The job market is teeming with job opportunities, and your goal is to secure the most lucrative job that you are best qualified for, a job that you love. If you don’t love it, you’ll less likely be motivated to do well at it. Since the job market is already intensely competitive, you want to have a good entry strategy into it. To this end, I have five action points for you to consider. (These points are mostly applicable to full-time positions.)
1. Identify your top organizations/companies
Discover about 3-5 companies whose workforce you aspire to be a part of, then begin researching them to ensure that their culture and values are a good fit for you. Narrowing down your choice to only a few companies will help you focus especially if you’re the kind that’s more concerned about company names than job titles.
2. Get clarity on your desired job titles/positions
You want to be clear about what position(s) in those companies you’d enjoy doing the most and determine what skills are required to excel at the positions. Please note that the first two steps don’t have to follow this sequence. You can discover what positions interest you before beginning to explore what companies you plan to work at. What is extremely important is that you know exactly what positions you want and where you plan to find them.
3. Acquire the required skills
After looking through a couple of positions that appealed to you, you’ll probably notice 2 or 3 skills which you don’t have currently that overlap across those positions (that’s if the positions are all in the same field). To make yourself more competitive, endeavor to begin acquiring those required skills. You may just be one skill away from your dream job.
4. Advertise yourself
Most times people don’t land their dream jobs not because they don’t have the qualifications but because they don’t reveal what they have. It’s like someone who has the solution to poverty or air pollution but fails to showcase his/her works and abilities. You’re not being pompous if you demonstrate your works and accomplishments especially when you are job hunting. There are couple of professional websites (e.g. LinkedIn.com, Indeed.com/ca, Monster.ca, etc) that allow you to publish your portfolio online where prospective employers can find you.
Remember, if you don’t tell hiring managers/employers what you’ve got, there’s no way they’ll know. At the time I was job hunting for a full-time position, I had a profile in most of those professional websites I knew about. I’m 3 years into my current position, and I still receive emails from hiring agents who found my portfolio online. In addition, you should sell yourself on your resume and cover letter as well.
5. Don’t give up
I won’t deny the fact that job hunting can be tough and frustration sometimes, but no matter what you do please don’t quit. Don’t stop looking for and applying to jobs and never lose sight of your dream job – whatever it may be. Keep improving yourself by taking online courses, attending networking events, learning transferable soft skills that aren’t directly related to your field, and doing the right things and – for sure – if you don’t quit, you’ll definitely win – your dream job will become real to you.
These points helped me to land my dream job as a software developer at a reputable IT company. And I’m always very delighted whenever after sharing these tips to my friends they end up landing a job. Unequivocally, these points will help raise your chances of getting that dream job.
I elaborated more on this topic as well as on writing attention-grabbing resume & cover letter, and on preparing for a job interview in my book – “Be A High Achiever” .
To your lucrative, dream job!!