THE BEECHMONT CREST CAREER GUIDE:
SURVIVING AND THRIVING IN THE CORPORATE JUNGLE
Chapter 1: What do Employers Want?
Conduct a personal SWOT analysis
The SWOT analysis is a tool that marketing executives and corporate planners use to determine the viability of a product line or enterprise. It attempts to measure how the characteristics of a business entity match the conditions of the external environment. The SWOT analysis consists of four components:
- Strengths: The strengths of the business venture or product line
- Weaknesses: The weak points of the business venture or product line
- Opportunities: Opportunities in the external environment that could be exploited
- Threats: Threats in the external environment that could endanger the business venture or product line.
Consider how you could apply these categories to yourself as a job seeker:
Strengths:
- What skills/qualifications do you have? How are these skills and qualifications unique? What makes you “special” as a job applicant?
- What aspects of your educational background are likely to be especially attractive to employers?
- Which items in the “Experience” section of your resume are the most relevant in the current job market?
Weaknesses:
- Does your resume indicate any gaps in employment? How will you explain this time “on the bench?”
- Have you switch jobs frequently? How will you convince potential employers that you aren’t a job hopper?
- Are you attempting to change fields? Can your experience in your current/past area of specialty be an asset in the new field you have chosen?
- Do you need more education? Can you reasonably argue that your practical experience and/or self-taught skills are a reasonable substitute for the formal education that you lack?
Opportunities:
- Has your industry (or the economy as a whole) changed in any ways that have made your skills and experience more valuable?
- Consider a few examples from recent history: The implementation of NAFTA in 1994 represented an opportunity for Spanish-speaking professional in the United States. The tech boom of the late 1990s created a wide range of new opportunities for computer programmers and web developers.
Threats:
- What macroeconomic changes and industry trends will make you less competitive in the near future?
- The most salient example in this area is the outsourcing/offshoring trend in the U.S. technology sector. While offshoring created opportunities for technology experts in countries like China and India, it generally proved to be a threat to their more highly paid counterparts in the United States.
Copyright 2006 Beechmont Crest Publishing