Finding a job is both an art and a science; it encompasses a variety of basic facts, principles, and skills you can learn but which you must also adapt to different situations. Thus, "learning how to find a job" can be as important to career success as "knowing how to perform a job". However, having marketable skills is essential to making job search strategies work effectively for you.
Our understanding of how to find jobs and change careers, you should involve yourself in a four-step career development process as you prepare to move from one job to another.
FOUR STEP CAREER DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
1. Conduct a self-assessment
This first step involves assessing your skills, abilities, motivations, interests, values, temperament, experience, and accomplishments. Your basic strategy is to develop a firm foundation of information about yourself before proceeding to other stages in the career development process. This self-assessment develops the necessary self-awareness upon which you can effectively communicate your qualifications to employers as well as focus and build your career.
2. Gather career information
Closely related to the first step, this second step is an exploratory, research phase of your career development. Here you need to formulate goals, gather information about alternative jobs and careers through reading and talking to informed people, and then narrow your alternatives to specific job targets.
3. Develop job search skills
The third step focuses your career around specific job search skills for landing the job you want. These job search skills are closely related to one another as a series of job search steps. They involve conducting research, writing resumes and letters, prospecting and networking, conducting informational interviews, interviewing for a job, and negotiating salary and terms of employment. Each of these job search skills involves well-defined strategies and tactics you must learn in order to be effective in the job market.
4. Implement each job search step
The final career development step emphasizes the importance of transforming understanding into action. You do this by implementing each job search step which already incorporates the knowledge, skills, and abilities you acquired in Steps 1,2, and 3.
ORGANIZE AND SEQUENCE YOUR JOB SEARCH
You may further expand your career development process by examining the key elements in a successful job search. It consists of a seven-step process which relates your past, present, and future. Notice that your past is well integrated into the process of finding a job or changing your career. Therefore, you should feel comfortable conducting your job search: it represents the best of what you are in terms of your past and present accomplishments as they relate to your present and future goals. If you follow this type of job search, you will communicate your best self to employers.
Since the individual job search steps are interrelated, they should be followed in sequence. If you fail to properly complete the initial self-assessment steps, your job search may become haphazard, aimless, and costly. For example, you should never write a resume (Step 3) before first conducting an assessment of your skills (Step 1) and identifying your objective (Step 2). You normally should do networking (Step 5) after assessing your skills (Step 1), identifying your objective (Step 2), writing a resume (Step 3), and conducting research (Step 4). Indeed, relating Step 1 to Step 2 is especially critical to the successful implementation of all other job search steps. You must complete Steps 1 and 2 before continuing on to the other steps. Steps 3 to 6 can be conducted simultaneously because they complement and reinforce one another.
Try to sequence your job search as close to these steps as possible. The true value of this sequencing will become very apparent as you implement your plan.
The processes and steps identified here represent the careering and re-careering processes we and others have used successfully with thousands of clients during the past 30 years. But this is not the complete picture on finding jobs and advancing careers in the job markets of today and tomorrow. You must do much more than just know how to find a job through networking. In the job markets of today and tomorrow, you need to constantly review your work-content skills to make sure they are appropriate for the changing job market. Once you have necessary skills to perform jobs, you will be ready to target your skills on particular jobs and careers that you do well and enjoy doing. You will be able to avoid the trap of trying to fit into jobs that are not conducive to your particular mix of skills, motivations, and abilities.
