Tag: Transferable skills

A dog is for life…, but a job doesn’t have to be

Dr. Joseph Barber

Many of you have probably heard of the saying: “a dog is for life, not just for Christmas”. It is a reminder to parents that while their children may really want a puppy for Christmas, they have to realize that they can’t just throw the puppy into the cupboard (or leave it lying around on the bedroom floor, more likely) when they get bored of it, or no longer want to play with it. Owning a dog is a life-long commitment. Although people do, one should certainly try to avoid taking a dog back, especially to a shelter, like it is some ill-fitting pair of trousers that someone bought you. The same advice about thinking carefully about the commitment involved holds true for bunnies and chicks (often purchased for children around Easter), for parrots (perhaps bought for International Talk like a Pirate Day – yes, there is one), and guinea pigs (bought for…, ok, well, there is no holiday I’m aware of that is strongly associated with the buying of guinea pigs, but you get my point). On the other hand, most turkeys purchased for Thanksgiving are just for Thanksgiving, and perhaps one or two more days beyond – but this is a special situation.

If you are a little unsure of what type of job you want, or afraid to commit to a certain type of job in case it turns out to be the wrong path for you, then it is helpful to know that a job doesn’t have to be for life. Any job you accept can be a stepping stone to a different type of job in the same career field, or a completely different type of career altogether. Of course, you might be completely surprised and find that you really like the first job you get, and continue on happily down that career path – you won’t know for sure unless you give it a go.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you should just apply for any old job, in the vague hope that you will figure things out along the way. For starters, it will be much harder to be offered a job if you cannot provide a convincing answer as to why you are applying to it. Here are some answers to the “why do you want this job?” question that may not do you any favours:

  • “I don’t really know what I want to do with my life, but I saw the job advert and it looked interesting, something I might apply to, and so here I am”
  • “I have discovered that I really don’t like working in a lab environment, and I have had some bad experiences within academia, and so I am looking for a new direction where I can be happier”

Put yourselves in the shoes of the employers listening to these types of answers, and you’ll see why they are not so great. Would you hire someone who didn’t show honest interest in your company or in the day-to-day elements of the job? Even if you a little unsure why you are applying for a job, you can still come up with a convincing and honest statement that will speak more directly both to the needs of the employers, and to what you can offer them. For example:

  • “I see this opportunity for me to apply the skills I have gained through my experiences at Penn, and to be able to use my effective writing and editing skills to complement the other staff in this department, and to maximize productivity. For example… [and an illustration of skills mentioned should follow]”
  • “I think I bring with me a unique perspective that would enhance this organization’s ability to interact with international clients, and I am looking forward to the opportunity to work with the program experts you have here to quickly and efficiently learn the new skills I need to take on the project requirements listed in the job advert. I have always been good at learning new skills. For example… [and an illustration of skills mentioned should follow]”

These statements are overly broad, as I don’t have particular job in mind. The key point is that you don’t have to convince an employer that you only want to do this one job at this one company. However, you do have to convince them that you know what their needs are, and convince them that you have some combination of experiences, skills, or technical abilities to offer something that other candidates don’t have.

It may be that you apply for a job, accept an offer, but find out over time that the career field you are in may not be for you. Make sure that you have invested enough time at the job to make an objective decision about this. All jobs are challenging when you first start. Make sure that you have also looked at whether there are any opportunities to change the nature of the position to better meet your needs – perhaps moving laterally within a company to another position, department, division, rather than considering leaving altogether. However, if you feel as if you need to leave, make sure that think about what skills you might need when applying for jobs in different career fields, and seek out as many opportunities as possible to put those skills into action in your current position. Focus on the key transferable skills that are valuable in any profession, such as communication, leadership, management, problem-solving, and taking the initiative.

Having specific illustrations of your skills in action being actively used to achieve tangible outcomes will be the best way to convince future employers that you are a viable candidate. Any job that you take on, even if it turns out not to be what you want, will give you a chance to put these skills into action, and so will further enhance what you can say in your cover letters and resumes when applying for future positions.

So…, dogs, bunnies, chicks, parrots, perhaps guinea pigs (but not roasted turkeys) may be for life, but the jobs you take on can be stepping stones on a straight or more convoluted path towards your ideal career. Sometimes you just need to take that first step.

