Joseph – Page 4 – Penn & Beyond

Illustrating Career Readiness Competencies: Part II

Dr. Joseph Barber

Employers value candidates who have developed career readiness competencies throughout their diverse academic experiences. Graduate students and postdocs in particular should aim to incorporate those transferable skill sets into their professional development so that they can be seen as more than just researchers and teachers. More than that, they need to be able to provide tangible illustrations of such skills and competencies in action to convince future employers that they are qualified for professional roles.

In a previous post I introduced the seven career readiness competencies we are developing at the University of Pennsylvania, based on the original National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) competencies. I also gave examples of some of the ways that the first three competencies could be illustrated. In this post I will focus on the other competencies from the list we are using at Penn: teamwork and collaboration, leadership and project management, professionalism and work ethic, and career management.

Teamwork and collaboration. Don’t be fooled — it is actually quite easy to be on a team. Indeed, sometimes it is so easy that you can find yourself on a team, a committee or a collaborative research project when you don’t even want to be. Teamwork is more than just participating on a team, however. It is about being able to effectively deal with all of the chaos that comes from a group of individuals with their own ideas, approaches, experiences, knowledge, egos, quirks and associated bad habits that is trying to work together with a mostly common goal in mind. Teamwork is about developing and managing relationships, negotiating conflicting ideas and uneven workloads, and self-advocating for your own role, ideas and results. Simply stating “worked on a team” or “participated in a team project” on a résumé or in a cover letter doesn’t illustrate any of the most important teamwork skills.

Not all team experiences are pleasant, but each one can be a learning experience that can help you anticipate future challenges and hopefully address them more effectively. Think about the last team-based experience you had and try to list all of the different roles you played within that team (leader, motivator, scheduler, conflict resolver, devil’s advocate, etc.). Think about the challenges that made that team experience complex and stress inducing. Then think about how you helped to overcome these challenges. Tell people why you enjoyed the experience, if you did. Tell them how you know your role was essential to the team’s success. Show them how flexible an employee you can be by illustrating the different types of professional working relationships you established with a wide diversity of people.

Leadership and project management. Certain industries, like consulting, put a lot of focus on leadership skills when they list desired experience in job descriptions. But the employer survey results that NACE collected in the development of their career readiness competencies show that leadership is not always seen as a vital trait. After all, most entry-level positions suitable for Ph.D. students or postdocs are generally not positioned as leadership roles — those roles come later on in the normal career trajectory.

That can be a relief to many students and postdocs, because some academic experiences may not feel like they offer many opportunities to be leaders — although that depends on how you define leadership. You don’t have to be called a leader, or be in a leadership role, to demonstrate leadership qualities. If you have ever changed someone’s mind or their perspective about an issue, you have demonstrated leadership qualities. If you have convinced other people to get involved in a project or program even though there was disagreement and a lack of consensus, then that is leadership. If you have been able to help others use their natural skills and abilities when working on a project, then that is leadership. If you think of leadership as more of a state of mind, then there are always opportunities to describe this competency in action even within a purely research setting.

That is not to say that seeking out actual leadership roles won’t be helpful. Serving as the vice president of a group on the campus run by students or postdocs can sound impressive. However, much like participating in a team, just listing a fancy-sounding title can feel a little empty if you can’t effectively demonstrate your skills in action. Be ready to tell a story about how you managed your emotions, and those of your colleagues, while working on a challenging project. Disappointment and negative results are a normal part of research; how did you overcome that? This part of the story is likely to be engaging to a future employer and represents a much more professional perspective of what leadership actually involves than merely listing leadership titles.

