Once you know your career direction and are ready to find employment, you'll want to inventory your experiences, skills, abilities, and accomplishments. In addition to your work and school experiences, include important personal activities as well.
Take some paper and create an Education Worksheet by listing the items below and filling in the blanks. These facts about you will be incorporated into your presentations to potential employers. Don't hesitate to ask family members, former classmates, and colleagues for their input. They may be able to help you recall some achievements you have over looked.
What Have You Learned Lately?
If you're in the process of learning a new skill or improving an existing skill, include that information on your worksheets also. If you're unemployed, this could be an excellent time to fill in some education / training gaps. You'll not only benefit personally, but employers will be impressed with your commitment to learning.
Joan, the public relations manager for an international food company, hired a former homemaker in her mid-fifties with only two years of experience in public relations. The critical factor? The applicant was a recent college grad who had learned desktop publishing on her own while working full time. Joan's judgment paid off: Her new hire was an outstanding employee.
Your Employment Worksheets
Starting with your most recent job, think back over your employment history (not more than 10-15 years) and write down all the relevant facts about what you did. As much as possible, be specific and quantify relevant information, using dollar or percentage figures. If you initiated, led, developed, or created something, be sure to state that. Use a separate sheet of paper for each position, list the items on Worksheet, and fill in the blanks.
"Mining'' Your Worksheets
What else can you pull from your worksheets? When you consolidate the information in each category, what conclusions can you draw? Do you see a pattern of increasing responsibilities? What are your strengths? What new skills have you been learning?
What functions have you performed at work, school, or in the community? Have you managed? Trained? Developed? Created? Initiated? Built? Analyzed? Researched?
The key facts about you are embedded in these worksheets. They are not only the "hard," objective facts, like age, gender, and years of experience, which are quite easily verified. There are other facts about you, which may be considered "soft." They are more subjective, but if you can substantiate them, they can give you a big competitive edge. How do you describe yourself? Are you an Industrious, reliable, conscientious, disciplined, persistent, an effective leader? Can you verify these claims? Do your accomplishments provide proof? How do others describe you? Ask your friends. What evidence can they give?
Here are the facts about Amy, a young college graduate with limited work experience. Accentuate the Positive.
Some ancient mariners among you may remember a song that was popular decades ago-"You've Got to Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative." Hopefully, you're doing this in general. Here's a very specific way to focus on the positive.
On another piece of paper, list things you like about yourself and things that others like about you. Don't exclude anything. Some things will be obviously relevant to the workplace. For instance, people may like you because you have a great sense of humor. That's a big plus in any situation. It can also be that they like you because you're wonderful with children. If your work is not related to children, that might not seem to be very pertinent, but list it anyway. Being wonderful with children suggests that you're patient, tolerant, flexible-characteristics that are, in fact, very desirable in the workplace.
The exercises will help you identify themes in your life which have implications for your career and job choices. Writing, Wolfe notes, is an important part of the self-discovery process because after you have put your thoughts, impressions, and feelings into words, you can gain some emotional distance from them.
Personal Activities
Your community activities could be the key to a new career or your next job. They are particularly important if your employment history is limited or if you are re-careering. Organizing a major community event, raising substantial amounts of money, or getting high visibility for a nonprofit agency demonstrate that you have sophisticated skills which are in demand in the workplace.
Starting with your most recent activity, outline your volunteer endeavors. Not being paid does not mean that you did not work. You did-and it's time to give yourself credit for it. Get some more paper and do a worksheet for each major community activity.
Some Exercises for Probing Deeply
Anyone can benefit from self-assessment. Whether an in-depth probe is necessary right now, however, may depend on how well your interests and abilities mesh with opportunities in the marketplace. If you're exploring a career change, you'll be gathering information about yourself and analyzing it.
Social psychologist Donald M. Wolfe"?, suggests that you search for themes and patterns in your life to gain a clearer understanding of yourself. He proposes several specific exercises to help you conduct your search:
- Play. Make a list of 20 things you enjoy doing. What do you do when you don't have to do anything? What do you wish you were doing? What do you fantasize about doing?
- Life history. Think back to your earliest recollections and write your autobiography. The more detail, the better. It may be useful to organize and write your history in terms of periods of stability and change/transitions. How would you describe the phases in your life, such as childhood, adolescence, high school years, college, and employment? When you made transitions in the past, what factors influenced them? Write about your experience when you were doing something very well and really enjoyed it. Where do you feel fully alive? When you have completed these exercises, review what you have written,. What common themes do you see? Are there patterns of strength, skill, and activity which pervade these experiences? Wolfe suggests that you draw a chart of your life, pointing out the highs and lows of your experiences, to help you clarify and express your life history.
- Get feedback from people who know you well. What strengths and talents do others honestly see in you? What weaknesses? What do they see you doing that excites you?
- Psychological instruments, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Strong Interest Inventory, may suggest some new options for you. Career centers at colleges and universities, as well as private career counselors, provide these kinds of services.
