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Snippets: Making Use of Transferable Skills

This is part of a series of articles to make your jobseeking experience more meaningful with JobStreet.com.

The idea of transferable skills is playing an increasingly important role in jobseeking quests. But what are they, actually? Simply put, transferable skills are skills that you have acquired doing any one of a host of otherwise commonplace activities in your life, including projects, classes, sports and hobbies, that can be applicable to what you will do in your next job. Specify what sort of transferable skills you have in your resumes, cover letters, and also during interviews, and try to portray these skills as pertinent to the job in question. Presenting transferable skills in a relevant manner to the prospective employer can make all the difference between acquiring a job or not.

Happy new networker

Networking, according to Will Kintish, is vital to our career and commercial success, but few of us do it naturally. He says that being a confident and effective networker will set us apart from the crowd. It raises our profile, helps us feel more in control and creates more opportunities for us to advance and develop our interests.

In 2005, a survey found that 60 per cent of the reason why individuals rose to the top in large organisations was because they were seen more often by more people.

But most of us find it a challenge because it's a question of fearing to be noticed. How visible are you, he asked. Are you doing a great job but stay hidden within the confines of your department? When you are at the coffee machine, do you strike up conversations with other colleagues from other departments?

He puts the fear down to three factors: the fear of failure, the fear of rejection and the fear of leaving your comfort zone.

Click here to read the full article from Will Kintish.

Be prepared to start from the bottom

The underlying lesson to learn from this story from JobStreet.com member Choo is that fresh graduates must be prepared to start from the bottom, especially when the economy is faced with a downturn. Start from the bottom and work your way up. Here is his story:

I had just graduated from university in mid-2002 and began my job hunt immediately after my last exam. As a major in banking and finance, I was actively looking for positions in the industry. There were limited positions available and before long, I realized I had to expand my job hunt beyond the industry I was looking for. Interviews were few and far in between.

To reduce the burden on my family, I took on a temporary assignment as a customer service officer with a statutory board. As an hourly rated employee, the monthly pay was half of what a fresh graduate would usually obtain. To keep expenses down, I made a conscious effort to have my meals at coffee shops and staff canteens instead of food courts or fast food restaurants. I also saved on transport by taking a 25-minute walk from my home to the workplace. I was a temporary worker in the day and a professional job hunter by night.

During this period, I was still attending interviews whenever there was an opportunity. However, there were no offers. It was even more demoralizing when I hear of peers who had successfully secured employment. Despite the fact that there were other fresh graduates in similar predicament, it was no consolation. I was constantly tinkering with my resume and cover letter to optimise the chances of an interview. Even though my performance in the statutory board was rated excellent, there were no permanent openings. After six months, the temporary assignment had also come to an end.

Click here to read Choo's tale.

Light at the end of the tunnel

One of our members, Low, went through some hard times when he was retrench in 1999. He tried to keep the bad news away from his wife while he went about to find a new job. Looking back on those trying days, Low said that it wasn't easy to pretend that he was still working.

I started my career in Jan 1980 as a technician and slowly moved up the corporate ladder, having a few job switches along the way. Eventually I became a manager in June 1991. I was very happy but before long, in March 1999, I was retrenched. I was told to pack and leave the company immediately. I have never tasted recession prior to this and I was totally lost and depressed.

Upon reaching home, I did not tell my wife and presumed my normal work routine the next workday. I woke up early, dressed up and left for "work". I sat at a fast food restaurant with a set of newspaper, browsing through the Straits Times Recruit section. Days passed by and I still could not find a job. I remembered looking forward to the weekend because there would be a "thicker" recruit section. However, I often found nothing suitable and was left disappointed and demoralised.

Another "work week" ahead was a scary thought.

One day, my hand phone rang and an old friend called and said he found out of my retrenchment.....

Click here to read his whole story.

Managing your emotional health

Your emotions can get the better of you if you are not aware or not strong enough to meet them. During this period of economic slowdown, it's quite possible that many person will have conflicting emotions. How can you prepare yourself for the waves of emotions sweeping you? Here. one of our members, Gilbert Goh, tells us what he went through:

I count myself lucky to have survived two tough years of unemployment with mounting financial problems during the period after 9/11 right up to the SARS epidemic. My family had just returned from overseas as we were away for a year on study purposes. The situation was made worse when we decided to buy a private house burdened with a mortgage loan. It was one of my worst personal decisions.

Although my wife works, it was tough to make ends meet with only one income. We also had a young daughter to raise. I faced sleepless nights trying to meet the minimum income payments for all my credit facilities especially when the bank account dried up. There was an unforgettable day when my ATM bank account showed a balance of less than $20. The worst moments of my life came when I had to borrow cash from friends to tide over. This is when you realise who your true friends are and whether they will stand by you when you are almost down and out. To this day, I am thankful to the few who volunteered financial assistance to me during this trying period.

During that period, I hovered between desperation and panic. Naturally, the relationship with my wife was not at its best. We often argued over financial matters.

Click here to read Gilbert's full story.

Does personality influence your job?

Are you a playful puppy, a lion king or simply at peace with the world? Believe it or not, these are typical personality traits demonstrated by people everywhere. Whether you are extroverted or introverted, aggressive or submissive, you can be categorised.

