Career Exploration
One student's journey through the process of discovering a career.
Resumes can be a very simple or very difficult part of the job search process. All you have to do is clearly and concisely describe your abilities and experiences to potential employers. However, with each resume you submit, you must tailor those skills so they are relevant to the company to which you are applying. As someone who does not have a clear plan for my future quite yet, finding enough specific, relevant skills for any specific job is not really possible, so I must make what skills I do possess relevant. For some jobs, this is easy; for others, not so much. Keeping with the theme of last week’s post, I decided to tailor my resume to a business internship at AbbVie Inc., a biopharmaceutical company that markets their treatments around the world to help as many people as possible. This job tied in with my work interest as a helper and my interest in trade compliance, so it seemed like a great place to start, but the tailoring process was not as simple as it seemed.
As far as relevant experience goes, I have volunteered multiple times, shadowed at a pediatric clinic, and took a job as a nanny in the past. All of these experiences can be tailored for communication and possibly leadership skills. While homeowners, patients, and families I have worked for are the obvious beneficiaries of my contributions, I have also gained valuable experiences, such as improving those skills and forming new relationships with a variety of people. However, these experiences would be better on my resume if I were applying for a position in which I worked with children. That kind of career is what I was thinking I might want to do at first, but since I am now leaning away from that possibility, these experiences are not quite as relevant as they once were. And since I am just now discovering new ideas of what I may want to do in the future and have no definite career plans yet, it is difficult to find or start obtaining new experiences specific to a certain career. My top skills are probably problem solving and analyzing situations, and while they are listed as key skills in the job description, positions like the one I “applied” for tend to emphasize communication skills more than anything else. I have developed my communication skills over the past few years, but they can always use improving. On the flip side, I do not have as much experience with leadership positions because I am very introverted, and leading is not within my comfort zone. Since most companies are interested in those kinds of skills above all others, though, I have been trying to work on those skills more. The other skills listed on the resume are oral and written skills, and while these are not my favorite things to work on, I have built them up for certain classes and can use them fairly well. Through the process of writing a resume, I have learned that while I do have some of the skills required by employers, I need to hone in on much more specific ones for a specific job I am looking for. While I may not know what that job is now, there are universally desired skills like leadership that I can be working on until I find the job match that is right for me.
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AuthorHello! I'm Tricia Bacon, a sophomore at UNC Chapel Hill and a current explorer of potential careers. Archives
November 2016
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