How to Understand Your Job Skills and Expertise?
You can start your job search off by going to a job board and looking for the title of your previous or current position. This will ensure that you are neither going backwards or forwards in your career, you will stay right where you are at. This may be the right thing for you right now, but at one point you are going to want to progress in your career. For each person progression means something different. It could mean making more money, gaining more responsibility, making a difference in other’s lives, increasing in title or some other type of self fulfillment. I have found that in order to progress I have to approach my career and job search in a different way. I would like to share with you the steps I have learned for my career and job search. I know that not everyone will agree with these steps, but this is what I have learned from my recent personal journey in searching for a new career.
Before you can go to companies, you need to know what your objective is. If you don’t know your objective, how do you know what companies to go to? Knowing this objective will also help you create a plan on how to market yourself. In order to know your objective you are going to have to ask some serious questions about yourself and do some exercises. You need to assess yourself. This is a daunting task, but I will break it down into two separate parts. We will cover part one today and part two tomorrow.
Step 1: Ask yourself some questions. What questions do you want to ask? This is the beginning of your self-discovery so you can start with these and any others you can think of:
What things do you know?
What things do you do better than others?
What skills do I have?
What interests me?
Step 2: You need to understand your accomplishments. You need to think of some questions that will help you understand your accomplishments. I attended an OCM-Lee Hecht Harrison course and below are some of the questions they asked. There are lots of these that you should think of.
Did you introduce a new system or procedure that made work easier or more accurate?
Did you efforts increase the company’s profit line?
Did you participate in decision making or planning?
Did you increase productivity or reduce downtime?
For example: Did you introduce a new system or procedure that made work easier or more accurate? Yes and I created a quality assurance program.
There is a reason why we are asking these types of questions. The answers to these types of questions will be used in your resume and interviewing process. Do not forget when answering yes or no to these questions to think of a specific experience. If you mention that you did something you need to have the proof to back it up.
Step 3: You can use your accomplishments to understand your skills. I want to use an exercise. This is the STAR exercise. I want you for each accomplishment to answer the following questions:
Situation – Detail the background. When? Why? Who?
Task – Describe the challenge. What needed to be done?
Action – What specific action did you take?
Results – What were the specific results: accomplishments, savings, etc.?
Now that you have this, you need to break this down to the skill. What skills did you use for this accomplishment? You may have way more than one skill used in one accomplishment. It is important to list all the skills because we will use them in the next step.
For example:
Situation: Financial Services is a regulated industry. Too many complaints from regulatory agencies and the customers were facing a lower quality of interaction.
Task: Balancing the Attorney’s desire for harsh compliance system with call center’s desire to have freedom to sell.
Action: Met with Attorneys and went over requirements for compliance and the sales script. Designed what the agents could/could not say on the phone. Designed a quality program that focused on tracking and scoring for all calls. Worked with outside organization to use software. Hired a staff of quality agents to grade calls for compliance and sales.
Results: Lowered the compliance issues 72%, going from 18% to less than 5% compliance errors. Increased quality scores 20%.
Skills Used: Developing Systems and procedures, Working across multiple functions (Legal, Sales and outside Software provider), Negotiations
Step 4: Clump skills into expertise. You will begin to notice that your skills can be grouped. You want to get down to some core expertise that you have. I have noticed that a lot of my experiences involve skill sets that full under strategic planning and implementation. This is a core expertise of mine. Regardless of industry this applies just the same.
Now that you have these done, we need to go onto your values, vision and how this fits into your objective. We will tackle that one tomorrow.
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