We Entered A Competition: Woods Canada Dream Job

Last month was incredibly busy at work for both of us but we still managed to enter a competition.

The Competition

It was called the Woods Canada Dream Job Contest. Woods Canada is an outdoor gear company and they were offering a 4 month all-expenses trip traveling along parts of the Trans Canada Trail for two people paying $20,000 + $2,000 bonus. The lucky two explorers were to use social media to promote the company and it’s gear. Woods Canada made a promo video too. Most importantly, they wanted a 60 second video from applicants on why they should be chosen and to demonstrate leadership and outdoor enthusiasm.

We found out about the competition about 2 weeks before it was due and the Promo video had 200,000 views. By closing there were over 500,000 views. We found out about the competition by chance and were surprised to talk with others after the closing who had also heard about it. People seemed to know about it but not talk about it.



Working on the submission over lunch break and past midnight on multiple nights, the 60 second video was most difficult as we had limited footage and had trouble finding royalty free music. We pulled together the application and submitted it the night before it was due because we both had work parties on the Friday evening that it was due. This was probably a good thing because I read on Facebook afterwards that several people tried to submit last minute and couldn’t. Probably the server got overloaded.



Not long after the submission I took a look on youtube to see what other people had submitted. there were around 20 videos and I didn’t think the quality or effort of the you tubers was all that great but Yuki pointed out that the best probably didn’t upload to youtube but just to Woods Canada. The views of other people’s submissions weren’t that high either so I was optimistic about getting an interview.



This is our video submission:

The Results

Anyways, Woods Canada announced three couples and three individuals who would move onto interviews and we were able to see two of the winning video submissions. We were surprised by an individual man because his video didn’t seem all that inspiring. On the other hand, a couple, also from Vancouver, had a good resume video that showed that they were significantly more qualified than we were, having been tour guides for the past 5 years.



Yuki speculated that being both Asia and relatively young might have been negative points towards us. According to a local newspaper there were over 3,800 entries which is plausible, but I have a hard time believing. If it is the case, then we had no-chance whatsoever against tour guides and the like. We also complained against people being selected who had longer than 60 second videos but we were just complaining for the sake of complaining.



None the less, it was a worth experience and a good competition. In some ways I’m glad Woods Canada was vague and did not stick with their own rules. If Woods Canada had been more specific about the kinds of people they wanted, such as past tour guides and such, I bet a lot of people would have been dissuaded. Additionally, us and others complained that they selected applicants that had videos over 60 seconds. Ours was exactly 60 seconds and suffered because of that. Picking someone who “broke the rules” isn’t right but maybe its best?



I was a bit surprised that I wasn’t as disappointed as I thought I’d be for not getting an interview. The first thought in my mind was: “that’s okay, there’s really good things coming for us anyways”. This is a bizarre time of year and there is a lot of change happening very quickly. I don’t know what better things are on our horizons, but I’m optimistic that this summer will be quite exciting for us and in the next few years we’ll be seeing a lot of Canada on our own accord.

The Benefit

Something cool that came out of the design competition was a shared resume that I made. About 6 or 7 months ago, my office had a power outage and I didn’t go to work that day. It made me incredibly productive at home and among completing other to-do’s, I made a graphical resume for Yuki. She thought it was pretty cool and suggested that we make a shared resume but I couldn’t image at the time how it would look. When this contest occurred, I knew that we could make a distinction with a shared resume that highlighted our teamwork and travel history.



Here it is:

Ta-da. You’ll notice first that it is a map of Canada. I traced out the Trans Canada Trail on to the map and then tried to put the call-out circles over major cities. I’m quite happy with how it turned out and even printed a colour 11x17 to hang on our map wall.

This is the resume that I made for Yuki in the fall.

Future Optimism

I mentioned that this summer is looking pretty exciting for us even without wining this competition. Although we’re not travelling anywhere exotic and are struggling to come up with travel plans (because we don’t have a car), I’m finally meeting a goal I set in 2011 to learn to ride a motorcycle and Yuki’s doing it with me! Double win! Additionally, I will begin design of a world-class leading-edge-of-structural-engineering project! We’re still planning on hiking on weekends using Modo Car, are setting up new blog websites and remain very busy at work. So for now, I remain optimistic about the future.