What to do if you’ve moved to Moscow with knack for fashion, fluency in English and French and experience at a cosmetics firm? This applicant would like to know.

Lara, 25, is from Novosibirsk. Not long ago, she left her home region to come to Moscow to live with her fiance. She graduated from the Novosibirsk State Teacher-Training University in 1997, specializing in French and English. Before moving to Moscow, she worked for three years as a customer-service manager at a cosmetics company.

She’d like some ideas on the kind of jobs that would suit her, and is particularly interested in the tourism industry. She would also appreciate advice on how to better present her resume.

Lara says that she found it easy to get her job at the cosmetics company, although there was a lot of competition. Her job involved explaining products to clients — usually other companies or shop directors — and sending them necessary documents, including invoices, receipts and copy checks. Her boss was the department manager and there were four sales managers all together.

She spent a lot of time talking to clients on the phone and in person when they came into the sales hall at the head office. Lara says that her job was both proactive and reactive, but that when she was dealing with clients in the regions, her role leaned more to the former, as she had to phone them up herself.

According to Lara, for the first year she was at the cosmetics company, she went into work gladly, partly because she got along so well with her colleagues. Her second year there was the year of the 1998 financial crisis and, by the third, she had already had enough because the corporation had changed.

She applied for a job at a newspaper as a secretary, and when offered the post of sales manager instead, she turned it down because she had had enough of sales. During that job meeting, the interviewer pointed out to her that working as a secretary would be a step back for her career and that she would be wasting her potential.

But Lara disagreed and said that she felt the mere fact that she would be working in Moscow would make it prestigious. She added that she thought it would be interesting to work as a secretary in a large organization; it would be a chance to gain more skills. However, she conceded that it wasn’t the kind of job she would like to stay in for a long period of time.

Lara says that she doesn’t feel the need to be super-ambitious; she can live with a low salary or unemployment for a while because her fiance supports her. Although she has been in Moscow since December, she has only just started looking for work. She says that people are often amazed at her desire to work, even though she doesn’t need the money. But she said that she starts to get bored without a job.

The kind of work that would interest her should have plenty of opportunities to be sociable and light on paperwork.

She is considering the possibility of working in tourism, although she doesn’t know anything about the career opportunities in the business. Fashion is another area that interests her, as she has nine years of experience in modeling in print and broadcast media. She says that she feels she is unfortunately too old now to become a fashion designer, but that she would welcome suggestions for anything else she could do in the field.

She says that she doesn’t want to get a job as a teacher, largely because they get paid peanuts and also because they have to work extremely hard. Lara added that she, like most Russians studying at university language programs, didn’t actually want to teach, and that she only chose that course of study because the foreign-language teaching there is of a particularly high standard.

Lara is a calm and confident person; she feels that she has a lot to offer an employerand that she is responsible, a quick learner and sociable. She says that she has a good level of English fluency and that she recently spent a month and a half in America, where she accompanied her fiance on business. Her English-language cover letter seems to be unusually good, with no language mistakes, but her resume is not very detailed.

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