1. What can you do to analyze your strengths and skills?

Analyze your career goals, strengths,

and skills to determine how you can fit the needs of potential employers. This analysis helps
you identify industries and companies to target for your job search and how to sell yourself
to those companies during the application and interview process. In addition to analyzing
your goals, analyze your strengths and skills by creating a list. Analyzing your strength and
skills helps you accomplish two goals. First, you can determine which job you are best
qualified to pursue. Second, you can build evidence of your skills to use in your cover letters,
resumes, and interviews to sell yourself to a potential employer. Remember to update your
“skill inventory” frequently to keep the list current and to help tailor your resume for
different jobs. Outline all your work experiences and create three to five bullet points that
identify the specific skills you developed on the job and the specific results you achieved.
Identify areas of expertise you developed outside of work from coursework, extracurricular
activities, and hobbies. Having a wide variety of talents will make you more marketable. List
your sellable qualities abilities that make you an asset to a company. Identify how, where,
and to what extent you developed them. Identify weaknesses so you can work on improving
them, especially if they are often required for jobs in your field. Avoid applying for positions
that require skills you do not have.
2. What questions should you ask yourself to analyze your professional image?
3. How can you maintain a professional social media presence? Even if you create a
recognizable brand for yourself and put yourself “out there” in a variety of online locations,
you will not be competitive if your content does not persuade that audience that you have
something to offer. Post positive status updates: post about things that sell your strengths,
including everything from the professional events you attend to your volunteer work and
avoid posting negative comments or “liking” questionable content (such as inappropriate
photos or offensive jokes). Emphasize your accomplishments: post about your education,
scholarships and awards, and your work experience, include information about conferences
or presentations you attend, and comment about volunteer work and other service-related
activities. Use content marketing techniques: provide valuable information without trying to
“sell” anything, write about new trends in your industry to demonstrate your awareness,
link to cutting-edge articles and comment about them, and provide other examples that
demonstrate your interest and knowledge. Demonstrate positive work traits in your site
profiles: demonstrate that you are organized and hardworking by organizing your site
 effectively and updating it with detailed posts and show that you are open to new ideas by
posting comments about your travel, interesting articles and books, and new trends and
concepts.
4. What guidelines should you follow to select an effective resume design and format?
Although social media is an important employment communication tool, a professional and
targeted resume remains an essential element of your job search. Most employers spend
only six seconds in their initial review of a resume, so yours needs to quickly communicate
why you are qualified for the position. To identify the most qualified candidates out of a
pool of applicants, employers focus on a few critical data points: your job titles, employment
history, start and end dates, and your education. Ensure that your resume makes the first
cut by eliminating red flags such as grammatical errors, unprofessional email addresses,
vague wording, and bad formatting. The following guidelines will help you compose a highly
effective resume. The three standard ways to organize your resume content are
chronological, functional, and combines. However, the three organizations differ in
important ways. Use the one that best emphasizes your strengths and presents you as a
desirable candidate for the job. Select keywords from job advertisements you reply to and
use them to describe your skills or your job duties. If your resume doesn’t include the right
keywords, it will likely be one of the many resumes that are thrown away. Keep you resume
to one page if you are just starting your career. Use contemporary fonts (Arial, Verdana, or
Calibri) that are professional and easy to read. Align content with tabs, not spaces, to ensure
neatness. Consider separating sections with lines or borders, but use them sparingly,
especially if your sections are short. List the one email address you are using for your job
search and a phone number that has a professional voice mail greeting. Include links to your
professional social media sites, assuming they include professional content. Compose a
concise objective statement (if you choose to use one) that relates to the position you are
applying for and outlines what you can do for the employer. Use a chronological resume to
emphasize work experience, use a functional resume to emphasize skills, and use a
combined resume to balance experience and skills. When composing your resume, tailor the
content for the specific job you are seeking. Many job applicants incorrectly assume that an
all-inclusive list of skills and experience on a resume helps them be everything to every
employer. However, resumes with long lists require prospective employers to hunt to find
the relevant qualifications. Use an objective statement to show how your goals can help an
 employer. Use a qualifications summary if you have strengths and skills that qualify you for
the job but little, if any, related work experience. Use a professional profile if you have a
well-established work history and more professional experience to offer. A professional
profile includes specifies about achievements that make you stand out as a candidate.
5. What questions should you ask yourself when you evaluate the content and format of
your cover letters? Is the content clear, complete, and concise? Ask someone who is not
familiar with your school or work experience to review your content to ensure that the
wording is clear, reword or explain any vague information, carefully review your content to
ensure you aren’t forgetting relevant experiences, remove any irrelevant content or
redundancies, such as listing the same job duties for different jobs. Does the content
specifically use keywords from the job you are applying for? Ensure that your objective
statement or qualifications summary relates to the job description and that you use
keywords from the job advertisement. Is the most important information emphasized?
Organize the content directly by placing the most important information, what qualifies you
for the job, at the beginning of your resume. Grab the attention of prospective employers
who often quickly scan resumes to find the content they need to make interview decisions.
Is the resume designed well and spaced to fit the page? If your resume is shorter than one
page, use extra spaces between sections or increase the line spacing throughout the page to
fill a single standard with balanced margins. If your resume is longer than one page, evaluate
the content. Do not compress it by minimizing side margins. If you have enough relevant
and concisely worded content to require a longer resume, make sure you have balanced
amounts of text on all pages. Are alignment and style consistent? Use the same format for
content in all sections. If you used bold and italics for a job title in one of your work
experiences, make sure you used the same format for the rest of your job titles. If you right
aligned your dates in your work experience, be consistent with all dates throughout your
resume. Is the resume carefully proofread for spelling and typos? Check names, locations,
and employment dates of companies. Check the spellings of any names (such as awards and
scholarships) to ensure they are correct. Have you obtained sufficient feedback? Ask people
in your network to evaluate your resume. Provide them with a copy of the job
advertisement so they can asses whether you have met the needs of the employer. Get
feedback from a variety of different perspectives, such as instructors, career counselors, and
previous employers or supervisors. Consider getting feedback from resume review websites
 such as vMock and Nukri FastFoward that use algorithms to analyze content and suggest
improvements. If you receive conflicting advice, consider the suggestions from the potential
employer’s perspective.
6. How would you sell your strengths during onsite company interviews?
7. Select a company you would use to analyze the company.
8. How can you ensure a positive first impression during an interview?
9. List the guidelines to consider before participating in an interview mean or social
gathering. Explain why each suggestion helps you present a professional image.
10. Explain the questions should ask yourself after an interview to evaluate your
performance.