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>> FRANCES SWANN: Our presenter today is Lorna Fong. Lorna spent 34 years as a state employee, retiring as Assistant Secretary, Office of Program and Fiscal Affairs for the California Health and Human Services Agency. Over the course of her state career she has held several management and executive positions. As a result, she has interviewed hundreds of candidates for various positions and reviewed thousands of applications, resumes, and statement of qualifications. She has extensive experience in administration, human resources, strategic planning, and workforce and succession planning. She has a Bachelor of Arts from California State University Sacramento, and a Masters in Business Administration and Management. Here is Lorna Fong. >> LORNA FONG: Hi, good morning everyone. There are 800 of you throughout the state who are online, and I hope in the next hour you'll get some basic tools and tips and suggestions regarding the strong statement of qualifications and how to improve yours. So by the end of this hour you're going to learn the basics of an SOQ, you're going to learn how that SOQ relates to your standard application form, that's the standard form 678, and how that relates to your resume. And I'm going to give you some pitfalls to avoid when you apply for jobs that require an SOQ, and some general tips. The first thing I want to go over is a basic statement of qualification. On your screen you'll see a poll, and I'm going to ask you to respond to the poll. Do you have a current statement of qualification? Answer, yes, I'm happy with my SOQ; yes, but I want improve it; or, no, I don't have one. And so what we can see is we've got about 63% of you, about 400 of you, do not have one. There are four of you that are happy with yours. So my question to you is you probably could use your hour today better. And then the rest of you have one but you want to improve it, and so that's the purpose of today's webinar. The next poll I want to share with you is how familiar are you. So 63% said you don't have one. So are you very familiar, you already have one and you've used it for a job interview or an examination; you're somewhat familiar with it; you started writing one but you haven't used it; you have little or no experience writing an SOQ; and 49 of you are bold enough to say you don't know what an SOQ is, so I give you all credit. We've got about 350 of you who have little or no experience, and so that's what this webinar is going to focus on. In terms of some general background on me, Frances has already shared with you a little bit about my background. But in the last ten years of my civil service career, there were a number of exams that we were administering at the California Health and Human Services Agency that required a statement of qualifications. And early on I realized that there were a lot of folks who were submitting statements of qualification but really didn't have a general understanding of what it...