How to find your first operations job with no experience?

How to find your first operations job with no experience?
How to find an operations job without Internet operations experience ? ”. This question is neither long nor short to answer. Today, I will give a unified and detailed reply in this article. 

 Let me pour some cold water on you first. Some people want to engage in Internet operations because they are optimistic about the value and prospects of this position. Li Shaojia believes that such motivation is understandable. However, a considerable number of people want to do operations work because they think it is easy and the pay will be higher than before. To this kind of people, I just want to say that you don’t understand Internet operations at all: although from the surface of the work, operations do have a lot of "seemingly simple" low-threshold miscellaneous tasks, giving people the illusion that it is easy to get promoted. However, for reliable Internet companies, the requirements for operators are very high. After all, the commercial value of Internet products is completely supported by the number of active users, and the position that works entirely around users is operations, which shows its importance to the success or failure of the product. "Initiative", "result goal orientation", "active thinking", "strong learning ability", "well-informed", "strong communication and coordination skills"... These are key words for operations work. See if you have them or whether you reject them. After explaining the motivation issue, let’s return to the main topic of this article and continue the discussion: For prospective operations newcomers who lack operations work experience, how should they work hard to find their first operations job? Where is the entry point for breakthrough? Starting from the end, let’s first analyze from the perspective of employers (corporate recruiters ) what kind of operators do they really need? To put it simply, companies value three things the most: willingness to do things, the ability to do things, and getting things done. Looking at these simple nine words and three points, they imply three types of requirements for candidates: Willing to do things: examine whether the candidate understands operations and whether he has a good working attitude based on his understanding; able to do things: whether he has basic operational work skills, such as content copywriting, user thinking, data analysis , new media operation and communication, event organization, etc.; get things done: whether he has operational work experience, preferably with initial success cases. Based on the employer's requirements, we can fully formulate a "strike plan to get the first operation job": 1. Set a deadline -> 2. General operation -> 3. Practical operation experience -> 4. Interview preparation This is the general idea of ​​the whole plan, which is divided into four steps and is explained in detail below. 1. Set a time cut-off point First of all, perhaps one point that is overlooked by most newcomers to the workplace is to set a deadline. Yes, no matter what we do, we cannot do it aimlessly without a concept of time. Once a deadline is set, your sense of goal will be clearer and procrastination can be effectively eliminated. Especially for "goal-driven" work such as Internet operations, a tight "time awareness" is required. Setting a deadline and treating the entire "preparation for operations work" as a project is also a necessary practice for prospective operators. Therefore, we can arrange a preliminary time cutoff based on our own actual situation, for example, our learning efficiency and the amount of spare time we have every day. Personally, I recommend that the time limit should not exceed two months. After all, whether you can get used to high-paced work is also a basic "soft skill" of operations. 2. General Operation Before we plan to engage in a career, we need to at least master some basic skills and intuitive knowledge. In my opinion, for operations, at least we need to master: understanding of operations (including definition and knowledge system) the boundaries and models of operations work and the collaborative departments Regarding the concept of operation, my personal understanding is this: through the optimal allocation and operation of operational resources (human resources, capital, channels), the intimacy between products and users can be continuously improved. (To put it simply, it means using various means to transform the relationship between users and products from strangers into good friends who meet every day. The more friends the better). The following table is an index of the basic operational knowledge system built by the author. You can learn and expand it by yourself through books and searching online resources. By the way, the ability to search for information is itself a "basic skill" of operation. To be clear, what is mentioned in the above table is only the basic introductory knowledge of operations. If you want to study operations in depth, this knowledge is far from sufficient. After reading these contents, did you suddenly realize that operation is not so "low threshold" or did you feel that "operation is so difficult"? In fact, this is a good thing. A job with no threshold and no depth will not have much prospects and value. Of course, if your goal is to "find an operations job", you don't need to learn all of the above contents thoroughly and master them. You only need to have a preliminary intuitive understanding and know what is going on (for example, it will take at least several years to master each of the subjects mentioned above, which is unrealistic). The author has always believed that the best way to master a knowledge is to attach importance to practice and gain perfection from practice. Operations work is a typical "goal-driven" job, which is very similar to sales work in traditional industries. The final results of its work, whether it is the number of new users of the product, the number of active users or other content-related indicators, are the easiest to quantify. All this means that operators need to have a strong sense of "initiative", "results orientation", "striving for resources" and "organization and coordination". There are mainly two types of corporate employees who will have collaborative relationships in operational work. One part belongs to the "inside" of the product, mainly including product managers , technical research and development, design, etc., and the other part belongs to the "outside" of the product, such as public relations, brand, business, etc. The large number of people involved also indirectly reflects the central position of operations in Internet companies. 