Marketing Yourself
by BNET Editorial
Tags: job, career
It’s an interesting thing to think about: When it comes to your career, every step of the way, you are making choices about how to present yourself as someone who can help a company succeed. This means that, principally, you’re making choices about what skills you have to offer, skills that presumably add value to the competence of a company. To the extent that you have marketable skills—and that you make them widely known where you work—your career will either flourish or flag.
So, it’s always a good time to assess your life and work experiences so that you can assess which of your skills are the most marketable. The best place to start is with these three areas of your professional life:
Your personal and professional goals
The educational, work and leisure experiences that tie to these goals
The plans you have (or need) to close any gaps
What You Need to Know
Why is it important to identify my marketable skills?
Let’s start with your résumé. For many people, this document is a have-to-do task, a check-off-the-box step to getting a job. Yet, from an employer’s point of view, a résumé is, in essence, an advertisement of what someone has to offer the company. Identifying your most marketable skills will help you build the most powerful résumé you can. More than that, understanding your marketable skills will help you feel confident about what you have to offer a company; this can only help you sell yourself better.
What if I don’t want to keep on doing what I am skilled at now?
A person’s skill set is almost always transferable to a different job, perhaps even a new career goal. It is important to realize that you may have many transferable skills that will be marketable in a new position. Or you may have skills that you haven’t used for some time that could be very useful in a new position. A set of marketable skills makes you dynamic, not fixed, in today’s employment world.
What to Do
Understand the Importance of Self-marketing
To be sure, focusing on what’s most marketable about you, or anyone else, is no easy task. After all, you have a lifetime of experience to think about, then distill. Yet, while this is not an easy task, it is one of the most important you can undertake because it helps you to plan your job campaign and to target the best potential employers. It also gives you a strong sense of confidence in what you have to offer.
Begin with the End In Mind
What can hurt you the most is personal confusion about what you want to achieve in life. In order to identify the marketable skills that you have, you must know what kind of a position you are searching for. It’s a lot like finding your dream job: You have to be able to target two things:
where, in terms of a career, you’d ultimately like to be, and
what you possess—or need to possess—to get you to that goal.
Write a Brief Life/Work Biography
Perhaps the best place to start is by writing “the story of your life.” That can sound overwhelming. It will help if you scale down the task by committing to write a 3–5 page history of your life that includes significant events when you were growing up, important educational experiences, and a summary of your work experiences. Think “highlights” as you assume this task; you want to profile only the most significant events. And don’t fret over the quality of the writing; you can always edit it later, or find someone who can help you make the writing more polished. This writing exercise is mainly for your benefit right now.
As you write about each of these experiences, describe what you liked, what you didn’t like, and what you accomplished. What were you most proud of? What is your highest professional achievement? What was your greatest career failure? How have you balanced your work and personal life? Are there non-professional achievements you should include, perhaps major goals you achieved in sports or hobbies? Make sure that there are at least seven key events in your biography.
When you’re done, take at least 30 minutes to ponder this question: What, if anything, did writing your biography tell you about potentially marketable skills that you might have? Now, in one paragraph, write a summary of this writing session.
Educational Assessment
Every career starts in a classroom. Just to be sure you did not pass over a key moment in your formal education, consider these questions as you proceed:
What teachers did I like best and why? How did they help me learn about myself?
What teachers did I like least and why?
Which subjects did I like best and why? Do I see any connection to my current career goals?
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
by BNET Editorial
Tags: job, career
It’s an interesting thing to think about: When it comes to your career, every step of the way, you are making choices about how to present yourself as someone who can help a company succeed. This means that, principally, you’re making choices about what skills you have to offer, skills that presumably add value to the competence of a company. To the extent that you have marketable skills—and that you make them widely known where you work—your career will either flourish or flag.
So, it’s always a good time to assess your life and work experiences so that you can assess which of your skills are the most marketable. The best place to start is with these three areas of your professional life:
Your personal and professional goals
The educational, work and leisure experiences that tie to these goals
The plans you have (or need) to close any gaps
What You Need to Know
Why is it important to identify my marketable skills?
Let’s start with your résumé. For many people, this document is a have-to-do task, a check-off-the-box step to getting a job. Yet, from an employer’s point of view, a résumé is, in essence, an advertisement of what someone has to offer the company. Identifying your most marketable skills will help you build the most powerful résumé you can. More than that, understanding your marketable skills will help you feel confident about what you have to offer a company; this can only help you sell yourself better.
What if I don’t want to keep on doing what I am skilled at now?
A person’s skill set is almost always transferable to a different job, perhaps even a new career goal. It is important to realize that you may have many transferable skills that will be marketable in a new position. Or you may have skills that you haven’t used for some time that could be very useful in a new position. A set of marketable skills makes you dynamic, not fixed, in today’s employment world.
What to Do
Understand the Importance of Self-marketing
To be sure, focusing on what’s most marketable about you, or anyone else, is no easy task. After all, you have a lifetime of experience to think about, then distill. Yet, while this is not an easy task, it is one of the most important you can undertake because it helps you to plan your job campaign and to target the best potential employers. It also gives you a strong sense of confidence in what you have to offer.
Begin with the End In Mind
What can hurt you the most is personal confusion about what you want to achieve in life. In order to identify the marketable skills that you have, you must know what kind of a position you are searching for. It’s a lot like finding your dream job: You have to be able to target two things:
where, in terms of a career, you’d ultimately like to be, and
what you possess—or need to possess—to get you to that goal.
Write a Brief Life/Work Biography
Perhaps the best place to start is by writing “the story of your life.” That can sound overwhelming. It will help if you scale down the task by committing to write a 3–5 page history of your life that includes significant events when you were growing up, important educational experiences, and a summary of your work experiences. Think “highlights” as you assume this task; you want to profile only the most significant events. And don’t fret over the quality of the writing; you can always edit it later, or find someone who can help you make the writing more polished. This writing exercise is mainly for your benefit right now.
As you write about each of these experiences, describe what you liked, what you didn’t like, and what you accomplished. What were you most proud of? What is your highest professional achievement? What was your greatest career failure? How have you balanced your work and personal life? Are there non-professional achievements you should include, perhaps major goals you achieved in sports or hobbies? Make sure that there are at least seven key events in your biography.
When you’re done, take at least 30 minutes to ponder this question: What, if anything, did writing your biography tell you about potentially marketable skills that you might have? Now, in one paragraph, write a summary of this writing session.
Educational Assessment
Every career starts in a classroom. Just to be sure you did not pass over a key moment in your formal education, consider these questions as you proceed:
What teachers did I like best and why? How did they help me learn about myself?
What teachers did I like least and why?
Which subjects did I like best and why? Do I see any connection to my current career goals?
Discuss Add this link to... Bury
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