Professionalism and work ethic. Here is a list of common behaviors that I see from students on a regular basis that hint at a lack of professionalism:

Setting up an appointment with an adviser and then not showing up on the day of the appointment.
Registering for an event with no real intention of attending the event.
Turning up 15 minutes late to an appointment, but not apologizing for being late or making any mention of it.
Continuing to ask questions once an appointment has come to an end, despite the adviser standing up, opening the door and suggesting the next step of setting up a follow-up meeting to ask additional questions.
Leaving a panel discussion 20 minutes into a 90-minute program

These are all relatively minor faux pas and can be easily addressed, but they can also be additive. Once a student or postdoc shows a consistent pattern of such unprofessional behaviors, people will find it harder to imagine them being able to present themselves professionally when it is much more important (like during a client-focused meeting).

When it comes to demonstrating this competency to future employers, you must do so through actions. I have seen an offer for an internship at a prestigious nongovernmental organization rescinded because the student’s tone was unnecessarily rude and dismissive in emails with an administrative assistant about finalizing the paperwork for the position.

If you want insight into what professional behavior looks like, spend more time talking to alumni in professional roles and asking them about their day-to-day work experiences and challenges. In fact, ask them what professional behavior looks like at their organization and actively listen to their reply so that you can model similar types of appropriate behavior. Respecting the time of your networking contacts, sending thank-you notes, choosing the appropriate tone for even informal communication, following up or showing up when you said you would — these are all great demonstrations of this competency in action.

Career management. Like leadership, the career management competency isn’t one that employers will ask about directly in job announcements, and it doesn’t rank as highly in the list of essential traits that they are looking for. But a good employer will hope that you can advocate for your own professional development and growth. In this way, if you do stay and grow within the organization, you will be able to contribute in meaningful ways at every point in your upward trajectory.

Whether or not career management is important from the employer’s perspective, it is always going to be essential to you — not just for the first position you are seeking but for every other position you will have throughout your professional life. The goal of “identifying and expressing skills, strengths, knowledge and experiences relevant to both the desired position and career goals, and identifying areas necessary for professional growth” can be achieved by working on developing all of the other career readiness competencies that I have been describing.

This won’t happen in a week or a month, but by working with career advisers, mentors, supervisors and your peers, you can continue to develop as a professional over time. Who doesn’t like lifelong learning? It sounds like something that most Ph.D. students and postdocs I know would, and should, willingly embrace.

How to Illustrate Your Career Readiness Competencies

Dr. Joseph Barber

In a previous post, I highlighted examples of career readiness competencies that are being integrated into approaches to improve the career and professional development of students. While the original NACE competencies may have been developed primarily with undergraduates in mind, they are equally applicable to graduate students. Indeed, they may actually be far more important to graduate students because of the tendency of those students, as they approach the end of their academic programs, to suddenly realize they’ve totally forgotten how to talk about their strengths, skills and abilities to different types of audiences.

Some of the students I meet with at the University of Pennsylvania readily explain that the last application materials they created were for their entry into graduate school — sometimes five or more years ago — and that they have not applied or interviewed for anything that resembles a job or an internship since then. The consequence of this lack of practice is a great deal of verbal rustiness when it comes to presenting clear, illustrative narratives that describe skills and experiences — academic or otherwise.

Even in the most ideal situations, graduate students can feel a little awkward talking about their research to other academics. Describing the transferable skills that explain how they actually approached and completed their research can feel even more awkward, given the fact that they rarely discuss such skills in conversations with their advisers or other faculty members.

Are you, in fact, one such graduate student? If so, not to worry. There are many ways to practice and become more fluent in professionally appropriate, skills-based talking through networking. You can read about them in this post and this one.

You can also become more fluent in this language by thinking about career readiness competencies and using them as a starting point for illustrating your skills in action. And, yes, if you are wondering, focusing on career readiness competencies is just as appropriate for those seeking faculty positions as it is for those who are not.

Here are some suggestions for ways to think about such competencies in order to tell better stories to future employers and networking contacts about your research. Those competencies — and I’m using those that we are developing at Penn, adapted from the NACE ones – cover some of these areas.

Self-management and personal wellness. Interestingly, most job descriptions don’t list skills like resiliency or emotional empathy in the lists of skills employers often seek in ideal candidates. But everyone needs them. While you might not write about them in your application materials, they certainly pop up in interview questions such as “What has been your greatest mistake?” “How do you deal with failure?” or “How do you address conflict in a group situation?”

