How To Build Job Skills Through ‘Adjacency’ BY SCOT HERRICK | OCT 28, 2011 | POSTED IN JOB NEWS TAGS: CAREER ADVICE, JOB HUNTING

Adding job skills to your resume is a critical practice for building your employment security in today’s job market. Adding job skills, though, gets harder to do with companies cutting back on training and not targeting what you need for your career work.

One option is to look at the work being done around you and acquire new job skills. I like to call these “adjacent” job skills — the work happening right next to you.

The way to look for these skills is to examine who gives you work to do (inputs) and what people do with the work when you give it to them (outputs).

An input for a Project Manager, for example, would be a business case. Knowing how to build a business case is a good job skill to have as a Project Manager because it supports that work. It also expands your work capability since PMs often manage building the business case in the first place.

An output of your work could be the input to a co-worker’s reporting work. Creating the reports could add to your job skills, too. At a minimum, understanding the process of building the reports, and knowing what they mean to those who receive them, creates context to your work. Context and knowing how the full process runs is especially helpful in job interviews.

How do you go about getting these skills?

Provide Backup for a Coworker
People need vacations and are gone for events, but the work still needs doing. A good manager has backups for every position so that if someone is gone for the day or a week, the work still gets done.

Look for the job skills you’d like to add to your tool bag, determine who on your team has them, and offer to back them up. You’d have to get trained, plus you’d do the work and produce results from it. Job skill acquired.

Work on Department Projects
Project work is another area where skills can be acquired. You can either accept a role where you would need to learn the skill you want with training, or volunteer to work with a person doing the work skill you want to learn.

Or, perhaps, you take a portion of the work from the person who has the skill and, through interaction, learn more about the rest of the work. Then, the next time a project comes along, you offer to do more of the work based on what you learned from the last project.

The great thing about project work is there are defined roles — and expected results. Working a project using a new job skill will mean your new job skill will produce specific results. That’s great on a resume or a job interview.

Target Your Work
The keys to building job skills are (1) knowing what skills you have, and (2) knowing which ones you need to further your employment security. You shouldn’t just unilaterally add adjacent job skills but, instead, try to target specific skills that will help you improve your work and get the next job.

With employers consistently skills as “requirements” for a job, getting familiar with those adjacent skills offers you a great way to add them to your own portfolio in the job you’re doing now.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Resume Writing

The 7 Deadly Sins of Resume Writing
By Peter Newfield, President of Career-Resumes.com

The resume is a double-edged sword: If your resume is a strong, accomplishment-driven example of your career experience, it can open doors and bring you new opportunities. But, if your resume is weak, disjointed, and boring it can virtually slam the door on your next career move. Whether you write your own resume or have it professionally prepared, check over your document to ensure that you have not committed any of the following "Seven Deadly Sins" of resume writing.


1.DECEIT
Purge your resume of any false information immediately! Lying about job titles, dates of employment, awards, or inflating statistics, financial figures, or numbers of employees supervised will definitely catch up with you in the end. Do not falsify college or grad school degrees -- if you did not graduate, just indicate the number of credits or years of undergraduate classes you actually attended. More and more companies are doing background checks on prospective employees and they are looking for precisely these types of falsehoods.


2.OMISSION
If your resume contains gaps in years of employment, it will raise questions. If you can explain the time away from employment and feel that it would be important for a prospective employer to know this information, include it in your cover letter. If you did not graduate from college but did take any professional training courses, include this information under the "Education" heading instead of just leaving off any reference to education.


3.INCONSISTENCY
Job hopping and presenting work experience in various fields can be disconcerting and raise a few red flags about your ability to stick with a job for any length of time. If you have moved about and changed fields over the years, it may be in your best interest to group these positions by category (a functional resume style) rather than by date (reverse chronological style). List the category, for example "Pharmaceutical Sales" and then present the related work experience. Then list the next category "Financial Services" with its related job information.


4.TEDIUM
Resumes are meant to be concise portraits of your career experiences and strengths. You are not doing yourself a favor by rambling on for three pages or presenting your job information in large, wordy paragraphs. Break up the information with bullets to highlight your accomplishments or achievements, key words, and brief descriptions of your day to day responsibilities.


