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Know Your Value
January 29, 2002
It's easy for Jobhunters to get
depressed during their Jobsearch. The steady stream of rejection letters (or out and out
deafening silence) from prospective Employers leaves Jobhunters with the
feeling that we are worthless. In economic
terms, your net worth is your assets minus your liabilities. This tidy sum
never reflects your intrinsic worth as a friend or human being. The same thing happens during the process of selling
yourself to Hiring Managers - it feels like you have no value because no one's
buying at the moment. But you are
more than a commodity in the Labor market, and it is necessary to focus on
the many skills you have to offer Employers in addition to the hundreds of
good qualities you have that make you a valuable person. Richard Bolles, of What
Color Is Your Parachute? Fame, recommends the following exercise: categorize
your skills into verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Skills that can be turned into verbs are your functional skills. Closely akin to innate skills, they are
probably things like planning, mediating, researching, analyzing, calculating,
manipulating, etc. You can train to get
better at these skills. Employers look
for these kinds of skills because they have crossover properties, i.e. they can
be transferred from one field to another.
For example, a Copywriter for a print newspaper might be able to
transfer their writing abilities over to a Job in Marketing. Nouns best describe
knowledge skills. Computers,
Languages, Geography, Mathematics, Graphic Arts, and Music all describe fields
that you might know a great deal about.
These subjects are familiar to you because you have previously shown
some expertise in them. Generally our
school days have prepared us in many of these subject fields, and we know where
our strengths and weaknesses are.
Internships focus on increasing our pre-existing knowledge base of
skills. Personality trait
skills are best described as adjectives.
We use these when describing ourselves to friends; e.g. 'I am manic,
creative, methodical, creative, lazy'.
You might describe your skills this way - 'I am a methodical planner,'
or 'I am an extensive and creative planner.'
These adjectives represent your evolving style, and your
personality traits modify your functional skills. By the time you get done with this exercise in reassessing
your skills, you'll have a much better feeling about yourself and the number
& quality of skills that you have to offer Employers. You have value. The trick is in getting the Hiring Manager to see how your value
will fit into their company in a way that is mutually beneficial.
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