What’s Your Daily Digital Routine?

Check Facebook. Update Status. Like. Check Twitter. RT. Check Blackberry. BBM. Check NYTimes.com. Check WSJ.com. Shake Head (or smile). Check Email. Reply. Check Blog Feed Reader. Post Comment.

This is a daily digital routine that may not be a far cry from your own.  Sit back for one moment and ask yourself: What do I do every day that involves checking something online?

A large part of our daily lives have gone digital.  Times Magazine author, Lev Grossman, observed this in an interview with Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher for The Social Network, when the movie was coming out. He wrote, “Doing things on Facebook, friending people, checking your news feed — these are so much a part of our daily routines now.” (Click here for the interview.)

I read that article and knew he was right.  Frankly, it’s becoming hard to disagree. I have a daily digital routine, so do the majority of people I know.  This is a shift in society that the film drew attention to – not just Facebook, but how we’ve gone digital. The question becomes, for a career services professional like myself, how can you move your daily digital routine in a direction that will help your career? That is, if you are not already.

This might seem overwhelming at first.  You may think, “I already have so much to do, how can I add checking and interacting on LinkedIn to my routine?”  The answer is – do what works best for you.  There are so many platforms online today that you can leverage to build your network and help develop your career.  You just have to do some research to identify those platforms and see if they could benefit your professional development.  LinkedIn is not for everyone. Twitter isn’t for everyone. Facebook isn’t for everyone. But, are the companies you want to work for on there? Is a leader in your field on there? If so, then think about when and how you can incorporate those platforms into your daily digital routine.

For example, every Sunday will be professional digital day.  Write a blog post. Check LinkedIn. Make a comment (or not). Check the company’s Facebook page.

These are tools to help you and you have control over them. You determine how frequently you log-on and what information you provide. Try incorporating more career building into your daily digital routine. If you don’t like it or it’s not worth it – then stop.

For resources to get started with platforms, go to our homepage http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/ and select the icons on the right for Vimeo, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Plenty to Be Thankful For….

By Barbara Hewitt

It’s that time of year again…Thanksgiving is right around the corner. Although we may be surrounded by turkey and pumpkin pie, this holiday also presents a time to reflect on those things for which we are truly grateful. Good health, family and friends all come easily to mind, but as I reflect on my life, I am also truly grateful for the wonderful education I have been fortunate to attain. The opportunity to learn about the world, develop new skills, and broaden my horizons are all aspects of my educational experiences I truly cherish. I’ve received degrees from a variety of institutions, including a small liberal arts school, a mid-sized public institution, and a large Ivy League school. Although the experiences differed greatly from one another, all were valuable and have helped me to pursue and reach my career goals.

There are many reasons why I consider an education to be a blessing, but perhaps one of the most practical is that it allows individuals more choice and freedom in their careers. In today’s increasingly complex and rapidly changing world, applicants for most jobs must demonstrate that they have (in addition to some very specific skills for particular jobs) a variety of more general skills, including the ability to continually learn, the ability to communicate effectively, and the ability to solve problems. Developing these high-level skills allows job candidates to shift between industries and jobs more easily in an ever-changing world because they are transferable and are necessary to succeed in a wide variety of work settings.

The skills developed in college can also really pay off in terms of job security. For example, in October 2010 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher had an unemployment rate of just 4.7%. Of course, this is much higher than the 2% average back in 2007 for college graduates, but much lower than the current unemployment rates for those with some higher education but less than a college degree (8.1%), high school graduates (9.2%), or those with less than a high school diploma (14%). Although having a strong educational background does not guarantee that you will always be employed, it does increase the likelihood that you will be able to reenter the labor market in a new position if necessary, perhaps in a different functional area or industry.

A college degree also increases the choice of jobs open to you and allows more control over your career. A wider variety of career options will be available to you simply because you have earned a degree. For example, many jobs require applicants to have at minimum an undergraduate degree, but often the degree does not have to be in a particular field. Consulting is a great example of this. Consulting firms hire individuals with all sorts of academic backgrounds from Penn, but successful applicants have in common a broad skill set such as the ability to work in teams, excellent analytical skills, strong communication skills, etc. Your Penn education will open up many doors for you in the working world, not always because of your specific degree, but because of the fact that you are broadly and well educated. During the coming weeks as you write term papers and prepare for finals (in addition to eating turkey and pumpkin pie!), you may wonder if all your work is worth it. Be assured that it is….and be thankful for the opportunities your Penn education will present to you throughout your life.