3. Gaining operational experience Li Shaojia suggested that the "practical link" and the above-mentioned "systematic learning" can be carried out in parallel, and the efficiency of off-campus learning is actually not high. Speaking of "practice", I believe readers may be a little confused when they see this: I haven't found an operations job yet, so how can I gain operations experience? Is this really the case? The essence of operations work is to maintain the relationship between products and users. In other words, to gain operations experience, we only need to find a "product" that we can operate, and then operate the product through various Internet methods. This is the entry point for gaining operations experience. Some friends may say, hey, I don’t know how to develop an APP, and I don’t have any friends who can develop an entire APP for me, so where can I get the product? In fact, due to the psychological effect of stereotypes, many people have preconceived notions that APP and "Internet products" are equivalent concepts. However, this understanding is narrow and biased. In fact, the concept of product is far more than just APP. Many things can be products: If you open a store on Taobao, your store is a product that "provides sales services for certain products"; If you are good at English and can be an English tutor for students, then you are also a product that "provides English training services"; If you are good at collecting and compiling valuable content that people are willing to learn, and then posting it on your official account, then your official account is a product that "provides valuable content services"; If you have deep experience in certain professional fields, you can open an account on Zhihu, specifically answering such questions, and continuously increase the number of followers and likes of this account. Then your account is also a product that "provides professional answers to questions in a certain field." Yes, once we let go of our narrow understanding of the product, we can easily find the entry point to gain operational experience. Now that we have the product, wouldn’t operational experience come naturally? As you package your "product", expose it on various social media platforms on the Internet, continue to influence potential users, attract their attention, and interact with them... this entire process is your "operational experience." At present, the industry has a high degree of recognition of new media operation capabilities, and the demand for new media operation positions is also relatively large. In addition, operating a WeChat public account can have almost zero financial cost. The author suggests that friends can use "opening a personal public account" as the starting point for operation practice. The overall idea of ​​operating a public account is as follows:
  1. Choose a content area that you are good at (you can get twice the result with half the effort by doing what you are good at)
  2. Apply for a personal public account: naming, introduction, and content creation
  3. Identify the target audience in this field
  4. Analyze their online user density
  5. Continue to expose content in places with high user density and direct traffic to your official account
  6. Continuously optimize the content and interaction of the official account based on the reading, sharing, and collection data of each article
  7. At the same time, we constantly refer to the "excellent methods in the operation industry" to explore more efficient operation strategies
 I believe that it won’t be long before the number of subscribers and readers of your public account will be able to achieve some success. This series of efforts is itself real operational experience, which will not pose any problem for them to handle the basic work of operations in an Internet company. These "operation jobs" can be written directly on your resume. I believe that you will receive an operation interview notice soon. Similarly, if you operate a personal Weibo account, Zhihu account, or even an entertainment-related personal account (such as Changba), don't restrict your own thinking. As long as the content is relatively focused and can attract more attention, it can be used as "operational experience." 4. Interview Preparation As for when to start updating your resume and preparing for interviews, my advice is “not too early, but not too late.” This is not nonsense. If you update your resume too early and receive interview invitations frequently, you will not only miss opportunities because you are "not yet mature", but more importantly, it will greatly interfere with your concentration on practicing basic operations and extend the time cutoff. So, when are you ready to start preparing for the interview? The author believes that the best sign is when you begin to understand the principles of Internet operations from the bottom of your heart and begin to be touched by the ideas discussed in some Internet books. Reaching this level means that you have initially acquired Internet thinking and awareness, and can better understand, communicate, and work with your Internet peers. At the same time, you can also initially express your own experience during the interview, which greatly increases the chances of passing the interview. Finally, when preparing for the operations interview, we once again focus on the three requirements of the recruiting units mentioned earlier: "willing to do things", "able to do things", and "get things done". If you can devote yourself to "systematic operations learning" and "operations practice", I believe that "being able to do things" and "getting things done" will basically be no problem. Regarding “willingness to do things”, I would like to say a few more words. Some readers may be thinking that “willingness to work” is just a matter of attitude, and it is enough to just express determination during the interview. However, employers, especially reliable ones, often recruit with the mentality of "better to have no one than to hire someone who is not qualified", and it is impossible for them to be so emotionally moved by your "glib tongue". The author has interviewed a large number of operations personnel, and one thing that struck me deeply is that it is not that we employers are unwilling to give opportunities to inexperienced newcomers, but that most newcomers are indeed full of "uncertainty." When I asked some candidates why they chose to join operations, their answers were: "Operations are simple", "There is no professional threshold", or "Operations are fun", "The work pressure is low", "The income prospects are good"... and other unreliable answers. It is hard to believe how long a candidate with this kind of mentality can persist when he is required to complete tedious and delicate operational tasks. So, how should you prove that you are "willing" to do operations? Li Shaojia believes that a good answer should be: you invest time and effort to systematically learn operations, have a preliminary understanding of the pros and cons of this job, and then still choose operations as the starting point of your career. Only in this way can you impress the interviewer at the mental level. This is one of the reasons why I think you need to have your own understanding of operations work before preparing for the interview. Finally, I wish all those who are interested in engaging in Internet operations can successfully find their dream operations jobs.

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