Marketing for the job market

Marketing oneself could be an important part of ones professional job search. I have never had much luck with it but I have not practiced it very much either however I have friends that have been very successful with marketing themselves. One easy approach would be to solicit professional resume writing help and believe it or not, there are professional resume writers out there if you look. However if you are like me and tackling the project yourself, it may serve you well to give several templates a cursory glance before writing just to get a sense of the formatting that is generally expected. Keeping things short, to the point and as impressive sounding as possible is good marketing.

Photo courtesy of Rhonda Robison Berkeley

A few tips I think may be helpful when trying to be creative I pull from different areas of my life. According to my fathers suggestion reading just the first sentence of each paragraph is an adequate way to get the idea of the information being conveyed without reading the whole thing so instead of putting paragraphs about your past try and focus on shor sentences that convey the necessary information. Although what you do may not be impressive to you does not mean it can not be cleaned up to sound better. As an example, I spent a summer doing construction and one project I worked on was digging ditches to burry a pipeline for water service. I used a backhoe while on this project, that make me a heavy equipment operator, not a ditch digger. Vocabulary can be very important. I was on a job once and a piece of equipment was not working. I resolved the issue and was questioned about the solution. I explained that I had repaired a high impedance air gap to get the device working. In reality, that just means plugging it in but it sounds much fancier.

Photo courtesy of Pandaworkshop LLC

I would also suggest, Belong to an organization, if you don't find one, it's out there and if you really can't find one then start one. But really, they are out there, I joined one and even submitted my credentials to get some letters to put behind my name if I want.