Developing Work Experience College Degree Content

Your work experience college degree content is best developed when you step back from listing your employers. Take some perspective about what you need to tell future employers.

Your focus in developing your content should be in two major areas:

• Your employment assets
• Needs of potential employers

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Your Work Experience College Degree Content Focus

Conceptualize your task. Doing this first will help identify the major landmarks you must address. The areas on which you must focus include:

• Understanding the basis and objectives for listing work experience
• Identifying appropriate content
• Identifying resources to obtain content
• Professionally describing your content
• Separating your content into appropriate sections
• Formatting content for the most effective presentation

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Understanding The Basis and Objectives For Listing Work

To be successful at this task, you must understand what you are doing and why you are doing it.

Your objective for listing work experience college degree is to demonstrate to a potential employer that

It is about:

• Presenting yourself in the best possible light
• Creating a BEST first impression
• Selling yourself as eminently qualified for the position
• Demonstrating your qualifications
• Providing EVIDENCE to back up the claims made in your professional summary statement
• Providing EVIDENCE you have solved problems similar to those encountered in the position you are considering
• Enticing the employer to call you for an interview

That is a large task. To make the task even more difficult, you must accomplish this in only one or two pages (If you need more space than that, consider a curriculum vitae or a career portfolio.)

In this environment you must

• carefully choose what you say
• consider how you will present it and
• remain ethical in your presentation

. Such a task requires selecting your best content that is relevant to what the employer wants.

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Identify Appropriate Work Experience

Two tasks are involved here.

Discover What The Employer Needs and Wants

A few steps will help you do this.

• Read the advertisement for this job if one is written
• Try to contact someone in the organization to discover what is on the job description - Yes, easier said than done - but EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE
• If you cannot do that, go to O*net and research what the US Department of Labor says about such a job.
• Check out the trade publications that would likely discuss such positions.
• Try to "shadow" an employee occupying a similar position for a couple of hours or a day.

Identify Your History That Most Closely Meets Those Needs.

After considering the employer's needs, your work experience college degree section should look to your assets most likely to meet those needs. At this stage of the process you want to be as inclusive as you can be.

Do not limit input here. This is the data gathering phase of your work. Later, you will obviously need to screen out some of the items you have included here. However, this is NOT the time to omit anything.

You may later see a place where seemingly unimportant facts help to prove some of your claims. Ask some relevant questions about your own history:

• Why am I valuable for such a position?
• What assets do I have that this employer needs?
• What outstanding contributions have I made to previous employers that would be interesting to this employer?

Building content requires you to keep those questions in the back of your mind. Then scan your work history for specifics.

The fields from your work history you need to evaluate include the following:

• Describe your major accomplishments - what have you done that exceeded your previous employers expectations? When doing this, use the SAR assessment - Situation, Action, Result. Some prefer to call it PAR, Problem, Action, Result. Either is OK. The important thing is to describe what you encountered, the actions you took, and the results.
• Describe recognitions given to you - awards, promotions, commendations, honors, etc. Describe the award, the basis for the decision and what you did to earn it.
• Describe your scope of responsibility - How many people did you directly supervise, indirectly supervise? How many dollars were in your budget?
• Describe the knowledge bases you posses that lend credence to your expertise
• Describe the abilities and skills you have that were required to perform the job
• Describe any job related special training you have received in connection with your previous employers
• List the Job Titles you have held
• Describe (briefly, for big picture purposes) the work duties and responsibilities you have performed. Be selective about what you include with an eye on what the employer wants
• Identify company names for which you have worked
• Identify date ranges that bracketed your previous positions
• Focus on keywords to use

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