08 Understand your Own Abilities and Determine the Job Seeking Direction Clearly #

Hello, I am your interview course teacher Yang Yukun. Welcome to Lesson 08: “Understanding Your Own Strengths and Clarifying Your Job Direction”. In this lesson, we will analyze how to better understand ourselves. You might be wondering why we are discussing self-awareness instead of interview skills and successfully receiving job offers. The reason is that only by understanding ourselves better can we clarify our direction and obtain better positions.

Understand Your Own Strengths #

I often get asked by my friends around me: “What career path should I choose? My current job is so tiring, and I want to switch careers, but I don’t know how to choose?” or “The salary in a certain industry is so high, maybe I should give it a try?” If you ask these questions, you may be influenced by many interests in society and have forgotten the original intention or have not considered future career planning. Sometimes I hear people say, “I hope to have my own coffee shop.” If this is just a joke, it can be easily dismissed. But if you are serious, have you considered what preparations you need to make before doing this? Therefore, when choosing a job, you need to think about your strengths and the preparations you have made for this job.

Here, I recommend a career personality assessment tool, MBTI, which can help you determine if you are more extroverted or introverted, whether you are a person with a plan or an exploratory person, whether you prefer challenging work or prefer to assist the team in executing tasks, etc. Of course, you need to rely on your own inner thoughts when taking the test.

Clarify Your Job Direction #

After taking the test, you need to start thinking about how to clarify your job direction. The key is to play to your strengths and find a suitable job. As the saying goes, “There are no bad jobs, only bad workers.” I believe that any job has great prospects as long as you do it deeply and comprehensively. Try not to feel anxious about things you haven’t touched yet, as this will limit your thinking. For example, people nowadays generally consider two aspects when job hunting: industry relevance and expertise.

• Industry relevance can be divided into internet companies and traditional companies. For example, if you are innovative and willing to change your life, you can choose the internet industry. If you prefer stability and prioritize procedural work, you can choose traditional companies.
• Expertise-related aspects can be divided into hard skills and soft skills. For example, hard skills include editing, accounting, research and development, law, statistics, etc.; soft skills include sales, event execution, customer service, creativity, etc.

You can refer to the table below for specific examples:

According to the data displayed on the Lagou platform, the top 5 popular positions in the internet industry are as follows:

• R&D engineers require technical skills, logical thinking, and time management, among others.
• Product managers require logical thinking, communication skills, and execution ability, among others.
• Operations positions require analytical skills and macro management abilities, among others.
• Marketing positions require creative ideas, an outgoing personality, and communication skills, among others.
• Sales positions require strong communication skills and an outgoing personality, among others.

If you want to learn more details about other positions, I suggest taking the MBTI test to find out which positions you excel at. I believe the test results will overlap with your previous understanding of the positions. At this point, you can search for high-relevance positions on the Lagou website, and then check the job descriptions (JD) for these positions. I recommend searching and reviewing JDs from multiple companies in the same position, and mark the overlapping parts, as these are the essential skills for the position. However, keep in mind that different JDs may have different requirements. You can choose the most suitable company based on your strengths and past experiences.

You can also describe the company’s position requirements to yourself and the company that invited you for an interview to verify if it is really your skill direction. Finding your own direction of development is one aspect. Of course, you also need to have a correct understanding of your work experience and abilities. In my years of reviewing resumes, I often receive resumes from candidates with around three years of work experience applying for executive positions. Maybe you have excellent managerial skills, but executive positions still require many years of work experience and project accumulation. Therefore, I suggest that when submitting your resume, you also need to clarify what stage of work experience you should have and what stage of work you are in, so as to find the most suitable position for yourself. I believe that through several years of training, you will be able to quickly obtain the job level and salary you desire in your current position.