Page 183 - 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

are your general skills? Your job-specific skills? Your personal
traits that add value? Your areas of exceptional competency?
Your special gifts and talents that make you unique?
Building those “stories” from your list of skills is something
we’ll tackle together in Chapter 3, where you will learn the most
concise and powerful way to verbally express your skills—the Q
statement. No question will be able to catch you off guard
because you will always be prepared to offer stories about
accomplishments that will impress and maybe even dazzle the
interviewer.
In this chapter we’ll be discussing five types of skills:

• General skills

• Job-specific skills
• Personal traits
• Competencies

• Gifts

Identifying your skills in each of these categories is the first step
in crafting stories and examples that will help you explain your
skills and experience to interviewers clearly in a convincing (and
interesting) way.

General Skills

First, let’s take a look at general skills and see why they can be so
important to you in the interview, whether you’re planning to
stay in the same occupation or you’re thinking about making a
move into an entirely new profession or a new industry.

Using General Skills in an Interview
for a Career Change
“Managing” is one example of a general skill. It is called a “gener-
al skill” because it can be found in almost every industry—sports,
computers, retail, manufacturing, health care, and even entertain-
ment. And occupations like sales manager, department manager,
production manager, project manager, program manager, office

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