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You can't control whether or not a recruiter chooses you from a sea of applicants, but you can do everything in your power to make yourself the most impressive candidate you can to stand out from the crowd.
Employability can be increased through education, work experience, and personal improvement. Education and work experience can easily be solved. You can either enrol in a programme that is relevant to your career path or gain more hands-on experience throughout your career journey. Hence, let’s focus on how to gain employability through personal improvement.
1. Sharpen Up Your Soft Skills With the constantly changing nature of work, soft skills are essential for anyone who aims to excel in their career path. Developing soft skills is just as critical as the technical knowledge and hard skills that you develop throughout your education. Employees with soft skills make a good team players and efficient managers as they are better in conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, time management and they can also work well under pressure. Nowadays during hiring process, employers would look for evidence of communication, creativity, curiosity, collaboration, cooperation and caring in the work that you have been involved in as well as your extracurricular activities for example hobbies, sports and other interests to better understand the candidate.
2. Make Your CV Shine Hiring Managers have to go through pile of CVs on a daily basis. One way to make your CV shine is to make sure your CV shows how you are uniquely different from all other candidates. Your CV shows how much effort you put in and how serious you want this job. A unique CV gets higher chances of being picked as it catches the recruiter’s attention. Bear in mind that employers spend around 30 seconds looking at your CV before deciding whether to give you an interview or not. Hence, keep it brief!
It is easy to forget what you have accomplished over a long period of time, so whenever you complete a training course, or take on more responsibilities in a current role, remember to add each accomplishment to your CV to showcase your skills and experience.
Keeping your CV up to date is essential, as you never know when you may need it!
3. Highlight your experiences
Work experience is a great way to stand out to potential employers, gain valuable insights about the organisation you worked for, and get a feel for the industry you want to work in. No matter what kind of position you hold, you will learn skills that are vital to increasing your overall employability.
You can also present some interesting and challenging opportunities that you were exposed to and which you can use to enhance future job applications or job interviews.
4. Build a professional social media profile for yourself
When we talk about professional social media profile, first thing that comes to mind is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is widely used by working adults, especially top management to showcase education and work achievements to both personal network and the public. Hence, your potential employer may have searched your name on LinkedIn to find out more about you.
Having an up-to-date profile and active presence on LinkedIn is a way in which you can attract potential employers, network with industry professionals and discover work opportunities to help you get ahead in your career. 5. Be prepared for interview
Once you know you had the interview confirmed, carefully examine the job description and understand the qualifications, qualities and background the employer is looking for in an ideal candidate. Studying the company background and the product or services they offer is also important. It provides context for your interview conversations and help you in preparing thoughtful questions for your interviewers. 6. Grow your professional network
Finding a job isn't just about what you know, it's also about 'who' you know.
If there's a particular industry or role you are interested in, begin to broaden your network by building connections both professionally and personally along those lines.
For example, if you're curious about finance roles in the sport industry, search for and follow finance professionals in the sport industry so you can observe what they do, gain their insights and even reach out to them with questions you might have.
You can also join online groups dedicated to certain industries, participate in networking events or attend the presentations held by companies you might be interested in working for.
The reason for building these professional networks is when there is any vacancy, you’ll probably be the one to pop up in their mind. Here’s how you land your dream job.
7. Develop a growth mindset
If you're looking to be challenged in your career, a growth mindset is a tool that you can use to develop positive habits and behaviours. When someone has a growth mindset, they take on challenges and learn from them, therefore increasing their abilities and achievement. People with growth mindset believe that intelligence and talents can be developed over time unlike people with fixed mindset.
Developing a growth mindset allows you to become more curious and open to learning from your experiences and mistakes, which is essential in coping with change and thriving in today's ever-changing business environment.
Remember these 7 ways and start making changes from today!