What would you like to have? An ice-cream - which flavour? something from the picture above? Or perhaps a sandwich or a burger? A toy car or a football? An easy project or a challenging assignment? A job close to your home, or a job in another city?
Throughout our life, we are offered preferences. A preference is about stating a choice from among different possible like-able options. I think it is important, to have and state a preference when offered, because the chances of instantly and completely liking whatever is placed in front of us, is not a surity. Strangely, we hesitate to state our preferences.
At a party many years ago, a friend was offered a choice of alcoholic and non alcoholic drinks. The friend kept saying "anything will do". The more the host pressed him, he gave the same response. So finally the host told him "Ok, you shall have water", to which an instant choice was stated, much to our laughter.
This kind of indecisive behaviour also enters our workplace. Sometimes, you hear it at office meetings when the boss says "I'm buying ice-cream for the team - what will you have?" Perhaps it's our upbringing or we're just shy.
Normally, this behaviour is not going to impact our lives very much. There are some dangers however, as we may come across as indecisive and get a reputation of not being able to make up one's own mind. Not really positive, is it? And unfortunately, some of us take this approach into our career and life choices. How? We say things like "Any job will do", "I'm looking for any opportunity to show my skills" or other such phrases when we are asking someone to help us find a job. This is a common thread, particularly with those who have lost their jobs during the past 10 months. It's predominant among freshers, most of whom have little or no access to a career counsellor or career coach who is not selling them an education course.
This approach is quite ineffective, because now, your friend or consultant has no idea what sort of job to refer you for. For freshers particularly, the friend or consultant may not know your skills well enough to make a judgement call on sending your resume to another organization in his network for a particular role. Additionally, a lot of resumes come in a common template format, which makes it hard for any reader to distinguish one resume (and by that extension, a candidate) from another. And so your resume remains in the back since no preference was mentioned to keep it at the top of the mind, and you remain unemployed longer.
So here's the deal - Freshers and seasoned professions MUST tell their network in very clear terms-
- What kind of job they are looking for
- What kind of industry preferences they have
- What work they do well (specific rockstar skills they may possess) in that particular role.
- Write their resume based on their strengths
- Prepare for interviews based on strengths so that "Recall Value" is created in the minds of the interviewer. Read my article about this here.
This is applicable to both fresh graduates and seasoned professionals.
So don't just ask for 'any' job. Get clarity about your job preferences by doing the following:
- Introspecting about your likes, dislikes, and what interests that may be turned into careers
- Developing strong self awareness about your strengths, weaknesses and areas where you want to develop opportunities. Get a Strengths Based Career Coach for this.
- Understand that skills are not one dimensional and can be applied to different industries, thus you can generate more job options.
- Explore i.e. research industries that seem interesting to you through industry journals and news articles.
- Leverage your network to find out about how it would be to work in organizations that you are interested in
- Inform your network that you are specifically looking for X type roles in Y type organizations or industries. It creates greater recall value.
- More clear about what you want in a job and as a career,
- More confident in your approach,
- More memorable in the minds of your network, and
- You stand a better chance of landing a job that you will love, enjoy and be satisfied with.
Want to know how to do this? Contact me. I am a Strengths-based Career Coach and Career Transition Coach who can help you do this. Call me on +919820155778 or email me at ryanbbarretto@hotmail.com for a discussion.
