Job Searching Information To help You Win A New Job

Thanks for reading my Coaching for SUCCESS newsletter. This is my Job Searching issue.

These Job Searching Skills Really Matter

1. Understand Your Own Job Skills
   Transferable skills, those skills that can be utilized in numerous fields, are the key to a successful career change. Consider your qualifications to date. What experience have you acquired that can be transferred across industries? When you link your skills with your personal qualities you will have a winning package that ensures your career change goes smoothly.

2. Know Where You're Going
   Career Planning is an important part of your career management process as it involves being totally honest with yourself about where your career is going. You need to ask a number of questions to do with careers planning and once you have them answered, you will be able to outline a career development plan that will guide you throughout your career.

3. Practise Talking About Yourself
   The preparation of some self-marketing, personal “Presentation” statements can give you a real edge when it comes to your turn to talk about yourself. These statements can easily be learned and delivered when you need them.

   Your personal describing skills can be developed and some of us are better than others, but many of us can get a little tongue-tied at the time when we need to be at our most eloquent.

   A solid framework of personal statements which you have already carefully thought through, means you can respond quickly in any given situation.

4. Write A Resume That Works
   To write a resume from scratch when facing a blank page can be very scary, but please don't let that put you off, there are tons of examples and resume tips on my website to help get you started. Basic resume writing is quite easy if you approach it methodically and use the information available to you.

5. Learn Cover Letter Writing Skills
   Including a cover letter with your resume is not a plus anymore, it's a must.

   If your resume catches the eye of the recruiter, your application will be selected to the next step. Now the hiring manager will take a look at your resume cover letter to get a feeling of your personal side and to evaluate your written skills. Use these sample cover letters to get started.

   If you failed to include a cover letter or included a poorly written one, without any real content, your application will be discarded.

6. Prepare Answers To Top Interview Questions
   Although interview preparation is everything it's sad to say but perhaps as many as half of all interviewers you’re going to meet will be unprepared or incompetent. It’s not all their fault, it's just lack of interview preparation time or responsibility; some of them will be co-opted at the last minute to meet you and won’t have had time to prepare.

   However there are those who just think they’re great interviewers and fly by the seat of their pants!!

   It’s not all bad news though; you can turn this to your advantage. You can be better prepared than they are by following a few simple rules.

7. Learn How To Find Unadvertised Jobs FAST
   Lots of people will tell you not to waste your time trying for a new job if there are no advertised jobs; yet I say the opposite and I will teach you to understand why you have even more opportunities to job search in the hidden job market because some people will just give up - but not YOU!

   The truth of the matter is that thousands of jobs are being filled every day, people are being hired, all the time without any job being ever advertised!

To achieve success in the job search market AND achieve the career change you need will demand:

• Energy and determination;
• A positive mental attitude;
• A clear definition of your target;
• A consistent marketing message;
• Positive attention to the task;
• Excellent communication skills;
• Persistence, patience and perspiration (Napoleon Hill);
• And Confidence In Yourself

Professionals Job Search

Jobsearch for professionals is in many ways more difficult than for mainstream jobs because there are far fewer jobs at the right level. Professionals, such as Accountants, Architects, Chartered Engineers, Lawyers and Quantity Surveyors may also have expectations that are higher and be confident that a new job will be forthcoming very quickly. After all you have had a good number of years when your future employment prospects felt entirely certain, so why shouldn't you feel confident about your next job?

Unfortunately, a new economic era means that more of you with your professional background and qualifications, are feeling the same cold wind of unemployment and whilst you may be able to weather the immediate financial effects, you will need to replace that lost income before too long.

My job searching tips for professionals ideas are based on my long experience of working as career counselor and outplacement consultant to public and private organizations and the ideas are my way of helping you to deal with the consequences of unexpected unemployment.

First of all: do not spend all your time scouring the papers and signing up for online email alerts for advertised vacancies. My own experience confirms that less than one third of appropriate vacancies for you will be advertised in the press or online. So sign up for one or two such as www.executivesontheweb.com and take a couple of hours once a week with the best newspaper i.e. the Guardian or the Telegraph for public sector or private companies jobs.

Second: do not spend lots of time trying to find all the different recruitment consultants and employment agencies that may be able to help; you could easily spend days when it is more cost effective to invest in a targeted mailing to all the relevant headhunters by using a service such as CVtrumpet, which is the leader in professional, targeted executive and management CV distribution. With this professional service you can distribute your CV to up to 3,200+ recruiters in the UK, targeted by job function, salary level, employment level, industry and location.

Thirdly: although you are a professional with your own field of expertise, you will still have to demonstrate to a potential new employer that you will add value to the new organization, which means that you cannot sit back and expect your qualifications to impress, or your past work to speak for itself sufficiently to secure a new position.

Fourth: more jobs are filled by personal contacts than through any other means and in these times, companies would much prefer to save the recruitment fees and act on recommendations from people they trust, so whether you like it or not jobsearch for professionals will inevitable involve networking with known and newly-introduced contacts in person. My own guide to networking and finding unadvertised jobs will give you step by step instructions in how to to do this effectively.

Fifth: the most important facet of any job search for professionals is to remember that organizations hire people.

That means that you have to create the right impression of you both as a person and as a professional, and the first impression is most often created by how you appear on paper. Which simply put means that your CV and your covering letters have to be the very best possible. I would also add that neither one is more important than the other.

The cover letter must be customized to each individual application and worded to achieve the desired effect - that is to get you the interview. The cover letter is your sales letter and must radiate your interest, enthusiasm and confidence in being the best candidate for the position. I have prepared some cover letter examples for you to use as a template for your own letters.

Your CV on the other hand, must be informative and interesting to read, and show clearly what you have achieved that will be relevant to your success in the new role. Employers want people who can contribute and add value to the whole, so listing your duties and responsibilities, just will not do it. Follow this link for the best way to write an effective executive CV

The key to successful job searching for professionals is to be seen as the right type of person, someone who will fit in and someone with demonstrable results that can be interpreted as a reliable indication of future success in the role.

Wishing you the earliest success with finding the job you so richly deserve. Thank you for reading.

Best Wishes

Peter Fisher

www.your-career-change.com