Although these objectives seem obvious and simple to achieve, most job hunters assume that they understand themselves sufficiently and wash gloss over this step or skip it altogether. In practice, this is a very difficult process because it requires the job hunter to objectively answer some tough questions and then to effectively analyze the answers that will contain some crucial subtleties.
The importance of this step is vital. Effective job hunting is simply the marketing of yourself as a valuable commodity to potential customers who, in this case, are employers. A fundamental principle of marketing is that it is very important to differentiate your product from the competition by emphasizing one certain quality that makes it more desirable and memorable. Moreover, workers who experience the highest job satisfaction say that it results from feeling very competent at whatever it is they do. Their jobs capitalize on their unique talents, however modest.
To know yourself better, you must conduct a detailed self-analysis of your current vocational condition in order to understand completely your strengths, weaknesses, needs, motivations, and objectives. If you have never done such a self-analysis, do it now or your job hunting will be aimless and unfocused. If you have done something along this line before, but not within the last year, do it again. People change as they mature and last year's personal assets and goals may be mildly or even substantially different.
The first part of this self-analysis consists of determining your "Special Ingredient". The second part is setting your "Grand Goal," creating your "Crucial Career Plan," and determining your "Critical Criteria”.
A series of exercises for identifying your Special Ingredient follows.
Exercise 1
The first obvious task is to list all your job-related background, including volunteer and club activities as well as the jobs for which you were paid. When switching careers or hunting for an entry-level position, the volunteer and club activities are often the more useful information, yet are usually overlooked.
For example, I once talked to a young woman who wanted to change careers and whose primary work experience consisted of dance instruction and bartending. It was only when she described her volunteer efforts to organize annually a Halloween party for handicapped youngsters that we discovered she was a natural sales person. She routinely convinced various companies to donate all the goods and services she needed by arguing, "It would be good publicity, and if you don t want the publicity, your competitor down the street will."
Listing all this job-related background, however, is only the easy part. Next, you must determine which of these jobs (or volunteer or club activities) was the most enjoyable. This would be the job that you considered your favorite and the most psychologically rewarding. Now come the critical questions:
- Why was that job so rewarding?
- What specific tasks were you performing that gave you such pleasure?
- Were you dealing primarily with things or ideas or numbers or people?
- Were you making decisions and implementing them, were you implementing the decisions of others, or were you making decisions and letting others implement them?
- Was the job repetitive and very methodical, or was it loosely organized and varied?
- Was the company large and highly structured, or was it small and very informal?
- What type of personality did your supervisor have and why did (or did not) it appeal to you?
- What types of personalities did your co-workers have? Which did you like and not like?
- Which personal skills or strengths did that job make use of?
The same analysis must be done for the job-or volunteer or club activity-you determine to have been your least enjoyable.
The answers to these questions will begin to give you an insight into the types of jobs and job environments that you would most enjoy.
Exercise 2
The second task in this step is to list at least ten job-related skills that you consider to be your strengths and/or that you most enjoy performing. Skills you would consider might in- elude computer programing, typing, public speaking, organizing meetings, writing, dealing with people, coordinating projects, help ing other people, or scientific research. The list of total possibilities is endless, of course, so I will not even try to construct a comprehensive roll. Certainly, you are one of the best people to focus on the skills that apply to yourself. However, a different and valuable perspective can be obtained by asking several of your friends, relatives, or coworkers to also construct a list of your strengths for you.
These people see you in a different light and may suggest strengths that you were unaware of or too modest to list. Some of your traits may seem quite ordinary to you, and you may assume that everyone has them when, in fact, everyone else considers you to have a unique talent. For example, I once worked with a man who was always appointed to head special projects. In talking with him one day he remarked to me that, although he enjoyed organizing those projects, he knew that he was given those jobs only because no one else wanted them. Somewhat surprised, I told him that I thought it was common knowledge that he was asked to do those jobs because he was a natural leader, even though a quiet person, and had a flair for organization.
Therefore, get at least three additional lists of your strengths from your friends. Merge all the lists into one master list of your ten most-often-mentioned strengths.
This exercise should be very useful in clarifying for you the extent and nature of your personal assets. The resulting listed strengths are points for you to advertise in an interview. You should seek jobs that make use of those strengths. This experience will also be helpful in strengthening your ego, which is important, because job hunting is hard on the ego.
