Job Seeking For Dummies
So here we are.
You’ve made the active choice to either change career fields, find something that better suits your needs, or you’re looking for a promotion. No matter what your reasoning, finding a job is… complicated. Let’s talk about it!
Plan it!
First things first, you don’t want to enter into the job market without a plan. Blindly applying to jobs that sound great to you will just leave you with a lot of rejection letters. In general, you should have a plan together for your career and keep it updated. Make it a living document, even, and update it as you progress in your career and achieve new positions/titles/certifications/education milestones. Always keep it for things that you want to achieve in 1/3/5/10 years. As a recruiter, I am also a career counselor for my talent and I often have hard conversations with candidates about where they see themselves vs what their experience level is actually able to get them. I make these plans with my talent so that they have a pathway to where they want to be, and they utilize me to get them there over a period of time (maybe I should start charging for career planning services?).
As far as planning on your next move, what are some things that you should be considering? Well, to start, what positions are you interested in? Do the positions that you want to apply to match your skills and experience? Where does this next role put you in your long-term goal planning?
Assess Yourself!
This will be the part of job searching that every candidate will ultimately fail at when they first start: Where are you at in your career and what are you capable of landing in terms of a new position?
Let’s start with the basics, though. Let’s say that you want to be a maintenance manager and you’re coming from being a maintenance technician (or equivalent military title). The first thing that you should do is go through LinkedIn and determine what skills maintenance managers have that you may be lacking. What education have they achieved that have helped them to become managers of people? What certifications have they earned through their work and professional development?
Image sourced from Zippia.com
For this scenario, 73% of maintenance managers have a degree of some sort, with 11 percent of those having “other degrees” which would include technical certifications such as Certified Maintenance and Reliability Technician (CMRT), Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP), and Certified Professional Maintenance Manager (CPMM). Is higher education required for you to earn a role as a maintenance manager? Absolutely not. But if the rest of the field has formal education and you don’t, then you’re behind the ball in terms of your peers and have a lower chance of being successful in your job search!
You really need to take a close look at your career goals vs where you are at professionally before applying to positions. If you are missing some key items that others in the field have, make the plan to attain those things before putting yourself out there to potential employers.
The next section is going to be repetitive, but…
Earn a Certification!
The military is great at offering certifications at no cost to you as a service member! These certifications go a long way to bolstering your resume and can give you more professional consideration than a standard applicant. Army COOL, Navy COOL, Air Force COOL, and Marine COOL are all available, and we HIGHLY recommend taking advantage of their programs as much as you can before you have to pay for these services as a civilian!
Great certifications that you can earn include Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP), Certified Maintenance and Reliability Technician (CMRT), and Project Management Professional (PMP).
Earn a Degree! (or work towards one)
According to Indeed, a professional with a bachelor’s degree earns approximately 43% more than someone with an associate degree, and over a 100% increase over someone with a high school degree only. An associate degree can, on average, will net you 7% more than someone with just some college under their belt and 47% over someone with just a high school degree.
By these numbers, you would stand to have an earning potential (as in not promised, but a probability increase) of about 40% higher if you were to just have college work towards a degree. It is in your absolute best interest to work towards higher education if you want to be competitive in the civilian work force!
There are plenty of military-friendly colleges that you can apply to and attend, most of which that also offer virtual options for enrollment and attendance. Western Governor’s University is one of our favorites being that they are a not for-profit university that allows you to complete your program on your time, and they don’t cost an arm and a leg to attend! They are internationally recognized for their programs and approach to higher education, and are definitely worth a look to see if they are right for your career goals.
Update Your Resume!
Your resume is going to be the golden ticket for employers to know that you’re the person that they’ve been looking for. Being the perfect candidate and showing that in their first impression of you are going to be two different things, and you need to put your best foot forward if you want to land that job! Let’s start with the basics of what things you should be doing to best secure your ability to at least screen through human resources (HR).
Tailoring your resume is a necessary evil. I hate it. You hate it. Computer screening programs and human resources professionals love it. Realistically, making sure that you include relevant information on your resume or application will be the key to getting in through the front door. What is relevant information? Relevant information includes similar job titles, experience that matches key words from the job description that you applied to, and relatable experience that can cross over to the job that you’re looking to secure. There are websites out there that can help you to determine how your resume looks to an automated system, such as JobScan or ChatGPT. The latter is free and incredibly useful to help you tailor your resume, you just need to be careful that the AI doesn’t make up information that’s not in your resume (because it happens).
You can also utilize a third party firm (like ours) to help you tailor your resume to a position. If it’s not a position that they are recruiting for, they may charge you to tailor your resume, but it’s normally very reasonable! If you’re interested in contracting us for that, send us a message and let’s talk!
Once you have tailored your resume and apply to your dream job, you’re all done and you have nothing else that you should do!
Ok, that’s a lie. There’s still some things you can do to help your chances of getting in front of the hiring manager. If the job posting has a hiring person linked to it, you’re going to want to reach out to them and express interest in the role and company that you’ve applied to. It pays dividends to look at the company’s webpage and mention their core competencies or vision statement as part of your interest in them (be specific with why). If no person is linked to the hiring process, a search on LinkedIn for recruiters for the company could help you to do this. If you send a connection and message request to one of them and they aren’t the person for it, they will usually direct you to who they think would be the right person to talk to.
Even after you find the job of your dreams, never stop networking! You never know when you may one day need to look for new work, or when you may be looking to fill a team with people that you’ve met and have the skills that you’re looking for.
What’s next?
In our next articles, we’ll discuss job interviewing and negotiating, which are critical steps in finding that career of your dreams.
About the Author
Donald Hible, MBA, CMRP
Don Hible, MBA, CMRP, is a Navy Veteran from the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program. He served from 2004 until 2016, and has held positions post-service in the federal government, food manufacturing, field service, maintenance and reliability, cannabis, textiling, and recruiting fields. He currently owns DH Staffing, LLC, which focuses on finding the right talent for the right fit with the right clients. He currently resides in Texarkana, Arkansas, and is a part of the local veteran community. He enjoys helping people achieve there career goals and seeing people flourish in their career fields.