As researchers, the ability to provide examples that highlight resiliency should be easy. Research frequently doesn’t yield positive results, grant applications are not always successful, manuscripts are often turned away at first and so on. Your job is clearly not to bring up a long list of failures in interviews. But using these as context to explain how you responded to these setbacks, what you learned from the experiences and how you have used this knowledge in more recent situations can nicely demonstrate this competency in action. No one is perfect, and being able to talk positively and confidently about how you have looked failure in the eyes and moved on can be a narrative that appeals to employers looking for candidates with emotional maturity and strength.

Active listening and effective communication. Attending a conference where you are giving a presentation (or, in the case of some disciplines, where you are strangely reading word for word a research paper that the audience members could just read for themselves — come on, you must admit that this is a bizarre activity!), provides an opportunity to demonstrate public speaking skills. That’s great, until you see how students and postdocs often refer to such experiences in their application materials:

Barber, J. C. E., 2016. “Chickens are fab — a metaphysical analysis of the philosophical surrogating of domestic fowl.” The Third International Conference of Poultry Philosophy. Denver [Oral Presentation]

While it might be standard to list talks in this way in an academic CV, outside a faculty search committee no one is likely to find this an effective illustration of any sort of communication skills. And, in fact, one of the key attributes of the “Active Listening and Effective Communication” competency is to adapt communication approaches to different audiences.

The résumé and cover letter should illustrate this. In other words, you can’t just talk about other experiences where you adapted communication styles. The entire way you write and talk about yourself has to be one giant representation of this skill set in action. The language you use should be the language of the employer who will be reading the résumé. The skills you talk about should be the skills that are relevant to the job. Thus, I might reframe my oral presentation reference above to say, “Analyzed three fields of research on chickens and gave a multimedia presentation to an interdisciplinary audience of 300 that included philosophers, agriculture researchers and federal policy makers.”

It is helpful if you can describe your experiences by telling stories rather than just listing task after task. A good story describes some of the challenges and obstacles that your distinct set of skills, experiences and knowledge helped you to overcome, and it explains why you embarked on whatever experience you are talking about. People will remember your stories more than they remember the tasks you completed. In fact, people will understand your ideas better and will feel more connected to you and your work if you tell stories.

Need some help telling stories? Try integrating these six words, adapted from a presentation given by Dave Evans, a lecturer in the design program at Stanford University, at the 2016 Graduate Career Consortium annual meeting, into your next attempt to describe some of your research experiences:

Initiative: Why did you take on the research project in the way you did? What did you have to do to even get started?
Innovation: What was new about the questions you have been asking and the approaches you have been taking?
Implementation: How did you get your research going? What were the resources you found, and who were some of the people you connected with to help you? What obstacles were in your way?
Insight: What have you learned from doing it?
Iteration: What did you change along the way? How have you changed by doing it?
Impact: What did you find? Why is this important to your field and to the person you are talking to?

Critical thinking and problem solving. No one is going to doubt your ability, as a Ph.D. researcher, to think deep thoughts. Instead, many people may believe that you can only think deep thoughts, and they will wonder whether you are able to take your thinking and turn it into actions. To address that, you should consider and articulate some of the research-relevant decisions you have made along the way as you talk about aspects of your academic experience.

For example, don’t just say that your research focuses on X. Be ready to talk about why you chose this research topic in the first place. Given the infinite multitude of research projects that can exist, why did you pick this one?

Remember, the topic of the research itself is usually not going to be relevant to most audiences, so your particular story has to be more about the decision-making process than the research. You made the choice to ask certain questions — why? You chose the methodology and the approach to getting answers — why? And remember, while your research may not have solved any global problems, you definitely had to deal with challenges to conduct it. These could be challenges with methodologies, gaining access to resources, acquiring funding, getting along with your adviser or collaborators, and so on.

