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Your Job Search Marketability Plan
Good career fit is organic, achieved through incremental movements and interactions and fortified with luck, timing, and helpful mentors, colleagues and friends who lift you to new levels of confidence, knowledge, and career success. This organic movement also is instrumental in developing individual careerthemes that comprise your job search marketability message.
Career Themes
Reflecting on your past career achievement, what themes do you note? Are you happy with those themes? For example, you may find a common thread in your career is when you act as a team cheerleader, influencing positive attitudes in other people, steering project momentum and displacing negativity with positivity. This may indicate you are an inspirer and team builder who elevates the experience for all and spurs project traction to meet – or even exceed – project time-line goals.
You may market this "team cheerleader / inspirer" attribute
as an asset to any organization that needs to quell a down-trodden climate spurred by layoffs, economic down-turn and other corporate changes that have lowered staff morale and slowed productivity and/or overall performance. Bottom-line: your contributions as a motivator/cheerleader/inspirer may impact project efficiencies, improve productivity, save time and money and/or grow revenue and profits. This job search marketability theme is both measurable and impactful in the reader’s eyes.Further reflection
may indicate you are a big-picture strategist who also knows how to corral and execute the details. This leadership trait that spans both management and front-line action-mapping and delivery is a marketable talent needed by today’s fluctuating and often resource-strapped economy.Bottom-line:
your big-picture strategy and execution contributions may impact business in the areas of building new revenue, boosting profits, slashing costs, enhancing talent pipeline and improving processes via marketing and sales, new product development, operations, finance, technology, human resources and so forth. Again, by identifying a theme you have further carved out a unique value proposition that propels your job search marketability in the job market.Galvanizing Your Job Search Marketability Plan
To effectively reflect upon your career and galvanize your job search marketability plan, you must first perform a brain dump to lay out the details of your story – at some point in the process, arrange this information in reverse chronological order so there is a clear indication of what you did and when you did it. Also organize it by functional categories and impacts as related to the needs of your target audience.
For example, a functional category/impact may relate to your ability to handle high-pressure, fast-paced scenarios. You may therefore wish to describe a pressure-cooker situation where you not only survived but thrived; then outline the action steps and measurable results. As well, be introspective in defining what specific leadership, team-aligning, critical thinking, negotiation and so forth abilities you leveraged during this challenging initiative.
After assembling your career brain dump, you will then want to assess it, further mapping your career experiences and victories to a refined career target. Above all, you do NOT want to try to be all things to all people. By attempting this, you will miss your mark. You want to engage and attract a specific audience with unique needs in order to get someone’s attention.
Proactively market your job search visibility
and messages to this target audience and even to a looser, broader network that likely has ties well beyond what your core network may provide.Stepping back and reflecting via career introspection and clarification of who you were, who you are now, and who you wish to be "going forward" is critical to compelling job search marketability messages.
© Copyright Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, 2009. Used with permission.
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About This Author:
Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter is 1 of only 26 Master Resume Writers in the world and the owner of Career Trend, a boutique career strategy and writing firm serving a global market. Jacqui composes career positioning documents for forward thinking executives and professionals, unearthing and translating their 'value into words.' For more about Jacqui, visit her website at CareerTrend.net or her blog Career Trend's Blog or you may follow her on Twitter at @ValueIntoWords.