Program offers job search coaching online

Need help tweaking a resume or cover letter? How about a job interview?

The Washington County Library is now offering JobNow, an online service where unemployed members of the library can get help with a variety of things to land the job they’ve been looking for.

“A lot of individuals coming in right now and probably for the past year are job hunters,” said Chad Lubbers, library manager.

The program is a personalized career center that offers live job coaching, real-time interview practice and a full-service resume lab.

With the economic downturn, Lubbers said the library is seeing a lot more people using the Internet to find jobs and often times, they’re asking librarians about resumes and cover letters.

He said library personnel are not the experts so all they can do is locate books on the subject. Sometimes the books available are checked out so fast that they can’t keep up with the demand.

“We literally cannot buy enough in that area,” Lubbers said.

Internet usage at the Woodbury branch went up significantly in January to 3,300 hours —equivalent to 138 days.

“It’s kind of a sign of the times. When the economy is not doing so well, public library usage goes up,” Lubbers added.

JobNow is a service purchased by the Metropolitan Library Service Agency (MELSA), a consortium of Twin Cities public libraries that agreed to use the program.

Everyone with a library card may access the program either from home or at the library. It’s available from 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Sunday.

The local library has access to JobNow for at least the next year, then it may be renewed after that.

“Ideally we would see usage numbers drop dramatically because people would be going back to work, but I have a feeling that may not be the case,” Lubbers said.

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