How to Market Your Skills in Your Job Search

By Curt Rosengren US News and World Report-Money Posted: April 21, 2011
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/outside-voices-careers/2011/04/21/how-to-market-your-skills-in-your-job-search

You’ve seen skills checklists that ask you to tick off every skill that sounds like you. When it comes to telling your story to a prospective employer, it’s still one-dimensional. There’s nothing to back it up.

If you want to talk about your skills in a compelling way, you have to go deeper than that. One way to do this is to forget the checklist and take a longer and more fruitful approach to identifying your skills.

Remember potential employers aren’t interested in your skills; they’re interested in how those skills can meet their needs. The following will help make your story more compelling by letting you demonstrate that.

Reverse engineer to find your skills

In a nutshell, you’re going to identify your skills through reverse engineering. You will look at three things:

1. Your big picture responsibilities

2. The tasks you had to perform to fulfill those responsibilities

3. The skills you needed to successfully perform those tasks

Start by making a list of the big picture responsibilities you had in your last job; for example, marketing planning, or coordinating teams, or fundraising. Once you have your big picture list, take each of those and start to reverse engineer them. Ask, “What tasks did I perform in order to fulfill that responsibility?” If the responsibility was marketing planning, maybe you say, “I researched the market, identified the opportunities and needs, and created a budget.”
After you identify the tasks, the next question is, “What skills did each of those tasks require?” Researching the market might have taken an ability to identify the relevant information, to find the information, and to compile and organize the information. Depending on the answers, you may find that you need to go down more than just three levels to get to the detailed skills. For example, if the task of finding the relevant information was actually broken up into finding the information online, in the media, and from people with subject matter expertise, those might be three very different tasks requiring different skill sets.

It’s the same with the individual skills you identify. Sometimes they will yield even more detailed insights if you dig a little deeper. For example, if you look at the skill of being able to compile and organize relevant information and ask, “What makes that such a strong skill?” you might realize that it boils down to your analytical ability, your ability to see connections between disparate pieces of information, and your ability to distill volumes of information into its essence.
Why reverse engineer? ou’re thinking. “This is work; wouldn’t it be as effective with a list?”

I’m absolutely sure. Why? Because now not only do you have a list of skills (which is likely to be more comprehensive than if you had simply tried to come up with a list off the top of your head), you also have a deep picture of how each of those skills relate to the big picture. More importantly, you have a direct picture of how each of those skills contributed to the benefit you created (and making it easier to demonstrate benefits to a future employer).
Remember you’re not selling your skills, you’re selling how your skills can benefit the organization. With a clear picture of how your skills have contributed to organizations in the past, you can convey their benefit your prospective employer.

It’s all about being able to tell your story, clearly, concisely and convincingly. In this case, the story is about the skills you have, how they have applied in the past, and how you can apply them to benefit a new organization.

Create Skill Story Snapshots
To make it easy to be clear, concise and convincing, take each skill and create a snapshot using the following elements:

1. Skill: State the skill with an example of how you have used that skill.

2. Result: Give an example of the result of using that skill.

3. Benefit: Explain the benefit when you put that skill to use.

By creating these snapshots, you have stories ready to tell about what makes you a great candidate. When you deeply understand what you have to offer and how it has been put to positive use in the past, you no longer have to grapple with words to convey what you bring to the table. You have the snapshots already prepared. And by having a better perspective on what you offer and how it applies to the big picture, it’s easier to recognize and express how those skills can be applied in the new situation.