Searching job boards by skills
- Why?
- An agile strategy
- Record your findings
Although job boards are typically used when applying for jobs, you can also use them for career exploration. Searching job boards by skills can give you career inspiration and broaden your horizons. We use a cross-platform approach and provide examples of how to use this strategy.
For this strategy, an assumption is made that you have a LinkedIn account. Whilst it is possible to use the strategy without LinkedIn, it is even more powerful if you have an account. For more information about creating a LinkedIn profile, check out our comprehensive resources here.
Why search by skills?
Most people search job boards using job titles, organisations or sectors. This is fine if you're ready to apply and you're clear on what you're looking for.
However, if you're less clear, this type of search can limit you. Also, it doesn't allow you to find a match between your strengths/skills and the jobs being advertised.
On the other hand, when you search by skills, new possibilities can open up. Searching job boards based on the skills you most like to use, can lead to jobs that are more suited to you. These could even be in areas that you have never considered before. This could stimulate further research into new careers.
You can search by technical skills, transferable skills or combinations of the two. The more terms you put in, the more tailored your search becomes.
Take a look at the Reflect section to help you understand which skills are particularly relevant for you. Perhaps you have already made a skills inventory, or you could consider making one.
The Prosper portal has several resources dedicated to skills, including those most in-demand by employers now and in the future. You could also look at skills frameworks and reports to translate what you have been doing as a postdoc into transferable skills. Examples include:
These frameworks can improve your vocabulary of transferable skills. You can see which ones resonate with you the most and use them as search terms.
A cross-platform agile searching strategy
Three of the major job boards used in the UK are LinkedIn Jobs, Indeed and Glassdoor. For career exploration, these can be used in combination, switching between platforms to identify new jobs, organisations and people.
This strategy was developed by Tina Persson, an academic turned career coach, entrepreneur and author.
This first video gives an overview of the strategy for searching job boards by skills. You can download a summary of the strategy here.
Hello, and welcome to this video on Career Exploration Strategies. I’m Eamon Dubaissi, a research staff developer with Prosper. As I’m sure you know, it can be quite overwhelming to consider all the possible career options that exist, both within and beyond academia. Here, we will look at some practical steps that you could take to break down the process. We will look at ways in which you can begin to identify careers, organisations and roles that might suit you. With the career clusters and other resources on the portal, you might have been inspired by different careers. However, these are just a small range of possibilities. It’s important to take ownership of your career exploration to drive it forwards and tailor it to your own needs. The strategies we present here are designed to get you started, to stimulate new ideas, and to support you as you weigh up your options. In terms of the outcomes of the video, I will first touch upon how you can use your research skills to your advantage in career exploration. I will then spend the bulk of the time introducing you to three complementary and interlinked strategies to assist your career exploration. At the end, I will touch upon the importance of using your research into different careers, organisations and roles to reach out to people to find out more. You can make use of the very same research skills that you’ve honed as a postdoc to explore careers. In fact, you could treat your career exploration as a research project in itself. Are there some transferable skills that you possess, but have given little attention to? Perhaps you’ve never spent the time to look carefully at what you’re doing when conducting research. It helps to look at a definition of research skills to bring awareness to the process and the skills needed to conduct research. Indeed.com describes research skills as a collection of several separate skills that help you to find and review information and arrive at a decision. We make the argument here that you can also apply this to career exploration. So let’s break these research skills down and apply them to exploration. Firstly, you need to be able to search for information. For career exploration, this could include reviewing the career clusters, conversations with others, and browsing the web. You need to pay attention to detail. So where is the organisation based? What would you be doing? What is the scope for career progression and development? These are some examples. Good research involves recordkeeping or taking notes. You can make lists, journal or create a database of careers that might suit you and why. Time management is also important in research. For career exploration, you need to know how long you’ve got and when to do things by. You need to be organised with your time, especially if you are balancing with a current job. Problem-solving is at the heart of research. You have a problem when searching for suitable careers. You need to know what’s out there and what would be a good fit for you. Based on what you know about yourself, would a particular career be appropriate for you, and what do you need to do to get there? In terms of communicating your results and career exploration, this includes networking to let people know your thoughts, and leveraging the support from others. Hopefully, you can recognise these research skills in yourself, and you’ll see how they apply to the