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Career Self-Analysis Helps You
Write A Better Resume

Your career self-analysis benefits you and applies to how to make a resume for several cogent reasons.

Great resumes (good ones just aren't enough any more - too much competition) have several characteristics.

Among them are

The more impressive (and provable) claims you can make, the more you increase your chances of achieving the goal of the resume - Getting the interview for your job.

It's about the CONTENT -- what you can say about yourself. Without CONTENT, all your resume is -- is ink on paper.

The BEST CONTENT is DEVELOPED by good, solid resume preparation. Great resumes do NOT just happen. They come about because someone sweats out the details.

I will acknowledge I prepare resumes. But I must tell you, that NO resume writer is as familiar with

• Your history
• Your skills
• Your abilities
• Your knowledge bases
• Your work preferences
• Your passions
• Your accomplishments

as you are.

Sure, you can pay a secretary hundred$ of Dollar$ to produce a pretty piece of paper, but it takes a comprehensive career self-assessment to ferret out those golden nuggets from your background that make you $parkle, and become a sure invite for an interview.

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Career Self-Analysis Helps You Target New Careers

In the last few days, thinking about and researching the benefits of career self-analysis, I have spent some time just "nosin' around" at O*net.

Part of the insights gained is the ability to

• take a cluster of skills, abilities and other employment related concerns
• input them into the programs, and
• watch jobs come up that I never even thought of taking,

but are "interesting" to say the least.

Using an abundance of tools that are available (more about them on another page) on the internet, it is quite possible for you to

by considering skills linked to ones that you already know you have, but are higher level skills. Now stay with me here…

Why consider higher level $kill$?... It'$ about improving the level of $kill$ and abilitie$ to which you can lay claim. Many job seekers can identify the lower level $kill$, but may not know how to articulate the higher level $kill$ also known.

Career Self-Analysis will help turn up these golden nuggets to help solidify your resume.

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Career Self-Analysis -
A Most Important Aspect of Resume Preparation

Without knowing detailed information gained from career self-analysis about:

• Who you are
• Your knowledge base
• Your skills and abilities
• Your education
• Your work history
• Your transferable job skills
• The spiritual factors that affect your work life
• The geographical factors that have meaning for you
• Your outstanding accomplishments
• Your passions
• Your orientation to the world of work
• The work that brings you the greatest degree of satisfaction

You will not

• create an effective resume
• conduct a successful job search
• get the job for which you are currently best suited.

As a matter of fact, it is difficult to conceive how anyone can effectively pursue a career without a basic understanding of ones-self.

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Career Self-Analysis Is A Matter of Degrees

There are some job hunters who do not need career self-analysis.

Now, you may think that is a rather ignorant remark to make on a web page written to explain the need for career self-analysis. But, dear reader, why should I take you into the arduous process of asking yourself hundreds of questions if this is not what you need?

I have enough respect for you to rest secure in your ability to determine whether you could benefit from career self-analysis or not.

You may not be sure whether there is significant benefit for you. If you have doubts, one of the best ways to determine your need is to just determine what your job search needs actually are. You will NOT need to pursue career self-analysis if:

• You are only seeking a job in a family owned business, and your parent owns the business
• You have already been offered a position, accepted the offer, and only need to put a document in your personnel file.
• You are applying for a position:
  • Nobody else knows about
  • Nobody else wants
• You, with absolute certainty, know that you have no competition for a job that has been your life-long ambition, and meets all your employment needs.

There are still others, who have an established professional identity, have done a good bit of career self-analysis already and only need to do a little thinking to polish up an objective statement or clarify a couple of job skills.

The spectrum of need for career self-analysis goes from those referred to above, to those who have absolutely no idea what kinds of work

• For which they are most suited
• What they would enjoy or
• What would challenge them to greater achievement.

It really is a matter of degrees. Some need no help. If that's you, please feel free to advance to other pages on our site designed specifically for you. This page is designed to present the need for career self-analysis

If you have a question about whether you need the help, a quick read through this page will help you determine your level of need.

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Career Self-Analysis Helps
Develop Your Professional Identity

Career self-analysis helps you identify your best work attributes. One of the saddest things in the American employment situation is the number of workers who do not have a clear concept of who they are, professionally. Many work in jobs for which they are ill-suited for any of a number of reasons.

A sense of professional identity gives:

• Meaning and purpose to daily activity
• A basis for professional growth
• A sense of direction
• A sense of your occupational value
• A knowledge that you are making a meaningful contribution to society
• A consciousness of your own uniqueness
• An awareness of when it is time to "move on" to jobs more suited to the personal growth you have experienced.

There is a sense of belonging, well-being when you know who you are and know the contribution you make. After you have been in a difficult situation, experienced the wherewithal to take the right actions and have seen the situation resolved, your sense of self-worth rises. Abraham Maslow talked about this as self-actualization, living and working up to your potential.

It is this self-worth that helps some take the courageous steps to put a period at the end of one phase of career choice and grow into another, more rewarding phase. There is this internal compass that points to "true north." That awareness can be generated by many factors, too numerous to mention on this page.

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Career Self-Analysis Helps You
Identify Key Components of Your Professional Life

Take the printing industry, for example. 50 years ago, the layout and paste up process was something that involved a lot of

• Exacto knives
• Photo boxes
• Photos of hand drawn art
• Linotype machines and
• Very complicated graphic plate construction.

Today, one person

• Keyboards something into a laptop
• Logs on to the internet
• Transfers a file and
• Before he can get to the print shop, 500 copies of his document are
  • Printed
  • Collated
  • Bound and
  • Boxed for distribution.

No camera… No linotype… No three week wait for a business card.

Parallels can obviously be drawn in hundreds of other fields as well.

Modern companies do not even use typewriters any more.

Bio-engineering, DNA analysis, gene splicing are all technologies that did not exist a few years ago. Bio-engineers are now talking about using ink jet printer technology to design and "print out" living organs to surgically replace those that are ailing.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering have developed materials that require crafting skills unknown to man as little as 20 years ago.

The point of this discussion is that because of the state of technological flux today, there are

• Job skills
• Tasks
• Knowledge bases
• Industries

demanding workers with skills that did not even exist when the latest elementary school graduates were born. Many of these technologies do require extensive education and training.

However, even in the most modern of jobs, there are certain skills that are transferable from other occupations. So, it is not necessarily that someone has to earn a complete new education to get a job. It is the work of identifying those transferable skills that can help you to sharpen your perceived value to a potential employer within the ultra modern, science fiction come science industries.

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