Is the Game Over if You Don’t Have Enough “Experience”?

I recently ran across a good article by Brad Karsh titled, “Job Talkin – The ‘Relevant Experience’ Conundrum.” He offers three excellent ideas for getting around the challenge of not having all of the experience or background that the company is seeking.

His suggestions:

1) Focus on transferable skills. Karsh suggests that if you’re applying for a job, say, in finance, and your background is primarily in marketing, that you emphasize your finance skills by listing them first.

I would add:

Take a look at some job descriptions for your target job and list examples of skills from your background that match a finance job. See yourself not as a job title such as marketing manager, but as a person who has many transferable skills, including the ability to read and interpret profit and loss statements, for example.

2) Thinking outside the job. Karsh also suggests that if you’re looking to change careers, you open your options by listing all of your relevant experience including paid, volunteer, board affiliations, and any leadership roles.

I would add:

Even recreational activities such as manager of a soccer team, can demonstrate leadership and management skills.

3) Being realistic. Karsh recommends approaching the job market with realistic expectations. When you switch careers, it’s not uncommon to take a pay cut and even accept an entry level position in your new career. This is called ‘paying your dues’, and savvy career changers understand that changing careers, while offering long term benefits, requires some potential sacrifices in the short run. The wise career changer understands that the long term payoffs can make the short term cost in salary or job title worth the price.

I would add:

Think beyond your skills and think ‘benefits’ to a potential employer. Do you either make money or save money for your company, and how do you convey this in one or two benefits-oriented sentences? In fact, if you were called upon to describe yourself in 20-seconds, could you do it? That’s important, because that 20 seconds is about all the time your resume might get before the reader moves to the next one.

Do you know the number one solution to the conundrum of getting a job without all of the experience or background that the job description requires? Informational interviews.

The informational interview process will allow you to identify job opportunities way before they become formalized in a posted job description. You’ll hear about jobs informally, through the grapevine. This casual, word-of-mouth process for identifying the ‘hidden job market’ can help you qualify for jobs that you might be passed over for, if you applied through the more conventional methods of responding to postings.

Informational interviews allow you to ‘skip to the head of the line’ so to speak, and access hiring authorities and others who know about job openings well before hoards of applicants apply for them, and before you are compared on paper with competitors who have more ‘relevant skills’ than you do.

The bottom line is that you can win jobs that you don’t have all of the experience or background for, but you must know and apply certain strategies well in advance.

Sue