different strategies. One of the main difficulties you might have with career exploration is knowing where to start in the first place. This is the hardest part and where we are going to try to help you. We’re going to focus in on three strategies that you could use to stimulate new ideas and give you a starting point to move forwards from. A good place to begin is to zoom out and take a considered look at your current network and what those people in your network do for a job. You can map your warm network, the people that you know, in order to assess whether their careers are of interest to you. What is your warm network? Essentially, it describes the people that you know personally and, importantly, that they know you in some kind of personal or professional capacity. So this includes people that are closest to you, such as family and friends, also colleagues and ex-colleagues. It also includes acquaintances, those you have had a few conversations and shared experience with, but perhaps don’t know so well. Why is it a good place to start when first embarking on career exploration? Well, first, it is a quick and simple way to get started, to do something rather than to freeze. It allows you to start getting some new ideas. Also, it is easy to have informal chats with those in your warm network, and they can provide support so you don’t feel isolated. Your warm network can provide you with motivation. You can share your career aspirations with them, and they might be able to help you find others to connect with. Many of your ex-colleagues and acquaintances likely have a similar background to your own in terms of their work history; this can give you confidence that you too can move forwards and onto new careers. At first, the aim of plotting your network is to get an overview of what everyone does in order to direct further research. There is no requirement for you to reach out to people for informal chats at this stage, it’s just to stimulate ideas. However, as you know them personally, if something does strike you as being of interest, the best way to find out more is to ask them. So start by putting yourself at the centre of the map and ask yourself who you know. Think of all the people around you and put a branch to their name. What do they do? Note down the organisation and role. You could highlight those people that you are initially most drawn to in terms of their careers. Don’t make too many assumptions at this stage, and don’t dismiss anyone whose career you have a feeling wouldn’t suit you when you might not actually know much about that career. You can also highlight those people that might be able to give you support and advice, or those people that are well-connected and might know others in a field of interest to you. Once you’ve made your map, take a step back and critically assess which areas you might look into in more detail, or who you might meet for a quick chat with. You might choose a few different careers as a starting point for further research. As you will see with the other strategies, LinkedIn is an extremely powerful tool to strategically expand your network in areas of interest to you; it can also be of use in these early stages for analysing your current network. As you are creating your map, you can make use of LinkedIn to remind yourself of connections that you might have overlooked. You can simply browse your connections on the LinkedIn webpage to add people to the map; you can also download your connections to quickly scan them. At the time of recording, you can do this by going to settings and privacy, data privacy, and get a copy of your data. Decide whether they are worth adding to your warm network map, based on your personal connection to them, and what they offer. Over time, as you make new connections, perhaps using the next two strategies that we will discuss, you can add to this map, so it becomes not just your warm network, but it starts to change to include people that you know less well or not at all; these new connections will have the types of careers that you’re most interested in. The next strategy takes an organisation that you have an interest in as a starting point, and helps you to expand your understanding of that organisation and other similar organisations. This could be an organisation you have found in the career clusters, or one you have become aware of from a different source. It doesn’t matter where the initial interest comes from, it’s what you can then do to become more informed. This strategy helps you to start building a picture of what a sector or industry looks like. To summarise the approach, you take an organisation of interest and gather more information on this organisation and similar ones, plus types of roles available in that organisation. If you’re unsure which field you’d like to go into, you can replicate this approach with different starting organisations; we suggest keeping the information you gather separately rather than mixing things up. Then it is important to record the information you gather. This could be in a list or spreadsheet or journal, something that you can easily come back to to refresh your memory. Record your thoughts as well as facts. Ask yourself if the types of organisations and roles you are looking at would suit you in terms of your skills, strengths, and values. The final step of the strategy encourages you to use knowledge that you have gained to reach out to others for further insight, making new connections and potentially opening up new opportunities. Even just sharing a list with people that you know might help you to identify people for further conversations and networking opportunities. Let’s now take a closer look at the tools you could use to gather more information about an organisation and identify similar ones. When you Google the organisation of interest, not only do you get a link to their website, but often also returns what people also search for. This might allow