5.SENILITY
Recruiters, HR Directors, and Personnel Managers want to know "What have you done lately?" A strong resume should highlight the past 10-12 years of work experience. Emphasize your current job the most as opposed to the jobs you held 20 years ago. Times change, technology changes, and the experiences gained in those after-school and summer jobs during high school just don't matter any more.


6.NARCISSISM
Never use the pronoun "I" when writing your resume. Resumes are written in the third person. Do not claim full credit for achievements accomplished as part of a team or group effort. Don't include personal information on your resume such as hobbies, religious organizations, or marital status.


7.SLOTH
Your resume could be the equivalent of career gold but if it is presented with typographical errors, or on stained or badly reproduced paper, that is the personal image the prospective employer will be left pondering. It only takes a few minutes to make sure that the document representing your best chances for new and rewarding employment opportunities is clean, crisp, and professional in appearance.

There you have it -- the "Seven Deadly Sins of Resume Writing" -- ignore them at your own risk!

Career Mapping: So You Don’t Get Lost Along the Way

Career Mapping: So You Don’t Get Lost Along the Way
-Gordon Miller, career coach, speaker, and the author of The Career Coach: Winning Strategies for Getting Ahead in Today’s Job Market

Just as companies who use a business plan as a "road map” find the path that is easier to negotiate, people who use a “career map” have a much better chance of reaching their destination. Think about it. If you’re in Winnemucca and you want to get to Wichita, a map is a handy thing to have. Without it you might eventually end up Wichita. Might. Eventually. But it could take much longer than it needs to and it most likely will be a forgettable trip. Sound familiar?

Making a career map can be beneficial at any stage of the game for many of us. If you’re just entering/re-entering the workplace, or perhaps been in the fray for decades, career mapping can prove to be an invaluable tool. Particularly if you are thinking of switching fields. (According to the surveys I have done for my new book, 57% of us are considering a change. Just thought you should know). More importantly, your Career Coach thinks the “C-Map” is necessary to help you better navigate the rapidly changing workplace rules. Changes like continuing record layoffs, mergers and acquisitions, the advent of technology and its impact on many of our jobs.

When I talk about developing a career map, I’m referring to an actual document. Typically, it’s a one or two page piece, a summary of your career strategy going forward. It’s a road map. A guide. It doesn’t mean you absolutely have to go by that route. If you get to someplace in your travels and the road is under construction, you may have to take a detour. Your company has been sold? Your department has been outsourced? Your position is being eliminated? Not to worry (too much). You have a plan.

A Strategy

The career mapping plan I’ve developed, which has worked wonders for the many clients I have worked with, is made up of nine (9) specific steps as follows:


1.An Overview: This first step consists of a ten thousand-foot view of want you want to accomplish in the future. One year, five years, whatever makes sense for you. There are times when the map will need to be changed suddenly. Perhaps your significant other finds a great job in another city, or you realize that the new boss and you don’t jive.


2.Identifying Your Market: The next step is to identify who your market is. It’s the same step a business goes through. Decide which industries or companies are most likely to continue to grow and need you.


3.The Marketing Plan: If you are working long hours, not making the money you want, and are quite unhappy, it may be a matter of focus.
Decide which aspect of your profession is the most appealing for you and develop a plan to market your knowledge, skills and experience to get the position you want.

Identifying Your Strengths and Weaknesses: The idea is to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. But first you have to know what they are. Ask the people in your life you most respect to help you with this one. Put them down on paper. It may give you a new understanding of you.


4.The Positioning Statement: In order to be good at what we do, we have to know what business we are in. The positioning statement is no more than one paragraph long. It spells out here’s who I am, and here’s how I’m going to position myself going forward, and here are my capabilities, and here’s how I fit into my industry or company.


5.The Action Plan: Now that you know what you want to do for the next year or two, you need to identify the tactics you use to carry it out. You might include research, talking to experts in your industry, and mirroring people who are already successful doing what you plan to do.


6.The Financial Plan: The key here is to understand that a change in career direction may have a impact of your finances. I recommend you determine up-front what could happen, good or not so good, and have a plan to deal with it.


7.The Review: How often should you stop along your journey, take a look at where you are on your map, check weather patterns and road conditions? If you are new to “mapping,” I suggest you do it once a week. Once you are more comfortable with the process, once a month is probably often enough. The key is to set a pattern for regularly looking at your progress.