The Back-and-Forth of Transferable Skills

One of the things we constantly emphasize at Career Services is how you can ‘transfer’ the skills you’ve learned during your academic career to a job in industry or consulting. I recently heard from a PhD in Biochemistry who just accepted an academic position at a Florida University that the ‘transfer’ can sometimes go the other way.
In his email, he emphasized that what made the most impact on his selection committee was what he’d said in his “Statement of Teaching Philosophy” about how to get his students to approach a research problem. Instead of using a piece of academic research to illustrate this, however, he’d used something straight out of a workshop I’d led on ‘Managing the Non-Academic Interview”—how to answer an off-the-wall quantitative question like, “How heavy is a Boeing 707?”
First, he emphasized that the wrong thing to do would be to try to come up with the ‘right’ answer, as students might be tempted to do if they were facing an academic advisor or dissertation committee. Instead, he went into some detail about how the question should be clarified (“Before or after a flight?”, “With passengers or without?” etc.) and then separated into component parts, (“Let’s see…a Boeing 707 probably has 30 rows of seats, with 6 people in each row, except for first class…6 rows of 4 seats, so that’s 24 + 144…160 passengers with an average weight of let’s say 150 pounds, and average baggage of 25 pounds, so 175 x 160 equals 28,000 pounds. Then the plane itself is pretty light—less than what a car would be per passenger—let’s say 1000 pounds for 4 passengers, or 40,000 pounds for all of them. Then a gallon of fuel is lighter than a gallon of water, and that weighs about 8 pounds, so let’s say 6 pounds x 1000 gallons…”) You get the idea.
What made this so appealing to the selection committee was that it closely matched the spirit of inquiry and cross-disciplinary thinking that were fundamental components of the University’s mission. The ‘thinking-out-loud’ aspect of the description triggered a lively discussion of the candidate’s interview, and gave him much more of a chance to display his teaching style and techniques than any discussion of his own research might have done.
So the next time you’re in a Career Services workshop on the Non-Academic Job Search, keep your eyes open for something that might be useful on the academic side as well!

Using Dirty Diapers to Illustrate Transferable Skills

Dr. Joseph Barber

I have been thinking about skills and competencies quite a bit just recently. This was triggered first by the fact that my introductory period working at Career Services recently ended. Many jobs have a 3-4 month introductory period, after which your progress is evaluated. All being well, this introductory period evaluation is a time to focus on future goals to reach for, and skills that should be acquired or put into action. In my case, the good news is that I passed the evaluation, and so here I am today! Ok, so it wasn’t really an exam where there are simple questions that need to be answered, of course, but an assessment of how effective I have been doing what is required of me in this role as career counselor for graduate students and postdocs. The only way to pass this kind of assessment is to illustrate the skills that I have by putting them into action to achieve measurable outcomes. Remember this last sentence, because this is really the key to being successful with any job application and interview. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

The second reason I have been thinking about competencies is based on the fact that I have just become a first-time parent. I’m a dad…, and all of a sudden I feel completely incompetent in terms of this enormous responsibility. Right now I dealing with the basics: burping, changing, rocking, changing, carrying, changing…, and this is already proving quite the challenge. I haven’t even got to the point where I need to figure out when to buy her first cell phone, how to teach her to drive, or how to convince her not to date boys from rock bands. Strange as it might seem, however, many of the skills I have been using here at Career Services are the same skills that I am trying to use when caring for a baby, and the same skills that most employers are going to find attractive.

I am talking about those elusive “transferable skills”. These are skills that you gain from one experience (let’s say completing a PhD in English), that you can go ahead and use in a totally different experience (for example, getting a job outside of academia as a development director at a non-profit organization). Your work on the writings of Oscar Wilde may not seem to have much application outside of university research, but what’s most important are the skills you put into action that allowed you to perform all aspects of this research effectively.