you to identify competitor organisations. Make a note of these and then you can use the same tools presented here to find out more about them too. On an organisation’s website, in the About Us section, you can learn more about who they are, what they do, and why they do it, their values. Does this align with what you would like to do and where you would like to be? Sometimes larger companies also post their annual report on the website. This is useful for general research. If you do apply for a job there, it is a good resource to look at ahead of applications and interviews. Sometimes an organisation’s website might also have blogs and news items that you can read for more information. When you work at a university, you often have access to business databases through your library. Examples include Marketline, Nexis and D&B Hoovers. You can use these resources to your advantage to understand more about the organisation you are interested in, similar organisations, and the sector as a whole. Finally, LinkedIn is an amazing tool to be able to find out more about organisations and roles within those organisations. It also allows you to connect with people that work there. Just input your search term in the search bar and use the filters to find what you’re looking for. To demonstrate how this strategy works, it can be helpful to run through a worked example. I’ll take an organisation from the career clusters and show you the tools you can use to expand your knowledge. The company that I’ve chosen is LettUs Grow, who can be found in the food and agriculture career cluster. They design technology for indoor and vertical farms. When you Google LettUs Grow, you not only find the link to their website, but you can also find what other people search for. In this example, you can see other similar equipment suppliers and related farming organisations. When you visit the LettUs Grow website and enter the About Us section, you can find out more about their background story, their culture and ethics, as you can see. When it comes to business databases, in this example, I searched for LettUs Grow on the business database D&B Hoovers, and I’ve highlighted some things you can find here. They often list competitor organisations, which you can research; you can also click on the industry to find out more about which other organisations are present in this space. I’ve also highlighted the news section, which may give you more insight into the organisation. This is also something you can come back to when applying for a job, or before going for an interview. It helps to build your commercial awareness. In this slide, I shall search for LettUs Grow using the website Glassdoor. This website allows you to look at reviews from employees and get some insight into salaries. This could form part of your research; approach it with caution, as sometimes people have an axe to grind, or if there are only a few reviews, it might be hard to properly judge. Finally, when you search for LettUs Grow on LinkedIn, you can view their LinkedIn company page to gain more insight; you can also see similar pages people also viewed, allowing you to identify related organisations. So once you’ve used these various tools for your research and recorded your findings, if you’re still interested, the next step is to use your connections to get more insight and expand your network. You can start off small, share your list of organisations with friends and colleagues, they might know of additional organisations and people that work there. This is also where LinkedIn comes into its own. Using the People tab on the organisation’s LinkedIn page, you can see who works there and what their job title is. Make a note of these to come back to. You can also see whether you know anyone there, or if one of your connections does. You can request to connect with them, as demonstrated on the next slide. On LinkedIn, you can also search for professional groups in your area of interest. By joining these groups, you can connect to more people and start to learn the language of professionals in this area. Once you’ve made some connections, it’s a good time to ask for a chat and conduct an informational interview. So let’s look again at the LettUs Grow LinkedIn page to demonstrate how you could send connection requests to people who work there. When on their page, under the People tab, you can see who works there. If you don’t have any link to them, you could write a short message with your connection request. For example, ‘Hi, I’m really interested in your organisation and I was hoping to connect with you. If you can spare some time, I would love to ask you a few questions.’ Alternatively, you could just try to connect and see if they accept. You can then ask for a chat. If you have LinkedIn Premium, you can send in-mails to people you don’t know without connecting first. Consider adding any new connections to your network map. Be aware that people might not reply to your connection request and messages. Don’t take this personally, it’s just part of the process. Before we move on to the final strategy, this slide just gives an example of how you might track what you find. This is useful for all of the approaches discussed in the video. In this example, we’ve created a spreadsheet showing the organisation name, location, job roles, notes from your research, for example similar organisations that you find, people that you’ve contacted, outcomes of conversations, and other information, such as skills requirements, and then any next steps you might consider taking. Once it has been populated, you can zoom out and ask yourself some questions. Do any organisations or roles particularly stand out for you? Can you rule any others out? Is it still an area that interests you, or do you need to look elsewhere? This is also the time to look back critically at what you know about yourself from reflection exercises to ask if your own skills, strengths, motivations and