Today’s job market is changing so rapidly that the people who hope to do well are those who have an idea about where they are going and how they are going to get there. I see too many of us making career decisions without a real strategy behind them. It’s a little like Ready!…Fire!…Aim! Occasionally you’ll get lucky and hit the target. Most often you won’t.

5 Ways for IT Pros to Become Indispensable

5 ways for IT pros to become indispensable
Jack Cullen, president of IT staffing and recruiting firm Modis, talks about how IT pros can maximize their value
By Ann Bednarz on Fri, 09/30/11 - 10:29am.

Tech is faring better than most industries on the jobs front. Unemployment is hovering around 4% compared to a national unemployment average of about 9% across all industries. Nonetheless, job security still feels elusive for many.

I spoke recently with Jack Cullen, president of IT staffing and recruiting firm Modis, about what IT pros can do to maximize the value they bring to organizations. Modis had come up with a list of five ways to be an indispensable IT professional in any economic climate, and Cullen elaborated on the topic.

But first the Modis list:

1. Know how and when to be thrifty;

2. Pay attention to preventative maintenance;

3. Be a jack of all trades;

4. Leverage IT to increase office productivity and demonstrate the benefits; and

5. Build relationships with coworkers.

In general, the pointers emphasize how IT pros need to think beyond the technical task at hand and use their expertise to help business leaders make strategic tech investments. CEOs and CFOs want to know how their investment in IT is translating into profits for the company, Cullen says, and that means IT workers need to learn everything they can about the business.

"Try to look at the business you're in, and how the work you do in IT could augment the return-on-investment for IT in that particular business," Cullen says. "Don't just sit back and focus on your work. Really understand your environment."

Oftentimes when a Modis client wants to retain a contract worker at the end of an assignment and use that worker for a new project, it's not just because of the person's tech skills, Cullen says. It's also because of the worker's understanding of the environment and willingness to bring ideas to the table.

Sometimes that means questioning a planned project, rather than simply doing the task someone tells you to do. If you're brought on to help with an ERP upgrade, for instance, "maybe you should ask: 'What do you want to accomplish? Why are we upgrading now? Have we looked at other platforms?'" Cullen says. "If you have an opinion, it's of value to speak up. People are looking for informed opinions."

Building relationships with coworkers and end users is also important. "Get to know other people in the work environment, particularly users of IT," Cullen says. "We want people to realize the importance of speaking up, letting people know who you are and what you do, and expanding your horizons."

A little self-promotion can help at a time when hiring managers are being extremely selective about the people they hire.

"I don't want to say they're looking for the purple squirrel, but they're coming close," Cullen says. "Companies have budget for IT staff, but they're being very picky, very demanding about who they're going to bring on."

The Two ‘Right’ Answers Hiring Managers Are Looking For

The Two ‘Right’ Answers Hiring Managers Are Looking For
By Scot Herrick

Most people miss the simple truth about job interviews. You only need to answer two questions:

•Are you motivated to do the work?
•Will you fit in with the manager and team?

Most people don’t realize your resume is all about getting the initial phone interview. Nothing else, just the phone interview. And during the phone interview, you must prove — to a person who does not know the job as well as you or the hiring manager — that you have the job skills to do the work. If you prove you are qualified to do the work, you will most likely move on to the face-to-face interview with the hiring manager.

The Focus of the Face-to-Face Interview is Different from a Phone Interview’s

A phone interview is all about proving you can do the work. A face-to-face interview with the hiring manager is all about showing you are motivated to do the work and can work with the manager and the team.

Now, there are a lot of people, including commenters here on Dice, that whine they are qualified to do the work, but the hiring manager doesn’t get that they are super-qualified because of their skills and experience and instead hires someone with less (fill in the blank) or the wrong (fill in the blank).

Those people miss the point of the face-to-face interview. They’re not about your qualifications. They’re about why you are motivated to do the work despite the obstacles, and whether you can work with the manager’s team. If you can’t show your motivation or if your behavior doesn’t fit, the manager won’t hire you — no matter how qualified you are for the job.

Think about it from the manager’s view: You’re a person who doesn’t work well with the person doing the hiring, and you don’t work well with the style of this particular team. Why would a manager hire you if all he sees is headaches and a ticked-off staff?

After all, managers hire you to help achieve their business goals, a hard enough objective without the burden of someone who doesn’t fit their management style and the team’s problem-solving style.