I have focused on reframing research experiences using these career readiness competencies, but most Ph.D. students and postdocs have done much more than just their research during their academic programs and training. All of these other experiences can also be used as the basis of skill-focused descriptions, narratives and stories. In my next post, I will focus on the other competencies from the list we are using at Penn: teamwork and collaboration, leadership and project management, professionalism and work ethic, and career management.

Using Marketing Principles as a Job Seeker

Dr. Joseph Barber, Associate Director

I am currently taking an “Introduction to marketing” course on Coursera as a way to think about the whole job search process in a slightly different way. Marketing is actually a very relevant topic when it comes to the process of career development. At some point as a job seeker, you are trying to encourage another entity (an employer) to purchase your product (your skills, experiences, and knowledge). To do this, you have to have a product worth buying, you have to know how to sell that product, and you have to know how to sell that product to a particular segment of customers. So far, some of the most pertinent topics covered in the course include the idea that no matter what the product is, it won’t be equally attractive to the entire customer base. In other words, some buyers will really like the product, some will respond to it fairly neutrally (they might buy it, but they might equally buy a similar product from another vendor), and some won’t find it attractive at all. In business, it generally makes the most sense to focus efforts on the subset of the population who really likes the product (taking a customer-centric approach and using a process of segmentation), rather than just hoping that everyone will find your product equally attractive (a product-centric approach). One of the career analogies here is quite clear. Sending out 50 versions of the same resume to 50 different companies (even if the job being applied for is similar – e.g., medical writer) won’t work as well as really taking the time to understand the differences between the employers, and targeting the most attractive and relevant ones with highly tailored application materials.

So far in the course, several marketing principles, assumptions, and theories have been shared, and I am still processing this information in my mind. It is interesting, though, to look for other areas of overlap between these concepts and what we focus on as career advisors. Here are three market-driven principles that were shared:

Know your markets
Customers have the final say
Be the best at one of these three concepts (compared to the competition): operational excellence, performance superiority, and customer intimacy, but just good enough in the other two

Knowing the market is essential. The more you understand about who your customers are (and in career terms these are hiring employers), the easier it is to convince them that you have what they are looking for. If employers are the customers in this case, then they still get the final say. That means that there is little point in telling an employer about all of the great work you have done, and all of the super experiences that you have gained, if this information does not align with what the employer is looking for. For example, over the course of a 5-year PhD, a graduate student can gain a very wide range of transferable skills. However, one of the consequences of doing a PhD is often a lack of practice talking about these skills outside of the context of the very specific research field the student has been working on. In an interview for a non-faculty job, PhD students and postdocs have to be careful not to answer the question “so tell me about your research” by actually spending 5 minutes talking about the specifics of their research. Instead, they have to be able to answer “so tell me how you did your research”, because the answer to this question will be much more skills-focused. Additionally, having completed a 5 year PhD and a 5 year postdoc, there may be some expectation on the side of the candidate that these combined experiences by themselves should qualify them for a wide range of positions. This is not the case – the employer wants the candidates to be able to show how these experiences make them a good fit, and wants the candidate to be able to demonstrate this level of understanding.

And then the idea of being the best at one of the concepts listed above (operational excellence, performance superiority, and customer intimacy), but good enough at the other two, might be relevant to the job seeker as a way to show that there are different approaches to successfully landing a position. Performance superiority might represent the research skills a student has gained. Someone with 15 published papers and two grants might demonstrate performance superiority. Operational excellence might represent the number of connections that a candidate has in different career fields, or their knowledge of these fields and of what employers are looking for based on extensive research into their different career fields. Customer intimacy would represent the degree to which a candidate has actually initiated and then further developed relationships with contacts at different employers through collaborations or networking (taking the idea of knowing people to the more advanced level of having professional relationships with these people). Given this, the following scenarios demonstrate how excellence in any of these three areas can help. Someone might be hired because they are the best at what they do even if they don’t have a lot of contacts or professional relationships with employers, or even if they don’t know much about the business itself (they can easily be trained in that, for example). Another person might get hired because they have been able to craft a spectacular resume that shows that they understand the nature of the position to which they are applying, even if they are not the best candidate in terms of their accomplishments (the most accomplished individual who cannot articulate how their accomplishments are relevant might not get the job, after all). And finally, someone else might get hired even though they are not the most accomplished, and even if they don’t have a smart-looking, tailored resume, but because they have great working relationships with people at a specific company, and those future colleagues can easily see themselves working with the candidate for the foreseeable future (fit always plays a role in hiring decisions). You only need to be the best in one of these dimensions…, but it helps if you are not terrible at the other two.

