Taking an inventory of your skills is the beginning of being successful in any job interview. Ninety percent of employers say that the primary reason they do not hire a candidate is because the interviewee could not clearly state his or her skills. Read that last sen- tence again. That doesn't mean they didn't have the skills neces- sary to do the job. It means that they could not verbally state those skills in a convincing way.
When you've finished the exercises in the next two chapters, you'll have built the foundation for an enormous constellation of personal skills and accomplishments that I call your "skills arsenal." In this chapter, we'll take an inventory of your skills. What are your general skills? Your job-specific skills? Your personal traits that add value? Your areas of exceptional competency? Your special gifts and talents that make you unique?
Building those "stories" from your list of skills is something we'll tackle together in Chapter 3, where you will learn the most concise and powerful way to verbally express your skills-the Q statement. No question will be able to catch you off guard because you will always be prepared to offer stories about accomplishments that will impress and maybe even dazzle the interviewer. In this chapter we'll be discussing five types of skills:
* General skills
* Job-specific skills
* Personal traits
* Competencies
* Gifts
Identifying your skills in each of these categories is the first step in crafting stories and examples that will help you explain your skills and experience to interviewers clearly in a convincing (and interesting) way.
General Skills
First, let's take a look at general skills and see why they can be so important to you in the interview, whether you're planning to stay in the same occupation or you're thinking about making a move into an entirely new profession or a new industry.
Using General Skills in an Interview for a Career Change "Managing" is one example of a general skill. It is called a "gen- eral skill" because it can be found in almost every industry-sports, computers, retail, manufacturing, health care, and even entertainment. And occupations like sales manager, department manager, production manager, project manager, program manager, office manager, and accounts manager require the use of management skills.
One exciting outcome of taking stock of your general skills is that it will enable you to link the set of skills you have developed in one career to the set of skills required in a different career. Someone who has managed budgets, inventory, and teams of people in the computer hardware field might find that he or she can apply those skills in another industry such as manufacturing.
In other words, if you wanted to make a jump from being a project manager in engineering to being a production manager
in the film industry, you would not be at a loss for some of the most important general skills required for that kind of change. In the process, however, you would probably be required to answer an inter- viewer's questions about your abilities to make that kind of change. Your answer might look something like this:
Although I have not had direct experience in the film industry yet, I do have management skills. I have managed budgets of
up to $1 million, teams of up to 48 engineers and technicians, and schedules involving up to three different projects, each on different deadlines. Through creative scheduling and careful allocation of resources, I was able to bring one project in 18
days ahead of the deadline, thereby saving my company over
$147,000. That's exactly the kind of savings I'd like to bring to your film company.
Holly, one of my clients, was a teacher, but she was able to make
a career change into the much more highly paid field of training and development for a human resources department of a large computer firm. Though the occupations were different, she was able to identify several important general skills that they shared. Her general skills list looked like this:
* Curriculum planning
* Research
* Presentations
* Teaching
* Evaluation
When the human resources director asked her how she thought
she could apply her teaching skills to training, Holly said something like this:
When I took over the fourth-grade class at Bowden Street Elementary in Minneapolis, the grade point average for the preceding 5 years had been a C minus. Using my skills in researching age-appropriate program planning, interactive learning approaches, and developing innovative presentations,
I was able to bring up the class average to a B plus. It's an achievement I'm very proud of-just the kind of improvement
I expect to make in your employee morale and performance.