Selling your work experience to employers
All work experience is good experience, but only if you know how to sell it to employers. Here's how.
So you’ve done an amazing placement with a blue-chip company, saved the gorillas of Borneo or worked in the IT department of your dad’s business – the worst thing you could do at interview is mumble ‘the coffee machine didn’t work’, ‘Borneo was a bit rainy’, or ‘dad’s business is rubbish anyway’. You need to know how to sell yourself. If you’re enthusiastic about your experiences and about the job then it’s all the easier, but it can be hard to know how to blow your own trumpet and hit the right notes. ‘Everybody has a name, an address and a degree’, says Kirsty MacCulloch from ICI Group Recruitment. ‘One of the things that can set your application apart from any other is to use your work experience to answer the competency or additional questions that a company may ask. It’s worth spending some time thinking about your answers and making sure that you are selling yourself.’ So lets find out how…
Keep a diary of your experience
If you want to save yourself lots of head scratching when faced with tough application form or interview questions, then keep a diary of your time while on work experience. There’s no need to go to Bridget Jones proportions but simply list all the new skills you pick up, any training you receive, difficult situations overcome, teamwork examples, personal achievements, recognised contributions and so on. As Jag Gill, marketing manager for Shell STEP, explains, ‘If you keep a diary while on your placement you will reap the benefits when applying or interviewing for a graduate job – you can be specific about your involvement and don’t have to rely on memory to remember important aspects.’ The more new skills and experiences you pick up and write down, then the more examples you will have to draw from in application forms and at interview. When it gets to this stage, ‘You should make the most of the transferable skills gained, rather than focusing on the actual routine tasks completed,’ says June Kay, careers adviser at Durham University.
Everybody has a name, an address and a degree. One of the things that can set your application apart from any other is to use your work experience to answer the competency or additional questions that a company may ask
Even if you have done an amazing amount during your work experience, try to avoid telling a graduate employer about every last thing. ‘Don’t just list a load of things you did’, says Jag Gill, ‘but try to use specific examples such as outlining a project from start to finish and the value it added to the company.’ The bottom line is that employers want to know that you are suitable for the job and the company. According to the CITBConstructionSkills recruitment team, ‘Any work experience is valuable as long as you can relate it to your new job role. Explain how things you learned on your placement, such as time management, communication skills, organisation and leadership could be transferred into your new position.’ If you’ve done an unusual form of work experience, then make sure you focus on the uniqueness of the experience and the transferable skills you picked up. According to Anna Paynton who experienced a BUNAC placement, volunteering or travel can ‘tell employers a lot about a person and may set you apart from other applicants. It may help secure an interview where the applicant can answer questions related to their experience and show employers what type of person they are.’
Examples of creativity and initiative
The buzzwords of modern graduate recruitment are ‘creativity’ and ‘initiative’. Giorgio Rondelli, who undertook a successful placement with IKEA, believes that employers want you to ‘work hard, show initiative and make an effort to prove yourself during your work experience’. Employers want applicants who can think on their feet and contribute in any given situation. ‘Try to give examples of times when your initiative and creative ideas were used and implemented,’ says Jag Gill, ‘as this will impress employers.’ How you initially secured your work experience placement can also be evidence of initiative. June Kay suggests that you can ‘demonstrate your initiative and interpersonal skills by securing a placement which was not advertised’, with SMEs for example. Similarly Sally Whitman, senior manager in graduate recruitment at Deloitte, believes that taking part in a formal summer vacation programme at an early stage in your career can also display these skills.
Business awareness
‘Employers often complain that students lack business awareness’, says June Kay. Your work experience should have given you an understanding of how a business works. If you can demonstrate that you developed, as June says, ‘an overview of the aims of a business and how the different functions such as production, sales, marketing and human resources all relate’, then you will show an impressive level of business awareness. Carrie Wyatt, graduate recruitment officer for Deutsche Bank, believes that the most important thing when selling your work experience skills to employers is ‘that you can demonstrate the ability to understand the dynamics of a working environment and provide examples of work-related situations’. Again, the more specific you can be, the better.
Follow the STAR
When asked to give examples from your work experience, covering any skill or competency, it can be very useful to use the STAR method – situation, task, action, result. You describe a specific situation that occurred while on your placement, then the tasks you were given, the action you decided to take and finally the result of those actions. This is a useful way of being concise and to the point in application forms, but also helps to stop you from waffling at interview. This is only a basic structure, so don’t worry about sounding too dry or formulaic, but if you ensure that you hit on these four main points (in order) then you will really enhance your answers. You can also finish by saying what you learnt from the experience, and how it would help you in the job role for which you are applying. And as with many things in life, perhaps the best way to sell yourself is to be enthusiastic. Be positive about your work experience and how you want to develop what you learned as a graduate recruit, and you’ll be an outstanding applicant!
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