Never before has job search been more challenging. To succeed in getting work in today’s competitive and changing market, you need up-to-date, creative job search skills.
The job search involves:
- self-knowledge and self-acceptance
- knowledge of the job market and your specific job targets
- job search tools, such as resumes, cover letters, letters of inquiry, thank you letters
- interview presentation skills
- ability to deal with rejection
- ability to deal with a job offer (decision making and negotiation skills).
Whether you’re experiencing work search for the first time or for the first time in a few years, a positive result will take:
- Determination.
- Energy.
- Confidence.
- Knowledge.
- Skills.
The job search is selling. Productive salespersons know their product, including its strengths and weaknesses, which enables them to emphasize the strengths and anticipate buyer resistance to the shortcomings. The same principles apply to the job search. The product is you.
Targeting
The key to an active work search is to know what you are seeking. Your job search strategy will be easier to determine once you establish your targets.
To effectively match your needs, interests, aptitudes, and competencies (skills) to the world of work requires considerable self-analysis. If you invest the time and energy, you will be more precise about your needs and able to target employers more effectively. And you will be well rewarded with positive results.
What You Have To Offer
The most crucial element in a job search is self-esteem. What you think about yourself affects how you feel about yourself and shapes your expectations. Your behaviour follows. If you feel you can’t succeed (” no one will want me because I was laid off/I’m too old/not educated enough”), you’ll feel defeated by your negative thoughts and expect rejection. And you’ll behave in a way that’s likely to create that result.
Henry Ford once said: “Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you will be right.”.
In the opening segment of the video, Minnie recognizes the self-esteem needs of job seekers. She encourages them to do some esteem-building activities that appreciate each other’s talents and attributes, especially those that are transferable and marketable in the workplace.
This blog contains exercises that will help you to increase your confidence and self-esteem and to understand better yourself and what you have to offer. The activities will also help you to assemble information about yourself and your strengths that will be valuable when writing your resume and selling yourself in a job interview.
Skills Inventory
Start gathering information about yourself by identifying your skills. Make a list of all the skills you know you have. (That’s product knowledge.) These will fall into three groups: technical experAtise, transferable skills, and self-management skills.
The skills most job-seekers are aware of are their technical or work content skills.
- Technical skills: These are the skills you most likely learned in a formal training or academic program or through a combination of school, college, and on-the-job training. This group of competencies may be the least useful as you look for work outside your field.
- Transferable skills: Also called functional skills, these are the skills you have been developing throughout your life. They are transferable to almost any work situation.
- Self-management skills are the skills that job seekers are aware of the least This set of competencies most influences employee selection decisions.
Your self-management skills communicate your attitude and motivation. These are the skills you have immediate control over and the power to change!
Myth: Get a university degree, and your success is guaranteed.
Reality: That was true 30 years ago, but it’s not true today. Often, vocational and community college graduates are as employable as university grads since employers increasingly seek job-ready applicants with specific technical and work content skills.
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