values match with the organisations you have found. I am now going to take you through the final strategy, which highlights how you can use job boards for career exploration, and how searching these job boards by skills can be a powerful approach to identify careers, organisations and roles that might suit you. Let me introduce you to Tina Persson, a former academic, who later worked in the recruitment industry, and is now a career coach, author and entrepreneur. Given her background, Tina is perfectly placed to advise on career exploration for researchers. She’s an advocate for an agile job-searching strategy that can be used for research into different the career options. Tina emphasises the importance of searching by skills rather than job titles, as it allows you to be open to new areas and ideas that you might not have considered before. This approach is ideal if you’re not sure what you want to do, or you’re looking for some initial inspiration. It also allows you to familiarise yourself with using job boards, which you may use again when it comes to actually applying for jobs. It also gives you an understanding of the current labour market and trends, but keep in mind that this is always changing, so don’t be put off if you don’t find anything of interest immediately. Revisit job boards regularly to see what comes up. Accompanying videos produced by Tina are available on the Prosper portal in the Explore section. These demonstrate how to use the agile job-searching strategy with specific examples. Here, I will summarise the approach. Three of the major job boards used in the UK are Indeed, Glassdoor and LinkedIn. For this strategy, you can use them in combination. Before I move on to describe the strategy in more detail, I just wanted to go back to job titles. With Prosper, we’re often asked by postdocs for lists of job titles as a means to start exploring. Tina’s advice is to keep them in mind; not to obsess about them. Job titles are constantly changing. They mean different things in different organisations and they may even limit you when it comes to career exploration because they narrow your search. Remember that employers hire you and the skills that you can bring. They might not always know exactly what they want, and your job title could change or be negotiated when you arrive. It is a good idea to write down titles when you come across something you’re particularly interested in, especially if the same job titles come up again and again, but be openminded to what you find. When using this strategy, Tina advises to think like a head-hunter. By this, she means that head-hunters focus on the skills that a person possesses in order to find the match to what the employer is looking for. So why not adopt the same approach when looking for careers and organisations that might suit you? As the starting point for this approach, you first need to identify some of your transferable and technical skills, focusing on those that you particularly enjoy using, or are a particular strength of yours. Revisit the Reflect section of the portal to understand more about what your strengths are, and which skills you’re most likely to use day-to-day. Look back at your skills inventory, if you’ve made one, and also the frameworks that give names to the range of transferable skills. For example, the Research and Development Framework or Eurodocs transferable skills. You can use these to help you decide on the skills that you’d like to input as search terms. This slide provides an overview of the strategy. Start by taking some of your preferred transferable or technical skills, two or three perhaps, and input them into one of the job boards. Indeed is a good place to start because it has the largest database of jobs. If you get too many hits with the skills that you input, one way to narrow it down is to also add in the term PhD and/or the broad discipline area. Although you won’t only be looking for jobs and organisations that recruit people with PhDs, it can help to reduce the number of hits returned. In the example here, I used Indeed to input supporting, communication and influencing, together with life sciences and PhD. Once you’re happy with your search, scan the job ads to see which ones stand out for you, which roles and organisations are of interest. Then go to the job description within these ads. Can you find any additional skills or new terminology that you can use to repeat the search and find more jobs? The final step, much like the previous strategy to expand your knowledge of organisations, is to switch platforms to LinkedIn in order to identify people to connect with and arrange informational interviews. I can’t emphasise enough the importance of recording your findings. You might want to come back to it later on, or find something very specific to build upon. Remember to copy job ads of interest to you into your own personal documents because you will lose the ads once the deadline passes. If something does interest you, note down the reasons why, the name of the organisation and role. The job ad may even give a name and contact details for someone to find out more. You could note this down too. If you record job titles at this point, you can use them to identify people with these titles on LinkedIn. At this stage, don’t be put off by the job descriptions and requirements. One, you’re not actually applying at this stage; two, remember that job descriptions are a wish list from the employer. It is very rare for anyone to tick all the boxes. When you switch platforms to LinkedIn, you can search for the organisation that interests you and identify people within that organisation, perhaps those with a similar role to the one you found in your initial search. You could look for people with PhDs. This not only shows that the organisation has employed people with PhDs before, but, as you have something in common with the person, this could trigger them to reply to a message or connect