Marin Professionals IT Career Group

The Work, Repurposed
Sean Nelson

Employable professional seeks repurpose of transferrable skills
into sustainable occupation.

If you really examine a resume or a job requisition, you’ll probably agree that 

these are not ordinary documents.  They are precisely crafted expressions of 

an idea directed towards  a specific audience, presenting one part of a puzzle 

and seeking an exactly complimentary  piece.  

A good place to start your transformation is to discover just what your skills really 

are, how they are described in the jargon people use today and where those skills 

are used. 

Discovery:  An objective view of your skill set is needed because it can
be difficult  for us to see what  we really have to offer. Seek out a former colleague
or business associate  familiar with your line of work. Interview them about you and 

the skills they have seen you use  on, and off,  the job.  

Ask them what stands out when they think  about you. 

This may seem an embarrassing exercise,  but it can also be a surprising one.
Be sure  to write out the questions you want answered and seek honest responses.
Spend some time organizing the answers and thinking about the skills discovered.

Expression: Identify some industries, or types of organization, that look interesting.  

Read some news articles and job descriptions in these industries, paying particular 

attention to the wording  that is used. Map as many of your ‘discovered’ skills onto 

the job descriptions you’ve read as  possible: 

Use their words to describe what you know how to do.

Refactory : Now that you have some new fangled ways of expressing what you
are, you need some new ways of thinking about what you do. Concentrate on
the value that your use of the skills,  the ones the interview discovered, bought to
the organizations you were part of and how that might  fit into the organizations you’ve
been reading about.  

For example, say you had been a systems administrator working for widget
manufacturing company.  Your industry reading indicates that many manufacturing
concerns are interested in cloud computing. Your ‘discovered’ skills include
 knowledge of servers, applications and operating systems, dealing with vendors of
computer services, assisting internal customers, persistence and raw diplomacy. 

These are all skills needed in by companies as they implement and support cloud
computing.  You are already half way to cloud computing expertise. Start thinking
about your resume and your accomplishments such that cloud computing is the
next and most obvious next step in your career.

Update : In the course of your industry and job description reading, you will probably
have found a set skills that are usually required. You may not have some of them and this
ruins yourall your good Imagineering. So. Ruthlessly seek out and 
consume any sources of enlightenment on these topics.  

Sources include  online training courses, meetups, trade shows, industry association
web pages,  Dr. Wiki and of course, Professor Google.  If software is involved get
hold of demo versions and try them. Doing these things will increase the depth of
your knowledge in these areas and your ability to speak intelligently about them.  

You may think you are a well versed expert, but you can sound, and be, more 
like one than you may realize.

That is more than half the battle because we often  
become what we play at.