One Snarky Chica with Issues

Every Thursday deals with issues related to jobs, career and school.

I’m 29 and I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Sometimes, it helps to just be able to know where to start when you are looking for a career start. Here are some of the things I have learned along the way…

Identify your skills or talents. You should make a list of your skills and/or talents, which can be anything you can bring to the table regardless of how long ago you used the skill or if it was something that you learned on your own as opposed to in a job. Once you have made this list, you should re-do list in order of importance to you. List the skills in order what that you feel is important, not what you think a company will deem important.

Once you have made this list you should be able to see a clear theme. Take the top 10 you should see a clear theme that leads to a certain type of job that is a good fit for you.

A lot of the same positions are available in multiple industries. You can be an accountant at a hospital, at a movie studio, at a non-profit and so on. With that in mind, you should have an idea of what field or industry that you wish to work in. You might not care what industry you work in, but if you do a good place to figure out what you like is to think about what interests you. Once you have that down, you should know what industries to look for employment in.

After you’ve gotten down what job you want and in what industry you want it, your next step is job hunting. Most people start job hunts online at Monster.com, but how many people have actually gotten jobs from Monster? My count is at one. My current and last job I got by contacting a company directly. The job before that was through Monster. In my current job hunt, I’ve gotten better responses for interviews when I have went to company websites and directly applied as opposed to apply for jobs on Monster or other career sites like HotJobs and Careerbuilder. The moral of the story here is not to limit yourself to online job banks because you just might miss that dream job. There are a lot of people that have success with Craigslist as well.

I haven’t yet found my dream job, so I can’t tell you the best avenue to take in that quest, but I can tell you how I got the two best jobs I’ve ever had. The first one I got my making cold calls. I knew (at the time) what I wanted to do and what industry I wanted to work in, so I cold called a lot of places and actually landed an interview at one. The second best job I’ve had I got from word of mouth. I was in college and a professor mentioned that his friend at XYZ Company had just told him about an opening for him to tell his students about. I promptly excused myself to ‘go the bathroom’ and headed to the nearest pay phone and made a call, which got me an interview the next day. After typing this all out, I’ve noticed that apparently the key is knowing what you want and going after it.

There you have it, discover what job and industry you want to work in and then seize life by the horns and go after it.

I think I need to actually start on that right now…