Job Seeking Advice

Being a recent veteran of unemployment, I have a couple of things to recommend that worked pretty well for me.

But first, I think that you should trust your instincts on this. In the United States, you generally don't have to pay to get a job. I suspect that in this case, the $4,000 course follows the $400 one, etc. etc., and/or you'll get a course that says, "good luck" and leaves you with nothing.

OTOH, a quick Google search of Linda Christas turns up lots of links about it, and I couldn't find anything negative. One "gotcha" here was the fact that most tutors seem to be volunteers so that the organization can keep costs down. If they are interested in keeping costs down, then why did they pay the job board for your information? I'd be suspicious of a scam being run by somebody posing as the school. It would be easy to send you to that site to get an overview of the program, then send you a forged e-mail with a link to their "bogus" course. Be extremely careful on the course.

And here is the contact information from the domain owner records (in case you want to call them):

Registrant Name:Ben Bernard
Registrant Organization:Linda Christas
Registrant Street1:1731 37th Street
Registrant Street2:
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Sacramento
Registrant State/Province:CA
Registrant Postal Code:95816
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.9167981304
Registrant Email:info@lindas.com

And for lindas.com:

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Bernard, Linda (LB2809) info@LINDAS.COM
Linda Christas
1731 37th Street
Sacramento, CA 95816
US
916-798-1304, 916-736-335 fax: (916) 736-3359

Hopefully that will give you enough information to get started on your own investigation, should you decide to pursue this.

If you're looking for a job, I *STRONGLY* suggest that you head over to Nick Corcordilos' Ask The Headhunter Site. Nick is a headhunter who essentially teaches you how to be your own headhunter. He's dead-set against posting your resume on the big job boards. One of the reasons is because of what you just experienced. Most decent jobs get thousands of responses, and yours is just another "unknown" in a stack for a hiring manager to go through. It would also be possible to pose as a company, collect resumes, and use the data for identity theft purposes.

At any rate, head over to Nick's site and learn how to be your own headhunter. It's a lot of hard work, but you stand a much better chance of getting the right job. And the only thing he sells is an excellent book that he wrote which you can get from Amazon for about $15-20 (I purchased it and there's no way you'll get me to give it up, even though I now have a great job). But there's enough good info on his website to get you started. I also recommend that you subscribe to his weekly newsletter.

I also recommend that you do what I call the "Slice And Dice" to your resume. Take every job, volunteer positing, etc. that you have ever had, then write down what you did, how you did it, the tools you used to do it with, and the results you obtained. Once you have this, it becomes much easier to tailor a resume for a specific job. And if your resume is custom-tailored to a job announcement, then you stand a much better chance of getting the attention of the people that need to see your resume.

In my case, I did end up posting my resume to one job board, but it is run by an old Army co-worker that I know and trust. This version was a specialized one for computer security positions, not a general one (even though it was a job board, I used a specialized resume because a general resume is of little help to the pressured manager looking for candidates for his/her empty position). It's a specialized board for people with security clearances that are looking for technical or analytical jobs with government contractors (I can send you the URL if you qualify and are interested). I got a call from a headhunter, based on that resume, accepted a temp contract -- and to make a long story short, will be moving to Germany soon to work on a government contract and will make more money than I ever thought possible. It's great for now, but I still want my Internet business so that I can have full control of my time.

Best wishes to you, and I hope that you find what you're looking for. And I'd be interested in your opinion of Nick's Ask The Headhunter site. His advice goes against what you'll hear from most "experts", and it's a lot more work than you'd expect, but trust me -- it pays off in the end.

HTH,
Tom