One other marketing topic that is directly relevant to the job search is the idea of brand positioning. One of the points mentioned in the course is the idea that a personal brand is not what you say about yourself, but represents what others say about you. You can come up with a really snappy brand statement about yourself, a well-craft narrative about what skills and experience you bring, but if this is not how the customers see you, then these statements won’t stick. This is another good reason to develop a broad professional network, and to cultivate this network carefully, and tend to it frequently. It will be people in this network who create your personal brand. You can help them through your interactions, through being able to articulate your unique selling proposition (the clear, simple, and unique benefits you bring), but beyond that, they will define your brand for you. When it comes to branding, the goal is to get consumers to notice the brand, but also to understand the information it represents. Just like with resumes, if there is too much information (and especially too much irrelevant information), the audience will likely block all of it out. Clear, concise, target-focused information should be at the heart of personal brands, resumes, and pretty much any form of communication.

I have obviously got more to learn about marketing, and hopefully will come across more ideas for how marketing principles can help individual job seekers. Interestingly, I think there will be information from this course that can also be used by institutional career centers at universities to better market themselves to their customers (the students and postdocs they serve). From branding, to segmentation and targeting, to customer-centricity, these are all relevant to how we as career advisors can better work with these populations.

Career exploration solutions – using your research skills

Dr. Joseph Barber, Associate Director

One of the common challenges faced by PhD students and postdocs is being able to make certain and confident career decisions that are different from those supported or promoted by their thesis advisors. Given the many career paths taken by PhDs, and the many career fields that value some of the skills, experiences, and knowledge provided by a PhD, it can be challenging to gain a clear enough perspective on which path (or paths) might be the best to pursue. The good news for PhD students and postdocs, is that your academic training gives you the ability to solve some of these issues by yourself without having to rely on your advisor. Indeed, your advisor has given you the some of the skills you need to come up with a solution – your ability to do research! All you have to do is apply these research skills to a field beyond your thesis topic. Here are some common career-related questions that a little bit of in-person and online research can help you answer:

What do people with a PhD in my field do if they are not a postdoc or faculty member?

Ask your administrative department coordinator if they maintain a list of alumni from your research group or department and review their current positions. Ask more senior PhD students or postdocs where they have seen people going after graduation or when their postdoc finishes.

Use QuakerNet to search for alums by degree, field, location, and so on.

Get a LinkedIn account (don’t worry, it is just a tool, not a lifestyle change), and under the “my network” header on every page select the “find alumni” tool. You can use this interactive table to search by “what they studied” (click on the arrow on the right hand side of the first 3 columns to get to this one), and then you can use the overall search box at the top of the table (next to the number of results) to do a broad keyword search using “PhD” or “Ph.D.”. You can use the “find alumni” tool for any university, even if you didn’t attend it. If you were going to be relocating to the West Coast from the Philadelphia area, for example, you can look at where PhDs in your field from West Coast institutions find employment, as you may come across location-specific organizations you didn’t know.

What skills are needed to be an X (where X is any position you can imagine)?

1. Use the same alumni networks described above to find people in the position that you think you might want and have an informational interview with them (i.e., ask them about their job, how they got there, what skills they find most helpful, what challenges they tend to face on a day-to-day basis, what advice they might give people considering their career field, and if they can suggest anyone they know that you might chat with).