your request. For larger organisations, look out for talent acquisition managers whose job it is to interact with potential recruits. They can give you more insight and tips. Send connection requests to people you’re interested in, as we discussed earlier. Consider adding them to your network map, if they do accept your request. I want to end the video by summarising the three approaches to career exploration that we have discussed. They have several things in common and can be used alongside each other. In all of the strategies, you can leverage your research skills to gather information, record it and reflect on what it means to you. Use this to your advantage. Not everyone possesses these research skills. The first strategy relies on you understanding and mapping your own warm network to identify potential career areas of interest to you. If you find an organisation of interest using this approach, this can then feed into the next strategy. Or maybe you have seen an organisation in the Prosper career clusters that sparked an interest. Wherever you get the initial interest from, the second strategy gives tips on how to find out more about that organisation and related ones. In the final strategy, you use the skills approach to search job boards to identify careers, organisations and roles that might suit you. All of the strategies described converge on reaching out to people in order to gain greater insight and realise new opportunities. The Prosper portal has lots of resources on reaching out to others. This includes more details on using LinkedIn, tips on networking and overcoming barriers to speaking with others, plus how to conduct effective informational interviews. Thanks for listening. I hope you have found the video useful and you can give the strategies a try.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
In the following two videos, Tina discusses the strategy in more detail and takes us through some example searches and how to move between the platforms. Tina also talks about connecting with people on LinkedIn. More tips on how to do this effectively can be found in the videos on Personal branding and positioning using LinkedIn.
Hi and welcome, this is Tina Persson from Passage2Pro in collaboration with Prosper. I’m excited today because I’m going to give a short preview of a new way of looking for a job, which is called how to headhunt your own job by using an agile method for searching for skills, instead for searching for job titles. So, hang on, I’m going to share the screen, and I’m going to start the presentation here. Just a second, and here we have it. Headhunt your job, or headhunt your own job, how to skill search for a job, an agile job hunt approach.
A little bit about me, and we can remove that, so here we go. The power of working out a strategy. The power relies on today that you have to create a self-awareness. You need to figure out at least the area or the job field you’d like to go to, instead of randomly sending out your resume and randomly applying for jobs, that’s not a successful career.
It’s super important to start to explore, investigate yourself, your drives, your motivation, what you like to do, your strength, your weakness, reflecting back, and I will go back to that a little bit more in the presentation the further they come here. I’d like for you here listening, instead for just starting to apply.
What you see on the picture here is that you go to the sun, as they call it. The sun, you get a vague feeling of what kind of people you like to surround you with, what you can see yourself doing on daily basis. How you apply problem solving, analysing. If you like to be a team player, if you like to work more enterprising or more practical. Have a job that is more creative or more administrative. These things you need to sort out before you start to apply. This is what I say, you start with self-awareness training.
Your next step, by reflecting back on your career and lifestyle, you will learn about how to identify your future career, your next step. It doesn’t have to be the next five years, it’s perfectly fine, but it is the next step, and then from there you reflect and you take the next step. By thinking too far ahead or too much into the future, don’t do that.
The labour market today is super agile, and it’s happened so much, not what’s happening here, Corona, pandemic, and now we have the war in Ukraine, you really don’t know where the job market and the labour market is going. But it will happen a lot, so take more steps, otherwise it’s easy to fall into the trap to feel anxious, and you shouldn’t do that.
That means you’re going to build resilience; we’re going to need the FIT management that I talk about in my book. FIT is staying focused, stay focused and be positive, incorporate exercise and meditation, and think gratitude, that’s a success story. That was the wrong slide. Now we go here. So we have what I say a new paradigm shift in the job searching strategy. That is the paradigm shift, is that we can’t any more just apply for job titles. I will come back to that, why it is like that.
You are overqualified, you don’t have the experience, or you are missing skills. Common things that we hear when we start to apply for jobs, but now remember, overqualified means that they’re not sure you’ll like the job or that you have the wrong expectations of the job or the salary. You don’t have experience, you are missing skills is an excuse that many hiring managers and recruiters are using because they can’t say something else, because they take the risk to be sued. So, they take the safe card and stay with, you’re missing skills or you lack experience.
Then you’re most likely, when you start to scroll the job boards, you most likely find that many jobs out there at the moment, extremely many jobs. if I check UK and particularly London, that they maybe don’t match the skills. They do, but you have to read the job ad in a different way.
