One Million and Beyond

Job Search Series – Step 1 – Analyze your previous experience

By Matt - Friday, February 15th, 2008

The very first thing you need to do when you’re starting a job search, in my opinion, is you need to stop and take a step back. By taking a step back you can look at your previous experience and see what you’ve done in the past. For me this is the starting point because what you’ve done in the past will help you and others determine if you’ll be good at doing things in the future. It also gives you some perspective as to where you’re coming from which will help us in Step 2 – Know what you’re looking for.

I start my analysis by listing all of my previous jobs/titles and responsibilities that I’ve had. If you haven’t looked for a job in a long time this can take a while. Really stop and think about what you’ve done and what your responsibilities where then compare that to what you actually did (they don’t always match up).

Next you need to write down aspects of each job that you liked and didn’t like. Pretty much every job that we will ever have comes with its good side as well as its bad. The goal is to make sure that the positive aspects outweigh the negative ones. Personally I find that unless I stop to think about it some of the more pleasant aspects of a job are lost in the negativity that is driving me to look for another job. Remember you want to highlight the positives as items that you might want to look for in the future.

Now you also want to look at the negative aspects of each job. If you’re searching for a job you’re either out of work or have decided to move onto something better. Either way there is a good chance that there was something negative or a series of negative aspects that got you to the point of searching for a job. Because the aspects themselves are negative we don’t need to treat them as all bad. We’ll use these or parts of these in Step 2 to make sure we don’t fall into the same trap again.

Finally, the good and bad of the job aside, think about your actual performance on the job and be realistic; was it the best that it could have been? The answer will hopefully be yes but it might not be. Don’t get discouraged if it isn’t. We take on jobs and responsibilities that sometimes we don’t like and aren’t great at. Our performance at these jobs is often not optimal but that doesn’t make us bad people. Looking at this realistically and honestly will give us a good starting point when we get out there to look for a new job.

From a personal perspective I am highly critical of my own performance and this part of the analysis always gives me some trepidation. I start beating myself up over things that went wrong where my performance could have been better than it was. Don’t get caught in a negative rut when you’re doing this. Use it to discover things about your working experience that will help you down the road. For example over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that I am not a highly detail oriented person. A lot of the times where I feel I could have done better performance wise have involved highly detailed tasks. I used to beat myself up over this because I know I can do a lot better when it comes to this. Rather than dwell on this I can identify that although I can do the detailed work I probably shouldn’t be looking for a job that is 90% detail work. We can highlight the jobs and tasks that we excel at based on our performance to help us identify the jobs we’re good at and we like.

Surprisingly if you’ve never done an analysis like this you might learn a few things about yourself. You might learn that you like to coordinate projects or that you’re not a detail oriented person or countless other items. You might find some holes in your training that you can fill in before you more onto your next job. Be honest with yourself and if it helps to have someone help you go through this then by all means do it.

Remember if you haven’t written your resume in a while this exercise will help you not only come up with the points that you’ll put down on the resume but it will also help you highlight your strengths. Also knowing where you’re coming from will make the interview process a lot easier because you’ve gone through and thought about your past rather than try to talk to it on the spot.

On Monday we’ll move onto Step 2 – Know what you’re looking for where we’ll take what we learned in this step to give ourselves some focus before actually writing or changing our resume.

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