You will need them for a search that will lead to more and better interviews. To help yourself develop those tools more effectively, you must do a little brainstorming. The best approach is to have a tape recorder running during this exercise, because you can speak faster than you can write. Ask yourself the first question aloud, answer it aloud, and then go on to the next question. When you have answered all the questions, start at the first question again and proceed through the list once more. Do this until you have exhausted your ability to respond to the questions.
Skills and Experience Inventory
With this much information in place, your next step is to begin to put the data together for easy access when you need to prepare a resume or rehearse for an interview. Here you will record more specific, career-based information about yourself. Either make copies of the pages provided and complete the copies, or record the data elsewhere. In any case, be sure to get everything down on paper before you try to go any further. Doing so will save you a considerable amount of time now and will help you have more accurate input later.
Evaluation of Past Experiences
Throughout your interviews, you may frequently be asked to demonstrate how your experiences have helped you grow in some way. As with some of the other areas we have discussed, it can sometimes be tough to come up with this information under the stress of an employment interview. Why subject yourself to additional tension? Prepare now; rehearse later; and you will be that much further ahead when such questions come up during an interview.
Preparing a Personal Balance Sheet
Now that you have recorded your many good points, it is time to put some things in perspective. No one is skilled at everything. In fact, you may privately rank your skills in some aspects of your own career below a five on a scale of one to ten.
Here is your opportunity to assess your least strong points and record them in one place. Doing so will give you better perspective for conducting your search, because knowing what you're not good at can be just as important to finding the right job as knowing what you do well. To make dealing with the bad news easier, use the format that follows to balance each weakness against your strong points.
Personal Assessment
As you continue to develop this realistic appraisal of yourself, you will undoubtedly think about your past employment in terms of the people with whom you worked. This is your opportunity to consider that aspect of your career in greater depth.
Think about your relationships with others and your interactions with them. Consider where you have been most and least successful. Reflect on the situations themselves. Then go through the yes and no questions that follow and check off the responses that seem most consistently applicable to your career to date. There are no right answers; there is no magic formula at the end to tell you where you should be.
Instead, this checklist should provide an additional way for you to consider that question yourself.
Again, these questions are not intended to be subjected to some form of evaluation; in fact, they are not even all-inclusive. As you think about your responses to them, you may come up with several other issues that are just as important to you and to your future.
Write Your Ideal Job-Offer Advertisement
You can now begin to focus in on the criteria for jobs for which you might be best qualified or which you would find most attractive. One handy way to do this is to read several display advertisements in the employment section of a major newspaper and then use the better ones as models for ads you will write about yourself.
Since there are often discrepancies between the jobs you are best qualified for and the job you would most like to have, it will be important for you to write an ad for each one and then compare the differences. As you developed each ad, did you notice the differences between the real and the ideal-what you are qualified for as compared with what you might want to have? This may not be the time to reconcile the differences, particularly if you need a job now. In the best interests of your professional future, however, you will want to give serious thought to developing a plan that will prepare you for that perfect position. In the meantime, your comparison of the ads will enable you to put your skills in more realistic perspective before you begin your job search in earnest.
Write Your Retirement Speech
Once again, to help you decide where you are going with your career, we will ask you to play a game of "imagine with me." In this case, the objective will be to enable you to focus on what you want to do with the rest of your professional life. The ads you just wrote have given you a start, and this assignment will provide the rest of that picture.
Pretend that you have been asked to write the remarks that will be made at your retirement dinner. You have reached the end of your business career, and this will be your final moment in the limelight. It will be your last opportunity to let the world know what you have done with your life.
As you write these remarks, be sure to include at least the following points:
- Years spent with employer
- Positions attained
- Areas of responsibility
- Honors received
- Recognition gained
- Attitude and personality
- What you will best be remembered for
This exercise should get you thinking about a lot of things. Regard less of your current age or health, once you begin to think seriously about your final career days, some interesting things begin to hap pen. Some executives who have gone through the steps prescribed so far have said that they had many conflicting thoughts when they did the retirement speech exercise. Some even changed careers after considering themselves and their business futures in that much depth. One person went back to school and became a minister; another became a college professor; several others undertook further education to make significant changes in their qualifications within their careers.
The key here is to know you better. As Shakespeare put it in Hamlet: "This above all is to think own self be true."