So, with COVID-19, the labour market has changed dramatically, and the transformation has exploded during the coronavirus pandemic. Many of the jobs that are advertised today, they didn’t exist before corona. Jobs you’re going to have in the future, they don’t exist today. So how to keep track on them?
That requires the new job searching strategy. It’s a paradigm shift. So, before you start to apply, create a proper resume and don’t mess up your brand by just randomly sending out your resume to companies and organisations, because it’s not good for your brand. They realise that you really don’t know what you want.
Not only that, today we have to rely on artificial intelligence and algorithms. So, by just sending out your CV or your academic CV that is not tailored to the jobs, not even indicating what you’re looking for, the algorithms and the AI don’t know how to select you. So, you are ranked down. If you don’t have the job titles and the skills for your future job on your LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn will kick back the wrong job ads. So don’t screw up the ranking in the digital platforms.
Not only that, companies today, they communicate through the same sort of digital platforms. People know each other, the world has become smaller using digital platforms, so don’t start to test your resume, take a step back, do the exploration phase first, and then you write your resume, and then you start to apply.
You need also to adopt a more agile job searching process. You must identify a job field that you go into. Whether you work more with enterprising companies or organisation, whether you’re more supportive administrative, or if you’re creative administrative, or if you are creative enterprising, or you are very practical investigative. You need to sort that out so you get, let’s say a package of job titles that you typically would like to work with, so you can communicate that with recruiters and hiring managers.
Then number three here on the spot is that you can negotiate your job title. You apply for a job, you don’t fit all the competences, and that’s perfectly fine. If they invite you for an interview, you are not qualified, it could very well be that you can negotiate the job, so they change the job title, or they even change the description of the job. Always have that on your mind. Today there is such a huge lack of competences, so you can negotiate your job title. That is an ace for discovery and informational interviews.
If you’re not really sure, if you can do the job or not, take the risk and say yes, I can do it. Take a decision, yes, I can do it. Remember, you never fail, because the whole process in your career is a learning process, and the job journey is a long journey. Your first job beyond academia is just your first job beyond academia, and you’re not going to end there.
Just showing you the career coaching guide. What I talk about here today is that it’s important to start with your transferrable skills and how you apply them for your next employer. When I say how you apply them, it is translating your academic skillsets to a terminology that future employers will understand, so they can see the value you can offer them.
Then you need to learn much more about the labour market, so you know what companies are looking for, you know what kind of job titles exist at the moment. The rest what you see in this career coaching guide is tools, because in the centre is you. You always start to work with yourself, that’s super important.
This is just a slide where we briefly show everything that you gained and learned in academia. You had communication skills, management skills, problem solving skills, fundraising, self-motivation, multitasking, and networking. All of that you can do. The question in the future is more directed to what you would love to do in the future. So, you most likely will have to start to select, so to speak, be select. It’s not about you can do everything; it is really to select what you would love to do on an eight hours’ basis in your future job.
Having a look on this job ad here, I have coloured them in green, yellow and blue, and this is something I highly recommend that you do. This gives you a much clearer picture of what’s really relevant in the job title. Everything that’s green here is something that you most likely have. The blue part is transferrable and soft skills, and the yellow is pure let’s say technical, transferrable skills.
If I as a head-hunter and recruiter would start to select you, number one would of course be if I find a person that has been working as a medical writer previously. However, I know that it’s such a huge lack of competences, so it’s most likely I don’t have a person applying with that background. So, I need to take a step and look on people that might be interested in writing.
Now you have the $10 million tip I give you. I would absolutely choose candidate to interview if the candidate can answer the following questions. “Do you like to write, and how do you know you like to write? Can you give an example of when you are writing, and what value would you bring to the company?” In this job you must like to write. Then I would like to figure out with you whether you really understand what a medical writer are doing on daily basis.
My other question would be, “could you describe for me what a medical writer are doing on daily basis?” This indicates that if you as a postdoc or PhD or academically trained person have talked with people being medical writers, you most likely could figure that out. It’s very well fine to say, do you know what, I haven’t worked as a medical writer, but I have talked with medical writers, and they describe the job as following. That would convince me as a recruiter that you actually know a little bit, and that you yourself can evaluate whether you would like that job or not. That strengthens my belief that you might be a top candidate for me.