When you apply for jobs, employers not only need to see that you have skills, but that you can use those skills effectively. In your CV, resume, cover letter and interview, you need to be able to illustrate your skills in action by using real-life examples that show just how effective they are. Anyone can say that they are a good problem-solver. By showing how you solved a problem, and why solving that problem was ultimately important, you are much more convincing. It doesn’t really matter what the problem was, so long as you can show how you identified and addressed it.

To see an example of illustrating skills, and to show that transferable skills really are transferable, let’s look at what I am spending most of my time doing right now (career counseling and child care), and see how I can market these experiences effectively.  Here are some of the most important transferable skills that you should always be on the look out to put into action:

Accountability

  • Career Services: Successfully coordinated panel discussion program by inviting three speakers to talk about alternative career options for scientists for an audience of 40 students.
  • Child care: Utilized on-line resources to improve effectiveness of baby swaddling technique, leading to a 20% reduction in infant ‘evil arm’ escapes, and maintenance of doctor-defined core body temperature.

Adaptability

  • Career Services: Gained working knowledge of Dreamweaver to update Career Services website, and added multimedia resources (Articulate presentation, audio clips, video interviews with alumni) to enhance experience for users.
  • Child care: Maximized daily productivity by utilizing quiet periods in early evening to powernap, leading to effective use of nighttime hours to provide child care with no decrease in day-time work output.

Communication

  • Career Services: Presented 4 workshops to groups of 10-25 students on career strategies, wrote 3 blogs, and assisted in the development of 4 PowerPoint presentations to effectively communicate career advice to wide diversity of graduate students and postdocs.
  • Child care: Maintain detailed logbook of feeding, pooping, and sleeping activities performed by child to provide pediatrician with accurate representation of daily activities.

Initiative

  • Career Services: Collaborated with 6-person team to develop in-print and online program evaluation forms for use after each workshop and panel discussion given during spring semester, to assist in tailoring programs to meet the needs of students.
  • Child care: Complete efficient removal of soiled child packaging units by identifying behavioural precursors to child discomfort prior to loud audible indicators, resulting in additional 40 minutes of sleep for over-worked co-parent.

Project management

  • Career Services: Identified and contacted 4 alumni to request participation in video interviews during career fair; recorded and edited video footage to create podcast for Career Services website to assist students in developing strategies for maximizing outreach to employers.
  • Child care: Coordinate scheduling of 3 local family assets to assist in daily care of child, moving care resources to upper or lower levels of care facility to facilitate needs of volunteers of different age-ranges with varying locomotory abilities.

Problem-solving

  • Career Services: Identified need for technology updates to allow office cameras to record complete mock interviews, and worked with office manager to order and acquire updated resources.
  • Child care: Developed stepwise process to systematically identify causal factors leading to infant crying, resulting in 30% reduction in Tylenol consumption needed to address noise-related cerebral discomfort.

Team work

  • Career Services: Partner with career counselor to develop interactive workshop on transferable skills by identifying program goals, creating group exercises, and framing discussion points based on experience of presenters.
  • Child care: Coordinate all daily activities with co-parent to effectively manage resource acquisition, consumption of nutrients, reorganization of living space, and financial responsibilities, leading to 50:50 division of labour, and 100% completion of household chores.

Leadership

Well…, leadership skills are an important area for me to focus on in the future. Hopefully, when I coordinate the Biomedical & Life Sciences Career Fair as part of the Graduate Team here at Career Services, there will be plenty of opportunities to illustrate my leadership skills. From the baby perspective, I continue to work with my wife to develop our strategic plan for effective child-rearing. We can come up with all of the house rules we want (e.g., no computer or TV in the bedroom), but an illustration of leadership skills in this case will be sticking with these rules. I’m no fool…, I am expecting this to be a near impossible task!

Take a look at the list of transferable skills I have provided above, and try to look back at your own academic and non-academic experiences to see if you can come up with effective illustrations of you using these skills to achieve quantifiable outcomes. If you have trouble finding a good example for a particular skill, try looking for new and different experiences where you can put this skill into action (e.g., joining a club, volunteering). If you are interested in thinking more about transferable skills, then consider meeting with us here at Career Services