Buyer Beware
So much for the high-street brands. Further upmarket, the luxury branded goods manufacturers are facing an even greater enemy of their own, namely, the pirate brands. And as the trade in lookalike products increases, companies like Ray-Ban and Reebok, Yves Saint Laurent and Armani are calling for a crackdown on the pirates. In Europe over ten per cent of clothes and footwear sold are said to be fakes, costing the firms who make the real thing nearly $7 billion a year. For a fraction of the recommended retail price you can pick up fake Gucci, fake Lacoste, fake Lego, fake Disney, fake Nintendo, fake anything. But buyer beware! Your case of Moet et Chandon will probably turn out to be cider and your bottle of Calvin Klein more like industrial cleaner than perfume.
Market Saturation
But, brand wars aside, the single biggest threat to the market remains saturation. For it seems there are just too many products on the shelves. In the States they call this product clutter and it is currently the cause of a strong anti-consumerism movement. In fact, product proliferation and widespread 'me-tooism' mean that some Boots stores actually stock seventy-five different kinds of toothbrush and 240 types of shampoo. It would take you over twenty years to try them all, assuming you even wanted to! And that's just got to be crazy when you think that eighty to ninety per cent of new brands fail within their first six months.
If the Price is Right
A personal computer wouldn't cost twice as much in the UK as it does in the States and you wouldn't need to take out a bank loan to buy a coffee in the Champs-Elysees. Of course, strictly speaking, the computer is tradeable and the coffee non-tradeable. For tradeable goods are exported all over the world, but non-tradeables have to be consumed where they are produced. And, since a cafe noir halfway up the Eiffel Tower can only be purchased in Paris, frankly, they can charge what they like for it. But, tradeable or not, as every salesperson knows, "The price of a thing is what it will bring." And when it comes to price, the buyer is his own worst enemy. Show me a high price and I'll show you too many customers prepared to pay over the odds.
The truth is, people pay the price they deserve. A massive twenty per cent mark-up does not stop people buying a billion cans of Coke a day. And with profit margins of up to a phenomenal fifty per cent, Philip Morris can still gross around $100 billion a year, making the makers of Marlboro cigarettes the most profitable company in the world.
In fact, product-pricing lies at the very heart of the marketing process itself. Its impact is felt in sales volume, in the product's contribution to overall profits and, above all, in the strategic position the product occupies in the marketplace. For a higher price will often raise a product's profile and a high product profile commands a higher price. Product profile is basically the difference between a Rolex and a Timex, a bottle of Chanel No.5 and a bottle of Boots No.7. So, of course, is price.
But it isn't as simple as that. Economic, as well as market forces are at work. If they were not, we might expect international competition to equalise prices everywhere, but in spite of all the talk of a single market, a borderless Europe and a common currency, prices remain alarmingly elastic. And what goes for a song in one country can cost a bomb in another.
For one thing, most commodities, particularly agricultural products, are usually heavily subsidized. So, in the absence of free trade, food will tend to be cheap in the USA, cheaper still in Central and South America, expensive in Europe and outrageously so in Japan. Trade barriers compound the problem. For sadly, those who took part in the last round of GATT could barely reach general agreement on where to have lunch.
So how do you put a price on things? An everyday supermarket item in one country might be a luxury item in another and cost considerably more. Scotch, for instance, is a mass market product in Aberdeen but understandably a niche market product in Abu Dhabi. No prizes for guessing where it's cheaper.
Then, of course, there are taxes. By imposing wildly different rates of tax on otherwise homogeneous commodities like petrol, governments distort prices even further. If you're driving through Europe, you'd certainly do better to fill up in Luxembourg than in Italy. Tax is also the reason why a Jaguar car costs less in Brussels than in Britain, where it was built.
So buy your car in Belgium, your fridge and other 'white goods' in the UK; stock up on medicines in France and on CDs in Germany. That way you'll be sure to get the best deal. For where you spend your money is almost as important as what you spend it on, but neither is as important as the fact that you're prepared to spend it. In the words of film actor Cary Grant, "Money talks, they say. All it ever said to me was Goodbye."