Trick one, figure out what the daily day work like so you understand what the people are doing if they work as a medical writer in a company. Then convince me that writing is something that absolutely you can see yourself doing on eight hours a day. That’s my tip to go through to the second step on an interview.
Time to check on the agile job searching technique. Ten years ago, commonly you looked for job titles on the internet. That was not so many job titles around, so it was possible. Today that too many job titles, and the job titles they come and go. So, it’s very hard to keep track on them. There are two ways of using skills search instead. That is either you use very technical, and this is a common mistake for people in STEM in particular, they only search for hard skills. Python, life science, artificial intelligence, AI, molecule biology, cell, etc. It could be very clever to use transferrable skills instead and say problem solving, writing, manager, supporting, so you put in problem solving, management, and then check what sort of job comes up.
This is a completely new way for many to look for jobs, but it gives you a much better idea of what new job title comes up. But now before you start doing this, it’s important that you write in transferrable skills that are commonly used in the job field that you would like to go. That’s why it’s so crucial that you use your exploration phase in the beginning.
This is a slide, on transferrable skills and why to use them. Transferrable skills are particular skillsets that doesn’t belong to any particular niche or job or industry. That’s why they are so important. They are general skills that you can use and apply, and they can be transferred between job departments and even industries. It is for this reason they are known as transferrable skills. This is exciting. That’s why they are so important in any transition in industry, or from academia to industry or within any organisation whether you work in an NGO, small-medium enterprise, or in a governmental position.
Going back, how to start to reflect over what you like and what you don’t like. I think doing an academic career it’s always that you start with a project, and you end up with writing an article, and that is a process itself. You start by reviewing articles, you do experiments, you learn about your research, and then teaching, collaborating, thinking, conferencing, setting up projects, and then editing manuscripts, and then you publish. In all that process, that can be up to a year or maybe even two years, you do a lot of stuff.
Now it’s time to really nail down on paper what you love to do, what is sort of interesting, and what you can skip. So, you clarify for yourself much more what you would love to do in the future. This is a way not only for yourself but it’s also so you can express for other people so they can help you. So, you can tell me loud and clear that for me it’s important to have a job, where I can collaborate, where I can create many new ideas, I have a supportive team around me, and I would love to travel. It just gives me an idea.
Not the exact job title, but you help me to understand what you like. This is the key, when it comes to both networking, creating your elevator pitch, or for informational interviews. Transferable skills indicating your drives and motivation, what you can start doing is to write your own priority list, what always is on the top and what you tend to procrastinate. Because things that we don’t like to do, we tend to procrastinate.
Here you have an assessment that I use that helps you to find whether you’re practical, investigative, enterprising, supportive, creative, or administrative. You can also think like the following. Experiment failed, but I analyse the data and try it again, and that shows that you have a problem-solving attitude and you’re good in analysing.
It could also be that you write, participated in public conferences, including speaking engagements. That’s ability to communicate to a diverse audience. That’s another way of expressing it. Coming to the step-by-step guide, and this is the end of the presentation.
In the next video I’m going to show how I use the step-by-step guide in reality by doing a search live and record it here. In video two you can see how I work myself through by using Indeed and LinkedIn. But I use what I call transferrable skills, I select the skills, and then I go to the platform and use more of the transferable skills. If I put it that way, start to search to find the jobs.
