- Facing up to who you really are, what your saleable assets are and equally what your recognizable liabilities are.
- Putting yourself in the position of your potential employer and deciding what he will be looking for if you were he or she.
Don't forget some easily forgettable items, like driver's license, typing, physical build, endurance, looks, health, strength, like to work alone or with others, leadership, your body cycle (that is, what time of the day and night are you sharp and when are you just kind of dead). Are you reliable? Can people count on what you say you will do? (Not from now on, but have people been able to depend on you in the past?) Are you emotionally stable (stick-to-itiveness), good at math, good with words (oral or written or both)? Write them all down, the big and the little, in two columns. Let the list cool for a day or two and go back and read it over and add to it.
Now, if you are still not satisfied or are near a large high school or college or university, you may well want to go over and talk with one of their career counselors. Most schools will give you a battery of tests on your personality, character, your aptitudes and maybe on your likes and dislikes, for a fee and even if you are not a student. Too many people the use of tests are a real help. But nobody knows you like you do, so don't rely totally on them. Keep that list of yours in addition.
If you are a little older and have a bit more money, you can go to the yellow pages of the phone book and look up Industrial Psychiatrists who will, for a fee (and don't be afraid to ask them what their fee is), give you a battery of tests, an in-depth interview and counseling, if you desire, on who you are and what you are best suited to do. At this point, I would stay away from head hunters and employment agencies.
Make sure in the completed list that you have covered such areas as intelligence, personality, skills, education, experience, ambitions, goals, personal habits, etc.
The following list of personality traits may help you to evaluate yourself in some areas you may have forgotten:
O.K. now put the "you" list aside and start thinking twice the employer for the job you are going to try for. Basically this means thinking in terms of what he is looking for. Or, if you were he, what would you be looking for?
First, it may be well to describe the job, its responsibilities, how he hopes to make money from it, if it's a private business, and, if public, what service is it performing? In addition you can start to make some assumptions, such as if the job requires certain skills or documents, they will be required-typing, driver's license, computer knowledge, etc. But since most of the applicants will have these skills or they wouldn't be applying in the first place, what else will the employer are looking for? Some points are honesty, punctuality, health, clean-cut looks, and willingness. And some of those hard-to-define terms like personality, character, feeling of rapport, etc. Or perhaps they simply don't know themselves, or are desperate and lump it all under such terms as, "anybody who will really work," or "people who are buying their own home or who are married or couples with children or not a smart aleck, etc."
Yes, trying to determine what they are really putting emphasis on is hard and sometimes impossible to determine. But at the very least you can put yourself in their position and try to make a list of what you would be looking for in a job applicant.
As you can imagine, it would be practically impossible to describe all of the different job possibilities and then match them with the personal characteristics which would be best fitted for them. However, 1 do feel that the statement question, "Tell me what it's like and I'll tell you whether 1 like it," lingers in most of us. So perhaps it's worthwhile to look at what most jobs have in common and also at some of the most common traits that most of us either have in abundance or far too little of in order to get any fulfillment from some types of jobs. First, some common types of job traits are:
- A. Willingness to be punctual. The employer's desire for people to start on time and not leave ahead of time is usually a minor irritant to most of us at least some of the time. However, if you are one of the few that clocks and checking-in and out really bothers you. Then you may be well advised to look to the kind of job that does not have this requirement, such as artist, writer, etc. Unfortunately, most of these people quickly learn that all they have done is trade an external boss for a sterner task master-themselves.
- B. Willingness to be reasonably pleasant to work with. Although very few of us practice Dale Carnegie's techniques twenty-four hours a day, most of us somehow act quite civilly to our fellow humans the majority of the time. If you know that it is with only continuous and serious effort that you can be even civil to your fellow humans, then a job which does not involve much human contact would seem appropriate for you.
