Career Search – Ask yourself ‘What Can I Offer?’

A career search and researching the options and jobs available to you may lead you to question 'just what can I offer?'

Before you start your job search, it's advisable to look at your job history and note down what you think you are able to offer your potential employers. We have added below a few practical tips which we hope assists you when you launch your job hunt.

Experience

Put together a kind of portfolio of your working experience. This is a good starting point and will allow you to remind yourself of achievements both within a working environment and outside of work, also helpful at this point to make mental notes in case you are required to provide examples at the interview stage.

Identify Your Skills

Identifying your most valuable skills, or transferable skills, is important and will help you identify exactly the type of role you are looking for and what you should be applying for, providing you are not planning on re-training for a different career (see Retraining paragraph below).

Transferable skills are those you can make good use of regardless of the type of industry you choose. If you search back through your career history to date, you will see that even if this skill was not your main role, e.g. administration, but you have always been involved in this.

Communication and teamwork are other types of transferable skills; again they can be used within most office and retail roles.

Which Skills Matter?

Well, they all do and it also depends on the type of career you are planning, but here are a few of the main things that you should be looking to highlight:

• Time management
• Leadership and motivational skills
• Foreign languages
• Organisation
• Interpersonal skills
• Administration
• Ability to problem solve

If you can't identify that you have some of the skills you feel are necessary to take you forward, then don't let that hinder your career search - there are always courses on at your local university that you can choose to take on, and whilst you may not yet have that skill you can add it onto your CV as 'currently studying' where it can be seen clearly by future interviewers and employers.

Retraining

In the UK there are lots of organisations you can approach to refresh any skills you feel need updating or to learn new ones. If you do choose to re-train by opting for a new qualification or skill will increase your choices related to your career search.

Taking courses, funded (free) or paid, or even taking up some more work experience in the

We can't possibly add every educational resource here, so we have added the two nationally recognised ones that you may wish to approach:

Careers Advice Service: on direct gov - a free advice and information line which offers support training, learning and qualifications.

Job Centre Plus: The Job Centre offers advice on both jobs and training