Moreover, the types of job we do often have a lot to do with our personality. Some people got stuck in their career and failed to see the recurring pattern in their past jobs. If we track back to the reasons some of us had left our previous employers, the answer could be devastating. Why were you not happy then? What really triggered you to leave? Was salary the main reason? Research shows that many leave the organization because of bad managers. Not able to get along with your managers and colleagues over a prolonged period of time is stressful and a career buster! But blaming others is only an emotional escape that says you are not responsible and limit your choice of actions to take. In today's fast changing economy, it is important that we play a more active role in our career management and be aware how our unique personality has an impact on the type of job we choose.

So how do you do that? Here is Desmond's full article. It's only the first of three parts. We're still waiting for the next instalment but the first part is an interesting read by itself.

Persistence pays

JobStreet.com member Joseph Ong shares with us his experience during a time when he was desperately looking for a job. Persistence paid off for him, he said, and it's a lesson which many of us may want to learn too. Here is his story:

I joined the workforce after graduating with a degree in Banking & Finance in end 1999.

My first employment was a six-month contract assignment in the Finance department of an MNC. After the assignment expired, I continued to send out countless CVs to Banks and Financial Institutions. However, after more than 10 interviews for various positions in different Banks and Financial Institutions, I was still unemployed.

During that time, I took on various temporary/hourly pay assignments doing general admin for a couple of months before I finally struck a deal with a recruitment specialist from one of the employment agencies, which eventually resulted in me being with my current employer for almost 8.5 years.

The recruitment specialist needed a temporary staff to assist in a three-day assignment with a company that was in the process of relocating its office. As she explained to me, it was going to be hard work - moving big cardboard boxes of stuff from the office to the storeroom on my own the entire day for the next three days - for $5/hr. No one else before me was willing to take on this job. So I took the opportunity to strike a deal with the recruitment specialist. My condition was that I was willing to help her with this assignment if she could help assign me to the next available job in a bank - any job in any bank (I was that desperate to get into the industry).

Click here to read Joseph's full story.

Staying positive

JobStreet.com member Kum Cheong shares with us his experience of recession: what is it to him and how he got out of the last one.

Recession - a dreaded but unavoidable economic condition that no one wants to be part of. Just like what goes up must come down, an economic boom must necessarily be followed by an economic downturn or recession, which is what we are currently experiencing.

A few years back in 2003 when Singapore was struck by the SARS virus, our shaky economy, still reeling from the dot-com burst and post-911 events, went into an immediate tail-spin. As a result, unemployment rates soared to unprecedented levels.

During that time, I was unemployed for a total of eight consecutive months before I found a suitable part-time job and eventually I decided to return to school for higher education.

Having never directly gone through a recession before this, it was by far the darkest and loneliest eight-month period of my life. It was a harrowing experience but at the same time brought out a new whole side of me that I have never seen before. It completely changed my perspective of life from then on.

Click here to read the full story from him.

Coping with Recession

For many, 2009 is approached with much caution and apprehension. A reminder of the worsening economic situation is always around the corner, with news splashed across the papers, blasted over the radio and discussed over meals. In fact, the government has just announced that Singapore is facing its worst-ever recession.

For the luckier ones who are employed, they are clinging on to their jobs with uncertainty for everyone knows the cruel reality that restructuring and downsizing exercises are inevitable occurrences during times of recession.

With that, JobStreet would like to share true life accounts contributed by some fellow Jobseekers on how they coped with recession and retrenchment...we are certain that they are stories many can identify with.

If you have been affected too by the current recession, or would like to share on your experiences, please leave a comment! Remember, you don’t have to be alone in this.

Best Regards,
JobStreet.com Singapore

 

Allow for gravity: Speaking of selling yourself

If you aim at a target a long way off, you have to take gravity into consideration. You aim above the target.

Aim above your goal. Tell people the higher goal is the one you want to reach. Never even mention the lower one. You’re selling yourself to those around you (and to yourself) with a strategy that retailers and salespeople have been using successfully for eons.

You go into Harry's Haberdashery thinking you'd like to buy a $300 suit. Harry sells you on the benefits of the $900 suit. It's a far better suit with double stitching and superior fabric, and it makes you look like Michael Douglas. Still $900 is too much money for you and though you'd like it, you end up settling on a $600 suit that has a number of the same qualities that Harry sold you on, and makes you look like Anthony Hopkins. If he'd tried to sell you that $600 suit in the first place, you probably would have settled on a $400 suit that makes you look like your Uncle Ralph.

If your boss thinks you're shooting for CEO and knows you're readying yourself for that, how can she not promote you to assistant plant manager? If the powers-that-be know you're preparing yourself to be regional director, they might not promote you that far, at least not yet. But they might make you area manager. If you'd simply prepared yourself to be area manager, you could have been just one of several with the same qualifications. They may well have picked someone else.

If CEO is your goal, the sooner you start thinking of yourself as a future CEO, the sooner your superiors will too. That's the career path you want to be on, and it's never too soon to get on it. Ultimately, if you aim for CEO and "fail," you may end up as a vice-president. Aim for store manager and even when you succeed you'll be way below the vice-president who "failed" to make CEO.

Barry Maher, www.barrymaher.com, writes, consults and speaks on workplace issues like motivation, communication, leadership, management and sales. He is the author of Filling the Glass, honored as “[One of the Seven Essential Popular Business Books.” Contact him or sign up for his newsletter at www.barrymaher.com.