- C. Willingness to take outside direction. Some people just simply bristle whenever anyone else tells them to do anything. No matter how politely it's done or what form of suggestion it may take, it simply rubs them the wrong way. Luckily for most of us it doesn't bother to that degree, but if you are one of those that it really turns off, then your job potentials are limited. But better limited than doing something day in, day out, which really sends you up the wall.
- D. Willingness to accept the absence of praise when or as often as you feel it is deserved. Most bosses in most organizations have too many things on their minds to be able to notice each and every "little thing" you do. What you may believe is very important may go unnoticed for a long time. In addition, they may be afraid to praise you for fear of being hit for a raise or that you may quickly get a "big head." It is unlikely that a job will ever be a true mirror of your worth.
- E. Willingness to trade a good day's work for a good day's pay. The person who is always trying to figure a way to do ever less or is constantly complaining about being overworked is not likely to do well or last long in most jobs. Nor are raises likely to exactly coincide with more work or more responsibility. Hopefully the day will come, but not right away.
- F. Willingness to have some patience with the other guys' faults, whether he or she is a fellow worker or a boss. If you happen to be truly hypersensitive and cannot put up with the good and bad days of others, a job, almost any job, is going to be very hard on you.
- G. Willingness to emphasize your own good common sense and de-emphasize your own tendencies to be a "smart aleck" will come in uncommonly handy in any job you try.
- A. Do numbers, figures, math, really bug you? In each of these areas the question must be, to what degree? Are you saying that because lots of others say it? Because you are simply lazy and haven't learned it? Or do you really have a hang-up about it? As you can probably guess, almost any job from carpenter to retail clerk involves some use of numbers. It may mean that you should not get involved in jobs where the majority of your time is spent dealing with figures, such as bookkeeping or accounting, engineering, computers, banking or the like.
- B. Ability and pleasure of working with your hands. Some of us are born with much more mechanical dexterity than others. Now I am not at this point talking about your degree of acquired skill but merely your pleasure in working with your hands and what you believe to be your own natural talents at it. Obviously your answers will help you either eliminate or include those fields that involve your hands, such as most of the trades-carpentry, plumbing, wiring, drafting, sewing, etc.
- C. Your likes or dislike for and of detail, thorough ness, and follow through. Do you tend to put things away when you finish using a tool, part, or lubricant? Do you get satisfaction from following a job through to its true final conclusion, or do you have a tendency to skip the ending and follow through? Naturally, these feelings will affect what kinds of jobs you will enjoy the most. Be careful to distinguish between lack of training and ingrained hatred of something. It well may be that you never or seldom put tools away because you have never been trained to do it and not because you are just basically averse to it.
- The jobs which lend themselves to or away from the follow through are pretty apparent, from laboratory assistant on the one hand to temperamental artists on the other (of which there are very few who can afford their own temperament).
- D. Are you basically a cheerful, bubbly personality or somewhat of a grouch? Naturally, the cheerful type has a much easier job in dealing with people than the grouch. So often I have seen men in such jobs as manager of a filling station who simply hate people and then wonder why their business doesn't do well. Or the very talkative type who is buried in the depths of the back room bookkeeping of a stock brokerage firm who is extremely frustrated with no one who wants to talk.
- Each of these areas seems so simple until you notice the number of people who are doing things which are so basically against their nature. Perhaps the real key is to be able to admit really who you are and what you do and do not like.
- E. Are you a self-starter or more of the "go-along-with-the-crowd" type? Naturally in selling, or any type of creative or semi-creative work, the self-starting tendency is of increasing importance. As opposed to the go-along production line type who finds nothing objectionable about doing a routine job time after time. Many in this category feel that the routine simply gives them more time to think about their personal lives.
- F. How constant and deep is your inborn curiosity? Here again, this answer will give you some direction as to which types of jobs will hold your interest and which will rather quickly bore you to tears.
- G. Are you and can you be logical? Naturally no one is totally logical or totally emotional, but how is your balance? How does it lean?
Now take the two lists and make a match. How do they match? If they look pretty good, we are ready for the warm up to go get the job.