2. Use the title of the job and any associated keywords to search online job boards (e.g., Indeed.com; USAjobs.gov; idealist.org; higheredjobs.com; LinkedIn). Keep track of which companies have the position (an Excel spreadsheet works well), and pay attention to the list of skills and requirements associated with the position. Assess which of these skills you have, and which you can develop using some of the campus resources still available to you. Since it can sometimes feel hard to self-assess your own skills, work with a career advisor to get a more objective (and you’ll find, more optimistic) perspective.

3. Look at people’s profiles on LinkedIn who are doing this job and scroll down to see the list of their endorsed skills.

What can I do with skill X (where skill X is something that you might have developed through your thesis research – e.g., ethnography, data visualization, surveys, archival research)?

1. Use the skill as a keyword as you search job boards, and see what types of jobs pop up. This won’t be helpful if you are searching for a broad skills (e.g., teaching, research), but can also be helpful if you have a particular subject/knowledge expertise.

2. Go back to the “find alumni” tool on LinkedIn and look at the “What they’re skilled at” column. Type in your skill and then look at the companies and roles in which people who say they have this skill are employed. People who say they are skilled at ethnography can be found at Google and Mattel, just as an example.

What is the job market like for job X?

In addition to asking contacts you make in any career field this question, you can also get a decent visualization of trends by using the trend function on Indeed.com. For example, throw in the word “assistant professor” into the search bar (include the “”), and you will see the cyclical nature of hiring for this position. Look for “data science”, and you will see how this position has been trending upwards in its prevalence. You can even search for specific skills that might be mentioned within the job descriptions (e.g., python, GIS) to see if these are skills you might need to gain.

How can I find a good contact at employer X?

No matter what career field you are interested in, chances are high that you know someone who knows someone in this career field who might be a useful contact. However, this person who happens to know a good contact is unlikely to dramatically wake up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night and exclaim out loud to their now no longer sleeping partner, “My gosh…, I should let them know that I know a senior scientist at Merck who might be a great contact in their search for industry positions!”. One of the reasons that they don’t tend to wake up like this is probably because you haven’t actually told then you are seeking a contact in the biotech industry. Even if you have mentioned it in passing once, they are probably incredibly busy working on their own life that they might have forgotten.

Let’s call this person who doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night, and doesn’t start gibbering about biotech and pharma researchers at Merck, and doesn’t then reach out to you with a great contact, Maggie. It is very possible for Maggie to know someone at Merck without knowing that she knows someone at Merck. After all, the person she knows might not have been at Merck when she first met them. Perhaps they were at GSK, but have recently taken a new job at Merck where they are leading a new research group and looking to bring new people on board (people, as it turns out, like you!). Maggie doesn’t know any of this. However, if you are linked with Maggie on LinkedIn, then you stand a much greater chance of finding this out. If you were to search for Merck using company search bar on LinkedIn, then on the employer page you will see in the top right hand corner of the page the number of 1^st and 2^nd degree contacts. Click on any of these 2^nd degree connections (people you don’t know, but who know people you do know) and scroll done their profile to see who you know who knows them. When you find out that Maggie knows someone at Merck (which is news to Maggie), there are many ways she can actually help you:

1. You can ask Maggie if the person she knows might be a good person to talk to with the specific questions you have.

2. You can ask Maggie is she has an actual email or phone number she can share with you (something that LinkedIn doesn’t like to do).

3. You can ask if Maggie can introduce you to the contact.

4. You can ask Maggie if you can use her name when reaching out to the contact.

All of these approaches will increase the likelihood that Maggie’s contact will actually speak with you. Getting the conversation started is the first step towards making the most of a new connection who can help you achieve some of your career exploration goals.

In terms of career exploration, the goal is for you to use your already well-developed research skills to understand people, their career pathways, their skills, and their connections. You should develop specific career-focused questions you need answers for, and then don’t stop researching until you have found answers that are meaningful to you. This will mean taking advantage of online tools like LinkedIn to help you find and make real-life connections, because it is these people who will help you answer your questions.

