Matching Your Skills to Find Appropriate Jobs

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Before you even think about looking and applying for jobs, you need to make sure that your are looking for jobs that match your skills set. Skills are the things you do well. The key to finding the most appropriate jobs in your industry is recognizing your own skills and communicating their significance in both written and verbal form to a potential employer.

The skills you need to look at are those that are most viable in work settings. What are these skills? And how does this help you find a job? Here is a mini plan of action to use at the beginning of your job search, especially if this is your first time out.

Determine Your Skills
If this is your first job hunt and you have no job experience to date, you still have a chance at finding work, for you still have skills that you’ve developed in school.

The majority of skills, including knowledge-based and transferable, can be absorbed and developed as a volunteer, a student, a homemaker, or in your other personal activities. The skills you have used for these activities can be applied to your job search.

So, the first thing you need to do is organize and list your personal skills. Can you type? (Maybe you took typing or computers in school.) Are you good on the phone? (Maybe you did some volunteer telephone work for a local charity.) Can you write? (Did you do well in English in school?) Do you have sales skills? (Did you volunteer at your church’s bake sale?) Do you work well in a team environment? (Maybe you were in the Boy or Girl Scouts.) Can you manage multiple tasks? (Moms — you most definitely have this skill!) Do you see where I’m going with this?

Now categorize your skills by separating your interests and aptitudes from your work experience.

List Your Aptitudes and interests
These include all of your hobbies, activities you have been involved in the past, and all the things that interest you. By listing all of these down, you could examine the skills it takes to achieve each item.

Skills from aptitude and interest may be homemaking, playing basketball, fixing cars and more. All of these items can determine if you are capable of working with a team, able to handle multiple tasks, have viable knowledge of human development, knowledge of electronics and ability to diagnose mechanical and numerical problems. The list goes on, but make sure to consider the skills that would be beneficial for a working environment.

List Your Work History
This includes volunteer, part-time, freelance, summer and full time jobs. Once you have listed all your past employment, examine the skills you did for each work duty.

As soon as you have your list ready, what kind of big picture does it give you? Do the separate skills, when taken together suggest a particular type of job or industry?

At this point, you can ask for help. Talk to people you know — your parents, a career counselor, or even go to the bookstore or library and visit the career section. There are plenty of books that describe career choices. Your job search will be much more fruitful if you match your skills and abilities with the needed skills and abilities of the jobs you want to apply for.

And don’t let high falutin’ job titles scare you. Take at look at the requirements — if you meet them, go ahead and apply for the job!