Improving Your Job Changing IQ

• CREATE A SELF-INVENTORY LIST WHEN DEFINING TRANSFERABLE SKILLS
Use transferable skills to create a self-inventory that can be adapted to evaluate and describe any working situation. Place a checkmark next to each of the 10 skills that match your background and review in your mind the tasks you’ve come to associate with these skills. For example, as a Social Media Manager you could oversee a four person staff engaged in researching, updating and writing on-line media content. In addition, you could be in charge of planning and marketing three successful ad campaigns for digital products. As a Manger, you provide administrative support and analyze budgets, tools, assess strategies, and determine rate of return and identify new channels to optimize RO and fuel revenue growth.
• DETERMINE SKILLS ASSOCIATED WITH A NEW JOB & HIGHLIGHT THEM IN YOUR RESUME
Study a job description and the key words to determine the type of career that you want to apply for. Do a search on Monster.com or other job search engines to review job titles and keywords to match them against your background. Highlight keywords that you can use in a different context to describe your experience. You can use transferable skills to create a self-inventory that can be adapted to evaluate and describe any working situation. Place a check mark next to each of the 10 skills that match your background and review the tasks you’ve come to associate with this skill. For example, as a Social Media Manager you could oversee a four person staff engaged in researching, updating and writing on-line media content. In addition, you could be in charge of planning and marketing three successful ad campaigns for digital products. As a Manger, you provide administrative support and analyze budgets, tools, assess strategies, and determine rate of return and identify new channels to optimize RO and fuel revenue growth. In the case of Social Media, selected keyword or transferable skills could be communicator, manager, organizer, thought guru, strong interpersonal marketer, strategist, planner, trainer, optimizer, and tool expert.
Learn the jargon or buzz words of your potential career. When you review the transferable skills, include a heading for each list of skills. In the first column type in analytical as an example and underneath the title place descriptive key words you can use to describe the tasks in your resume. The table and columns contain transferable skills as well as specific examples of how the skills can be used in another column. Putting each keyword in the context where you have previously used them at a job or to highlight activities such as part-time work, internships, special projects, volunteer work, and education is a great help when it comes to writing your resume and cover letter. Handy transferable skills are also used in statements to answer competency based questions for knowledge, skills and ability questions (KSA’s) that are part of a Federal resume or other questionnaires.
• STRATEGIES FOR GETTING THE JOB YOU DESERVE
In some cases changing careers is difficult because you don’t always have all the skills and experience an employer would like and you should not make up instances where you used them. Instead set your sights a little lower and take an entry level job within the environment where you’d like to grow. Supplement development of sought after experience by volunteering to make your background more attractive to speed up the time it takes to achieve your goals.