The 5 interview questions you need to answer well

Dr. Joseph Barber

Interviews are full of uncertainty, but you can feel pretty certain that at some point someone is going to ask you one of these 5 questions. In fact, I would be fairly confident that you will be asked all five of these:

Who are you? Tell me about yourself
Why do you want this position?
What do you know about our organization?
What do you bring? What is your greatest strength? What are your relevant strengths?
Do you have any questions for us?

It is a good idea to have really solid answers to these questions that sound natural, spontaneous, and authentic, but that you have actually rehearsed out loud on more than one occasion. You may be asked far more challenging questions during the interview process, but if you cannot get these basic, foundational questions answered successfully, then you are always going to be on shaky ground for the rest of the interview. Here are some very quick tips to help you answer these questions effectively:

Tell me about yourself

There are a couple of strategies you can take with this question, and it is fine for you to take charge of how you answer since the interviewers have basically handed you the proverbial microphone, and given you 1-3 minutes to impress them. One approach is to use this as an opportunity to answer a more specific question of your choosing. For example, you might say:

Great, thank you. Let me tell you about why I find this position so interesting, and why experiences are a great fit.

This is a valid response, and feels much more focused than the vague “who are you” question. With a well prepared answer, you can make a good impression. The other approach is to provide a relevant overview of your experiences that may be connected more thematically. If you are applying for a science communication position, you might start by saying: “I have always been interested in the way people understand complex medical research…”, and then continue by talking about the different experiences you have had where you have played an active role in this (e.g., a course you took, an experience you had trying to adapt your own complex science for a broader audience, and so on). And you definitely want to end your answer by explaining how all of the experiences you have mentioned make your application for the position make sense:

And that is why I find this position so interesting, because it would give me the opportunity to use my experience working not only with scientific researchers, but also the medical community as a whole.

Why do you want this position?

Obviously it depends on the position, and you, but here is some general advice. Focus on what you bring to the job before you talk about what you gain from it. Saying that you are interested in consulting is a benefit for you if you are applying for a consulting position, but it doesn’t necessarily provide any benefit to the company. Your interests are not as relevant as your skills, abilities, knowledge, and experience to the people you are talking to. You can think of an answer along these lines:

Based on what I know about your company from my research, and chatting with a couple of your staff, what I think you are looking for is someone who can do X, Y, and Z. I have had great experience doing X (for example…), and have recently done a lot of Y (for example…), and will be really interested in doing more of Z in working with the clients your firm works with.

What do you know about our organization?

Don’t just repeat what you have read online. You are not trying to demonstrate that you remember how many employers they have, or where their HQ is based. Try to show them that you have taken some extra steps.

I recently spoke with your director of research, and she was able to share some great insights. It was great to hear that your organization is…

I was actually reading about one of your projects the other day, and so I know that you are expanding into the medical device field – I think that is a very interesting new direction.

What is your greatest strength?

There is actually no such thing as a list of strengths, on top of which is your greatest strength. Each of your strengths can have different value in different contexts. You want to pick the one that you have that will be of greatest relevance to the interviewers. And you can even say, “in terms of this position, my greatest strength is…”. If you talk about a great strength, remember to provide an example of this in action. After all, if it is your greatest strength, then there should be many examples of you using it.

Do you have any questions for us?

Yes…, always yes. Ask questions that help the interviewers picture you doing the job. For example:

What projects would I be working on for the first 3 months?

How big are the project teams, and who would I be working with in this role?

Within this department, where do people who have had this role in the past move onto next?

How would you describe the culture of this organization?

If no-one mentions anything about next steps, then you may want to say something like this at the very end:

It has been great talking to you today. I am really very interested in this position. Please can you give me an idea about what the next steps are in this interviewing process.

Take a look at our interviewing resources here, and call Career Services to set up a mock interview with an advisors to practice what you have learned