III. Develop these powerful personal tools.

Finally, throughout all phases of your job search, the following personal tools will help you recognize opportunities that will meet your goals and encourage you to stick to your search when success appears to be the most elusive:

• Be flexible. Always keep in mind that most of your skills and attributes can be beneficial in many industries doing many types of jobs. My mother started out as a science teacher and medical technologist. Upon retirement, without any additional formal education, her final position was Manager of Training for Princeton University.
• Stay positive. Find support. Looking for a job is largely a numbers game and a game of opportunity. Be smart about how you are spending your time but also stay positive. Walk into that interview knowing what you can uniquely contribute. If a job offer does not materialize, don’t take it personally and try not to get discouraged. It probably wouldn’t be the right fit anyway. And in the end, ideally, I think we all want to work for a company that appreciates us.

II. Promote yourself.

Now that you’ve set your goals for employment, the next step is promoting yourself.

• Establish a good strategy to promote yourself to people. Develop the 30-second pitch . Design a good business card. Be ready to network. Put yourself out there showing what you can do by joining a professional organization or volunteering.
• Network. Network. Network. This really is a powerful strategy, because the more people who know you are looking for work, the more opportunities will become known to you. Plus, companies would much rather hire someone that their own valued employee can vouch for, then to hire someone no one knows and take a chance. This is also a great way to get your resume directly to the people making the decisions. I’ve seen this work time and time again.
• Work on several resumes that aren’t just a laundry list of accomplishments. “Quantify” those accomplishments so that people can see the actual impact. Use power words. There are many sites that can help with this process.

  After not updating my resume for a decade, it took me two weeks to come up with the one I finally used, chipping away at it every day, making sure everything I wrote “counted”. For instance, I started out with this paragraph on my resume:

  “Developed an automated module test system for embedded software verification.”

  Drab, drab, triple drab! But after applying what I learned, it turned into:

  “Invented an unprecedented and revolutionary automated unit test system for flight-critical embedded software verification.”

  And then I went on to list bulleted items that quantified why it was unprecedented and revolutionary, how it was used and the impact it had, awards I had gotten for doing it, and my job responsibilities and skills associated with it.

  This brings to mind another point I want to make about doing resumes and promoting yourself. You cannot be shy about the impact your work had. Some people think of it as bragging. But no one will know what impact you made and what you are capable of unless you really describe how what you did made a difference. My first cut fails miserably at describing WHAT I did let alone the significance of what I did. Both sentences are completely true. But which one do you think will grab the attention of someone scanning through my resume? If you are shy about this type of self-promotion, which again is not advocating lying, but further describing the TRUTH, then you need to think again. This is your life and your livelihood. It is worth overcoming the stigma of embellishment to create opportunities for yourself.

The employee attributes and practices previously discussed in this series My Experience and Attitude and Work Ethic will only help you in any job. Here are some valuable tips I learned while looking for a job back in 2001.

I. Assess your abilities, employment desires, and set goals.

• Find a skill set that will transcend the fluctuations in the economy. This probably means several different ones. Starting this blog, while fun, is part of my own strategy to enhance my skill set and make some extra money. Analyze your abilities, where they can be applied and the demand for them. Set some goals. Then steadily work toward establishing a skill set that will keep you afloat.

  Back when I was still looking for a job in 2001, I used a wonderful book called

  What Color Is Your Parachute? 2009: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers

  I also think that entrepreneurship can be a great way to go as part of your strategy if you can find that underserved niche market you can tap into.

  ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

  has a whole section of the book devoted to this. There are also some other tools that can help like Google Insights.

• Determine specifics about what you are looking for in an employer and workplace culture. This will help you target your search more effectively and find the right fit.

  One tool I use for making complex decisions is called the Paired Comparison Method to work out the relative importance of competing options. For instance, some common things to consider would be good salary, short commute distance, job security, regular hours, medical benefits, 401K with employer matching, training, and growth potential. The key is to quantify these items. You simply set up a matrix to compare each item with the other, and determine in each case which is more important to you. When finished, you tally how many votes each item received and Viola! You have your ranking. In my case when looking for a job in 2001, I was surprised to see that a flexible work schedule was near the top of my list. This can really help you pinpoint what is most important to you in a job.

  I tried to find some information on this, but most articles are very analytical of the technique itself. Here is one link that illustrates how to use this technique: Paired Comparison.

See
Career Success after Layoff: Part III-II Job Hunting and Selling Yourself: Promoting Yourself for the next part in this series.