Blog: Career Management

When job seekers are developing their resumes, they have to identify what they are selling.

In other words, what skills and experience do they bring to the employment table. Are their skills state-of-the-art and in great demand or are they rusty or too specialized to be sought after? How many are transferable to different positions, different industries or different professions? How competitive are they?

Think of it this way:

Someday your current job will be a line entry on your resume. Under the entry, you’ll have two or three bullets to describe your major accomplishments. “Did a good job of doing what always was done” can’t be one of them.

• What have you done that added value to your team, department or company?
• What customer or operations problems have you solved?
• How and where have you shown leadership?

These are the things you need to put in the section of bulleted accomplishments for each position on your resume. They are the things that distinguish you from others and will get the hiring managers eye.

Take a hard look at your career

Therefore, at the end of each year, whether you are looking for a new job or not, take the time to write or update your resume and compare it with last year’s. See if it has gotten noticeably better. See if it shows growth in a variety of skills, or growth in satisfied customers, or completed projects. If not, what can you do to make it better in the coming year. Avoid becoming a career dinosaur. If you don’t evolve, as in nature, you will face extinction.

Career Success Tip

At the beginning of a new job decide on what you want those two or three major accomplishment bullets to be. Then deliberately set out building them over the course of your job responsibilities. Otherwise, you run the risk of having them simply be the incidental byproduct of what opportunities happened to come your way.

Do you want to develop Career Smarts?