Your skills should be transferable

In the Career Service's four-step plan to rethink your career after redundancy, the first step is simple: "Know yourself."

"Know what you have to offer - your skills and attributes," says northern regional manager Dale Bailey.

"Often people's identities are tied up in their current occupation. They may not realise that the skills they used in their old job could be transferred to a new setting."

Transferring resources from one setting to another is what a recession is all about. It is capitalism's painful way of shifting capital out of low-profit businesses, which are the first tofall over in a downturn, into more profitable fields. And many workers have no choice but to shift too.

Recognising this, job interviewing techniques have also become much more general, probing people's broad attitudes and behaviours rather than their narrow technical skills.

For this reason, the first of two seminars offered to redundant workers in the Auckland Chamber of Commerce's Jobs+Plus programme is on "CV writing and transferable skills".

The second is on "job search strategy and interview skills".

"Say the textile industry has gone. Think outside that industry and about what skills you have," says Jobs+Plus manager Leah Gates.

That means rewriting your CV to emphasise the broad skills you have acquired through your years in the textile industry - which can now be applied somewhere else.

The Careers Service website provides a long list of "transferable skills" that you might have gained outside the workplace as well - things like "organising and co-ordinating activities and other people" and "readily taking responsibility", which you might have developed by common life experiences such as "evaluating and purchasing food, furniture and appliances".

"This is a really important part of our process - analysis and reflection on what people have and how that might take them to the next step," Mr Bailey says.

The next step is to "look at your current situation, see what opportunities there are, what restrictions you face, what you can manage at this point in your life".

You can do part of this research online, looking at the Careers Service's descriptions of almost 700 kinds of jobs and studying the websites of organisations you could work for.

But Mr Bailey also recommends talking to people directly in the fields that look possible for you.

"Go and interview someone working in a job and find out what they would like from their employee, what is the best way to get in, what are the best training courses and so on," he says.

Finally, the last two steps are to decide where you want to go and make a plan for how to get there, which could include retraining, volunteer work and taking a short-term job to keep afloat and to get into the network in the area you want to break into.

The job interview techniques being used to assess people who may have come from a completely different industry often seem "bizarre", to quote someone who has been through many interviews lately.

One example: "What would you do if you had to choose between a strategic piece of work and an operational thing when both were important and had to be done by 3pm?"

The 55-year-old communications consultant who was asked this question says: "Being in journalism, you are balancing phone calls and requests and obligations and commitments all the time. You just do it."

But later he talked to a younger colleague who explained that organisations were "obsessed with 'no surprises' and teamwork and keeping everyone in the loop".

So, asked the same question, she would have said: "Both are important and have their own priorities. I would speak to my manager and decide on the basis of what he or she said."

"It's like being an actor," the consultant says. "It's completely self-serving, but she gets job offers all the time."

Mr Bailey says it's also very important for applicants themselves to ask questions to show that they have researched and thought about the job.

"Most employers would be very, very interested in people who have interesting and probing questions," he says.

"That would set you apart from someone else who didn't have questions but was equally qualified."