Your employability narrative
The next step is to bring all the learning together to fully realise your employability and personal potential in the workplace.
What makes you employable is the sum of all your experiences, good and bad, big and small. They all come together to form your overall employability.
Do think about your employability in a holistic way.
Your employability is like a personal brand. Every brand has its own narrative. There is always a story behind every brand.
Here are some key questions to help you identify your personal brand:
(1) What are your defining moments?
These moments have given you key insights into yourself and potential career pathways.
For example, while visiting a relative in a nursing home, you realise that you have a desire to work in aged care.
(2) What are your key development opportunities?
These opportunities may come from research, talking to people, studies, work experience, or personal experiences.
For example, volunteering at an aged care facility.
(3) What can you offer as an employee? What are your capabilities, strengths, and weakness?
Another way of thinking about this question is not what you have, but who you really are.
Even though you do have skills, capabilities, and personal qualities, your employability is not just a ‘toolkit of skills’.
It’s what you can contribute in terms of value to an organisation. You need to be able to provide or create tangible value that will meet your employer’s expectations.
It’s about how you go about the practice of working and collaborating with other people. This is where your soft skills come in handy.
The workplace context of your employability
Sometimes people often struggle to relate their experiences to employability, especially when the experience is not a ‘workplace’ one.
What does being part of a basketball team has to do with working in a job? How does being more confident from studying abroad impact your ability to perform in the workplace?
How well you perform at work is based on how effective you apply appropriate behaviours in certain situations or contexts.
The kind of attitudes, behaviours, and actions that demonstrate those skills or attribute outside of workplaces are indeed valuable in workplaces.
While your employer’s expectation is a ‘skill’, it can be manifested as behaviour and activities in the workplace.
Because we are wired differently, people may learn different skills or attributes from the same experiences. But the way you conceptualise your learning and the way you talk about it will be quite different.
This is where you have to differentiate yourself from other employee and job seeker.
Employer expectations in the context
Employability is not just about collecting a ‘toolkit’ of skills. You need to understand that there are general expectations and requirements set by employers.
How well you perform at work is based on how effective you apply yourself in certain situations or contexts. When preparing to transfer your previous experience to the workplace, you need to think about the way in which your personal attributes, skills, and capabilities that you have developed previously will be practised or applied in the work context.
Applying your employability is not a one-size-fits-all approach.
You will need to be aware of different situations, different workplaces, different professions, and different organisations.
For example, being good at teamwork does not make you employable in every employment context.
It is also important to consider the expectations of particular professionals and organisations when developing your employability and communicating your potential and value to an employer.
Continuously communicating to an employer what you can offer
Now that you understand how all of your experiences have come together to realise your employability, you’ll need to think about how to effectively communicate your employability.
In your current workplace, you need to constantly remind your manager of your worth and value since you are constantly applying yourself.
If you are looking for a new job, then you have to communicate your potential worth to prospective employers.
In effect, you must make the most out of your experiences constantly to differentiate yourself from others. You must be able to explain your potential worth to make or create a valuable contribution to the organisation.
Employers are constantly using the assessment of individual skills to make a judgment of your overall potential to contribute to their organisation.
How to communicate your employability
Interviewers in particular often use behavioural questions to determine your suitability for a role. These questions ask you to describe a situation where you have demonstrated a particular skill or attribute.
Behavioural interview questions are easily identifiable as they generally start with “Tell me about a time when …” or “Describe a situation where you …”
It’s also quite common for you to be asked very broad questions such as “Tell me about a time when you’ve faced a challenge …” or “Describe a time where you’ve had to solve a problem …”
The answers to these questions could draw on a number of skills and attributes that you have, depending on the evidence you give.
Prospective employers generally look at your past behaviour as an indicator of how you might approach a similar situation in the workplace in the future. Do remember that sometimes past behaviour may not be the best indicator of future performance for a number of reasons.
Because you’ve been through the SEAL reflection process (as outlined earlier) and you have identified the skills and attributes that you’ve developed, you should have plenty of evidence to respond to behavioural interview questions.
You may not always be asked questions that directly relate to a particular skill or attribute.
For example, you are not likely to be asked a direct question about your communication skills, but you may be asked to recount a time when you have had to negotiate with someone. On the surface, this question seems to be about your negotiating skills, but it is also about communication.
Similarly, if the question is about dealing with a difficult customer, you are likely to be demonstrating your communication skills in your answer even though the question does not specifically address communication.
How to do STAR
You first need to determine what you have got out of the experience through the SEAL process.
STAR gives you a structure for organising and communicating an example of your potential behaviour in a given situation.
The STAR acronym stands for:
Situation
Set the context for your story. It has to be short and sufficient enough to give your audience the relevant background information.
For example, I was a sales manager at ABC.
Task
What was required of you? What were you expected to deliver? Set out the task that you were expected to perform.
For example, I was asked to increase sales for the fiscal year because it has been flat for two years prior.
Action
What action or steps did you take? Your actions must be sufficient to give the audience confidence in your ability. Be succinct and logical when communicating your actions.
For example, I created a network of 52 resellers across the country.
Results
What did you achieve? Your achievements must be quantifiable (supported) and believable.
For example, annual sales increased 15% from $1.0 million to $1.15 million. Customer satisfaction also increased by 10% during that same period.
Here are some tips to help you formulate a good STAR response:
(1) Keep your answers clear, specific, concise, and focused on the requested criteria.
(2) Use appropriate recent and relevant examples. But make sure you use a range of experiences that show your capabilities.
(3) Link examples to what is expected on the job.
(4) Use the past tense.
(5) Remember that you need to demonstrate that you can do something or you possess a certain quality or competency to complete the job.