If you’re a go-get-’em hotshot looking for immediate answers, you won’t do well in a culture that’s all about consensus and collaboration.

Likewise, if you don’t like a lot of interaction and the management style is a lot of walking around and coworkers dropping into cubes to solve problems, the contact will drive you crazy, not to mention your manager and your coworkers.

That’s why the face-to-face interview is all about fit, not qualifications. Can the manager work with you or are your styles incompatible? Will you work with the team — or drive them crazy? Your style is neither “right” or “wrong,” it’s simply about whether your style of working fits in with their style of working. If it does, you’ve got a shot. If it doesn’t, you don’t.

The Face-to-Face Interview is not About Job Skills

Of course you need the skills to do the work. But by the time you hit the face-to-face interview with, it’s already assumed you do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be sitting in the interview.

What’s not assumed is that you can overcome the many obstacles to getting work done or that you will get along with the manager and the team.

So let me say it again. In the face-to-face interview, there are only two questions to answer: Are you motivated to do the work and will you fit into the organization? If you get two “yes” answers, you’ve may get an job offer.

Interview Presentation: Perception vs. Reality

Interview Presentation: Perception vs. Reality
You and the Interviewer May See Things Differently
By Gladys Stone & Fred Whelan, Monster Contributing Writers

In our work as recruiters, we clearly have experienced situations where what we see and what the candidate thinks he is presenting could not be further from each other.

For example, let's say Jeremy waltzes into our conference room and plops himself down in the chair. His hair is a mess and his shirt looks like it needs some spray starch and a hot iron. Jeremy thinks he's presenting a picture of someone who is self-confident, comfortable with himself, not looking too eager about the open position and not intimidated by a couple of recruiters.

His personal grooming choices make his solid qualifications moot, because it's hard to get over his appearance. Our first thought would be that Jeremy is recovering from a late night on the town. His posture indicates his energy is low and his half-closed eyes convey that he is trying (unsuccessfully) to stay awake during the interview. His wardrobe malfunctions reflected a lack of preparation for the important meeting. After all, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

Poor personal grooming and sloppy attire can detract from that all-important first meeting. It does not take a lot of time to check your overall interview presentation, and it is definitely worth the effort. Here are some cautionary tales and tips for making a favorable impression.

Interview Advice: Consider How You Look -- and Smell

A colleague once interviewed a woman in her late 20s who made the mistake of unbuttoning too many buttons on her blouse. The young woman thought she looked terrific, but in reality her interview presentation was very distracting. Then there was the promising candidate who scored highly in the phone interview. Impressed by what he heard, the recruiter set up an in-person interview at his office. Imagine his astonishment when the early-30s man walked in wearing a tie with a knot the size of his knee cap. Sadly, this person was not trying to make a fashion statement.

While the visual image you present is important, so is the impact you make through the other senses. Have you ever been in an elevator with someone who applied cologne too liberally? Here is some interview advice: Less is definitely more when it comes to applying a fragrance, particularly in the workplace.

For people who smoke, even more restraint may be necessary. While a smoker may be immune to the smell of nicotine in their clothes, the interviewer sharing the same small space (like an office) may find that odor unpleasant. And if the smoker has tried to mask that smell with mints or perfume, the resulting atmosphere may be downright off-putting.

Pull Your Interview Presentation Together

Enlist the help of someone you trust to review your choices at least a day before your interview. Model your interview clothes and style your hair just as you would for the interview. Then have this friend critique your appearance. Ask him to be brutally honest about what may need to change.

Next, ask your friend for some interview advice. Will your nonverbal communication hurt your chances in an interview? Do you absent-mindedly crack your knuckles, jingle loose change in your pocket or cross your legs and rapidly jiggle your foot? If your friend cautions that your behavior may be distracting, acknowledge the habit, avoid it, and channel that nervous energy toward interview preparation and focus.

Personal Grooming and Presentation Tips

Since you'll probably be shaking hands at some point during the interview, check your fingernails. Are they clean and clipped? Good posture denotes confidence and energy -- how do you carry yourself? If you know you tend to slouch, pretend you have a string attached to the top of your head and it is tied to the ceiling. That string is pulling your head up, keeping your posture straight. And it goes without saying, be sure your hygiene is impeccable.

People do judge a book by its cover, so be sure your interview appearance is picture perfect. The impression you leave should be memorable, but in a good way.