The 8th of our 10 tips for anyone looking to progress their career. A two-minute read about updating your marketing material to ensure that your skills are clearly being conveyed might be all the inspiration you need.
Expanding your Skill Set – Tip 8 of 10
The job skills shortage isn’t going anywhere so here is this week’s tip that you can take to improve the probability of your career success.
Tip 8 of 10: Update your marketing material to ensure that your skills are clearly being conveyed.
Many CV’s tend to focus on the person’s responsibilities, but taking this approach does not highlight their skills, abilities, or value. So, if you want to get your value across to others, focus on achievements.
To do this, go through your career history and if you had a specific responsibility, think about the responsibility as a task and then ask yourself did you deliver on that task? If yes, that is what you want to be conveying to the reader. The following framework will help.
Task: what was it that you were asked to do?
This sentence should describe what you did. This statement acts as a headline, so it needs to be punchy and to the point. The first word sets the tone so choose a strong, action verb.
Result: what was the result?
How did the business / organisation benefit? Ideally the result should be quantified in some way. Financial figures are the most powerful (saved £500k p.a.), but percentage change (reduced time to market by 27%) or rankings (took division to number 2 worldwide) are also good. Failing that use words such as increased or reduced significantly, marked improvements etc
Once you have identified the task and the corresponding outcome, merge the two together into one sentence making sure it remains punchy and to the point, not overly conversational and remove any obvious duplications and repetitions.
By re-writing, using strong action verbs, you will be able to convey the skill and by having a quantifiable outcome, the value.
So, closing the skills gap divide might not be as daunting as you first thought and may not require anything more than a fresh perspective and way of looking at it. It sounds simple and it is, it’s just not always easy, especially when trying to do it alone.
For practical advice on how to make the change without being overwhelmed contact us to discuss how we can help.