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.