By Jeff Westover
Pat Fox feels trapped.
By day, he works for the IT department of a local medical center. By night,
he labors on the graveyard shift fixing equipment for a photo finishing
plant.
His heart--and his future--lies with his day job. He has studied and paid
his way through certifications to become a networking professional. But he
has not yet been able to secure the kind of position he feels he is trained
to do.
So Pat pays the bills with his second job--- a job he detests. For right
now, he sees no other way until he can somehow get the experience he needs
to do what he loves for a living.
It is a cruel paradox: Pat wants an IT job to get experience. But he cannot
get a job until he has experience.
He has tried everything. He looks in the newspaper and on the Internet. He
religiously attends every job fair. His resume has been sent everywhere he
can think of to send it. But without being able to say he has experience,
Pat feels that no one will hire him.
Pat does not have to live this way. No inexperienced professional needs to
work under the assumption that a lack of paid experience will hold him or
her back from being hired.
There is no doubt that experience opens doors to opportunities easier than
to one without it. But even the inexperienced have options available to them
that make securing that coveted job easier to do. All that is needed is a
way of communicating how those new, inexperienced skills can add value to a
potential employer.
~ Become A Conspiracy Theorist ~
The greatest skill a professional in any industry can gain is the ability to
ask questions. For the job seeker, the ability to seek out and obtain
information is vital to success. Before even asking or applying for a job, a
job seeker needs to become a detective and a conspiracy theorist. Good
decisions cannot be made without first having good information.
The trap many job seekers fall in to is asking the wrong questions of the
wrong people. Most people first ask complete strangers for information,
or --worse yet, for a job. This is like walking the streets looking down at
the sidewalk for $100 dollar bills. It's possible to find a job this way but
not as likely if you go about it another way.
The questions job seekers need to ask are first created in their own minds.
For example, when attending a job fair, the job seeker needs to question why
the recruiting companies are there. Job fairs are attended by only two types
of companies- those that are desperate for people and those that don't want
to be desperate for people. Knowing which category a given company falls
into can be a real benefit to the job seeker that takes the time to ask
questions and find out.
The ultimate information that a job seeker is searching for is why a company
is hiring and what specific needs they have. If a job seeker can ascertain
this information prior to a job interview they stand a much better chance at
success.
~ Who Says You Don't Have Experience? ~
Researching companies often provides a job seeker with the motivation to
take action. If the job seeker has identified a need within a company they
must find a way to communicate their ability to meet that need.
Yet many job seekers operate under the mistaken assumption that only
experience within an industry is the exclusive indicator of their ability to
a job. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, I have plenty
of expertise in driving a car but I have no experience parking cars for a
living. Does that mean I can't get a job parking cars? If I can explain how
my expertise is relevant to the job my lack of industry experience becomes
less of an issue.
This is done through an exercise called PARs. The acronym stands for
Problem-Action-Results and it is used to illustrate specifically how skills
a job seeker possesses applies to solving a problem for a potential
employer.
Let's take Pat for example. In his night job, Pat sometimes is called upon
to support the company network. It is not in his official title or job
description. But everyone there knows that Pat has training in this area and
he is a go-to guy when problems arise.
In a job interview situation, Pat can say something like this: " We had a
critical deadline on a Saturday night that required us to deliver on a
Sunday morning. None of the IT guys were around or even available because it
was a holiday weekend. When the network failed, I was able to restore usage
after only 7 minutes of downtime and our customer never knew we had a
problem."
An impact statement like this can go much further than merely stating the
fact that training courses have been completed and certifications have been
obtained. Even if a jobseeker cannot claim to have been paid to perform a
specific skill previously they can demonstrate the ways they have used their
skills unofficially. These real-world experiences go a long way in
communicating not only knowledge of the job but potential in executing what
the job may require.
Job seekers that do use PARs create memorable interviews. Being more
memorable will lead to more job offers.
~ Recipe for Success ~
Having "no experience" is not necessarily a liability. Many companies hire
trained personnel with no experience because they do not want to inherit bad
habits instilled by other companies. At a job fair, these companies are
often the ones that are hiring for the future.
The companies there that hire to fill an immediate need often run into job
seekers that are desperate for work. This is a recipe for disaster. Both
parties in this case are taking a big risk by perhaps settling for less for
the sake of filling a hole. Such arrangements rarely work out.
For job seekers like Pat Fox, the future lies in communicating good skills
and ability to an employer. If he has done his homework, the job he wants is
there for the taking.
-- Jeff Westover is an Internet Content Developer based in Salt Lake City. He
has 15 years of executive level experience in personnel and project
management. Jeff writes for
myjobsearch.com, publishers of the largest
independent directory of online career resources.
