Page 101 - Marky Stein - Get a Great Job When You Don't Have a Job-McGraw-Hill (2009)

Get a Great Job When You Don’t Have a Job

• I think I can guess that you’d agree that Q statements
sizzle, while job duty statements are stale.

The magic of a Q statement is not only that it causes your reader
to have a more vivid reaction. There’s something much more
exciting about a Q statement.
When your reader can clearly “see” or “feel” what you did in
one of your past jobs, as you describe it with a quantified state-
ment, she also unconsciously imagines you achieving something
similar at her company!

Don’t Force It
Don’t worry. You don’t have to force the employer to create
images in his mind, and you don’t have to be a writer, either. If
you just supply detailed information, which sometimes can be
done by using numbers, measurements, amounts, and percent-
ages along with places, people, ideas, and things, the employer’s
brain will respond automatically.

Using Your Skills as a Starting Point

Since the first word in a Q statement is almost always a skill, you
can use some of the general skills and job-specific skills you
selected in the last chapter to form some Q statements of your
own. In the following statements, simply look at how the skill
word fits into the Q statement. Just a bit later in the chapter,
you’ll find out how to quantify parts of your statement and/or
show a quantified result of what you did.

Examples of Skill-Based Q Statements

SKILL: DRIVING
Statement: Drove over 350 miles per week through the Central
Coast, delivering over 1 ton of cargo.

SKILL: LEADING
Statement: Led a team that produced a piston that was over 12
percent more effective than the previous version.

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