If you can prove you meet all the employer’s needs by relying solely on paid work history and formal education, great! Do it! Employers believe that if someone else has paid you to do the job, you are more likely to be good at it. But, what if your formal employment and education doesn’t match the job you want now? …Until you offer proof from other sources, you will appear “UNqualified”. It’s important to remember that even if you haven’t taken a course or been paid to do the job you want, the employer hires all of your knowledge and experience, regardless of where you gained it. Your unpaid experience could translate into skills the employer needs, so don’t limit yourself.

At 16 Gordon was more experienced in car repair than most adults. He had helped his uncle overhaul more than a dozen engines and had done two all by himself, just never as an “employee”.

Nancy could prove she was great at caring for the elderly because she had been caring for her grandmother for the last 3 years. Gran, all her friends at the Senior Center and her Gran’s Doctor will vouch for her skills even though she wasn’t a certified caregiver.

If you only look for proof among your paid work history and formal education, the employer may never see the talents you could bring. When you are pursuing a job, you must let the employer know that you have what they need, even if your Prove Its come from unpaid work or informal education.

As an employer, I have received thousands of resumes that made me wonder why the job seeker sent them to me. Their selling points may have proven they’d be great … but not for the job I advertised. Perhaps they had skills I needed, but I will never know because they were screened-out in the first round.

I have coached people who got their best Prove Its from “unpaid experience”… volunteering at their child’s school or a local community center, work assignments in prison or an addiction recovery program, or personal experience, such as managing of a community softball team.

Jason is a great example. He wanted to be an Assistant Manager in a Restaurant. He’d been a Cook and a Waiter, but never a Manager. He believed his life experience and natural talent was enough, so we took the most important Employer Needs for the job, and set-out to Prove It. Need by need, I asked him, “Why do you think you can do this?… When have you done it before?” Many of his answers came from a single experience…taking-over as Coach of a community softball team that had been last in the league for 2 years. As coach, the plan he created helped him re-vamp how they practiced, correct mistakes, teach new skills, bring in new talent and motivate the defeated players. He took the team to second in the league within a year. He was a great Manager! We just had to present it so the employer could connect the skills he used with the team to the skills needed as an Assistant Restaurant Manager.

When you read the skills Jason used as a softball coach, did you think “that’s nice, but an employer is never going to buy that as proof”? It depends on how you present it. Most employers would express surprise that someone who grows award-winning tomatoes in their back garden thinks it proves they can run a farm, or that because someone is a Mom they think it automatically qualifies them to be a Nursery School Teacher. These job seekers do not understand the rules of using unpaid experience to Prove It.

Part 2 – Can be found here.

This is an excerpt from a new book by MacDougall/Harney copyright 2008. It is printed by permission of the authors and can not be duplicated.

Photo by dheuer

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