Thursday, January 22nd, we will focus on assessment activity leading to your communication strategies. …  My colleague, Brian Allen will co-present.  Your Careerpilot has created collateral development: resumes, correspondence, etc. as a separate topic for our next event.

NOTE: Change of venue-we’ll meet at The Original House of Pancakes in Addison (Belt Line, just east of Tollway)

Just what IS a good CareerFIT for you?

To achieve a good “fit” between you and any future opportunity, you have to ask yourself some basic questions about yourself and your prospective employers. The fit depends on how well the jobs meets your needs and how well your skills and abilities meet the employer’s needs. The employer will make a decision and extend an offer to you: now it is time for you to make your decision.  At the core of your drafting efforts is your communication strategy, those keywords that uniquely define YOU.

A GREAT resume makes effective use of the actual words and phrases you use to define the FIT between your motivated competencies and the market’s need for services and solutions.  Selection of those keywords comes from your assessment and awareness of those characteristics by which you are measured by others.  Your characteristics should be viewed in both hard and soft measurements.  They are so much more than the “the right buzz words,” or “keywords” as used in technology driven job banks (or the mirrored resume bank queries)… they are the building blocks of your message.

Most of us learned these lessons back in grade school.

1. Word selection… Your choice of words can convey very different meanings.  For example, as a manager, do you direct the activity of your subordinates… coordinate the efforts of multi-level, interactive teams or peer groups… or actually do certain functions to achieve results?

2. Effective phraseology… Often, the soft measure words used to describe what sort of a worker you are or how you perform your work, are discarded as self-serving “fluff.”  However, when built in to powerful, high impact phrases, they serve to differentiate you from others capable of doing the same work.  For example, being a “problem solver” doesn’t make you better than your professional competitors… but describing yourself as a tenacious (an adjective) problem solver, or one who solves problems professionally (an adverb), begins to personalize your strengths.

3. Whole sentence structure… Build accomplishment statements that demonstrate and prove your abilities and experience.  While resumes utilize a truncated syntax that eliminates the repetitive use of the noun “I”, correspondence and conversation dictate the more narrative use of nouns.  Use action verbs to convey actual behavior, words and phrases to describe the object being acted upon, and, when possible, state actual results of the activity.  Constructed effectively, a good accomplishment can trigger all the right questions about your strengths.  

4. Focused, behavior-laden paragraphs… to provide examples and offer proof of your strengths and experience.  A typical resume format doesn’t allow for much of this proof, but a well constructed message should trigger the questions that allow you to expand a conversation from your actual experiences.  Thus your resume and correspondence can create the dialog of your phone calls, personal conversations and, ultimately, actual employment interviews.

Yes, its worth your practice time to focus on words.  They can create high impact and convey powerful “word pictures.”  

Remember… FIT HAPPENS !

SHARE THIS POST with your network… and let them know about the scheduling AND content changes at DFWCareerpilot!… THX

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This is a great place to start for new-comers as the other Core Topics will follow in sequence… THIS WEEK’s Workshop…  Achieving CareerFIT brings focus to those elusive decisions regarding positioning and targeting your efforts.

The first five steps of the 12 step process, from assessment to beginning the evolution of your LinkedIn Profile, will be discussed.

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Write out the factors that are important to you in a job… actually write out your list.  During your career transition, learn the value of setting your offer criteria, a key element of your Personal Market Plan:

1. Creates an objective target for your efforts ahead;
2. Gives you a meaningful set of questions to ask during research and networking;
3. Provides an objective way to analyze and react to offers as they occur.

To manage your career wisely has you extending the same concept.  Consider some of the factors listed below … Examine each factor through the questions listed – and then ask, “does this opportunity fit me?”

Please let me know you’re planning to attend by filling out this quick RSVP… THX