Then eventually I go to LinkedIn, and I can Google, and I start to track down and read the job ads coming up to identify even more skills that could give me new key skills and new job titles that could be of interest to me. With that said, I say thank you very much, and see you in video number two. Okay, take care, bye.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
Hi, welcome, Tina Persson is back, and this is video number 2. I’m going to show how I do the Agile skill-searching technique or how I apply it by using preferentially Indeed – it’s a job-searching platform – and LinkedIn. I’m going to try to use different kinds of skills, but this is open for you to test and try yourself. This is a super Agile method, so I really hope that the way I show it, that you’re going to catch it up as – you can’t ask me questions, but okay, let’s go on, and I will dig down into the computer here. I will share the screen and I go into what I call Indeed, which I think is the best platform to play around with, but there are other platforms that you can have a look on. There is Glassdoor, for example. Then, of course, if you look for specific countries, you’d need to maybe go and be country specific. That could be, for example, you know that you look for European jobs, on governmental jobs, then that could be different platforms. But for the Agile job-searching technique using these skills, Indeed, I consider, and Glassdoor, are the two best platforms to play around with, so let’s go and put in the first skill here. I thought I’m going to look and take a skill that I call coordination, so I put ‘coordination’ in, and I decide also that this is a person that likes to coordinate and have a supportive nature. So we say ‘coordination’ and ‘supportive’, and let’s see what happened here and what comes up. I happened to go to the London page and there we go – 388 jobs, and that’s a little bit little. That should be more, so I write ‘coordinating’ instead – ‘coordinating’ and ‘supporting’. Coordinating and supporting, and as you see, I used that before, and now I go and find jobs, and now you see, just by changing that little, I got 2411 jobs. The first thing I do is I check without adding PhD in, and I check what kind of titles actually come up. I see it’s Policy Adviser, Lived Experience Adviser, Project Manager comes up. I go for… Project Coordinator comes up, Market Intelligence Associate, Quality Standards Officer, Analyst, Talent Assistant, Training and Awareness Analyst, Research Analyst, Customer Success Engineer. As you notice here when you read these job ads, it’s like it’s not one single job title being the same, so only there – I’m putting in ‘coordinating’ and ‘supporting’ – you get fairly many job titles coming up here. Now, you note we had 2411 and I put PhD in because I decide that, okay, we’re academic. We have a PhD title. Now we are down to 21 jobs, so by adding PhD, there are far less jobs, but still fairly many. Then I go again and check Lived Experience Adviser. Consultant IQVIA is a Real World Solutions job. Senior research economist, Doctoral Student comes up, Business Information, Academic Affairs, Biostatistician, Senior Data Scientist, Lab technician, Chief Data Scientist. Still, not a single job title is the same, and now it’s time here for you to open up a job ad and read further. Let’s say that we take the Consultant job. What I do is that I click on these three dots and I do a right click and I open in a new window, which means I have to do a new share here. Now you should see Consultant – Real World Solutions. What I do now is I start to go through the job ad. This is the moment you should be calm. Don’t get irritated. Don’t be frustrated that you don’t understand what’s in the job ad because this is not the moment where you think, I’m going to apply for jobs. This is your exploration phase. This is when you start to think, okay, could that be something more for me? You are there to learn skills and keywords and read in general if you can figure out the work style of the job. So you go to the role summary. You start to read that one: ‘Consultants in our Client Engagement team are involved in managing and delivering Real World Evidence projects for our clients,’ and you’re going to work towards pharmaceutical and biotech business, but it could also be academia and health industry, so this is obviously a job that fits very well for a PhD to do. ‘Our Consultants work as part of the team and are expected to be self-motivated individuals with excellent communication, task management, collaboration, presentation skills.’ Only there you can write down on a separate paper many skills. You could write down, for example, ‘communication’. You could write down ‘collaboration’, ‘presentation skills’, and then ‘high-quality input’. High-quality input – it’s also something interesting here. Then you go to Responsibilities, and there it’s like planning, organising, managing discrete components, etc. Here you have more skills – planning and organising. So, planning and organising, if you are a person that likes to plan and organise. Well, that’s maybe skills you could go for Indeed and search as well and see what kind of job comes up then. You remember that and you say, ‘Okay, planning is something that I will put on my list as well.’ Here I get curious about presentation and planning. What happens if I write that down? Then providing day-to-day support to project teams, so project is something interesting here, analysing, time, budget. Time management could be interesting here. Designing and structuring client reports, development… You start to read here. Okay, this might be something that fits to me. This could be something I’m interested in doing even though I don’t exactly know the job. Planning, organising, client face-to-face, supporting – that’s something I like to do. Okay, and when you come that far, you can see what they have. Experience and education, it’s here – it’s super important. This is a wish list from them, so you say, instead of saying, ‘proven’, you remove that and you say ability to manage, planning and conducting projects – you have done that as a PhD. Problem-solving – that’s what we’re good at to do as a PhD, so you don’t have to worry about that. Curiosity about developing and interpreting new insights – well, that’s interesting. Developing, interpreting new insights – that’s what we do as well as a PhD. Ability to articulate complex issues – that’s what you do in academia. Again, excellent conversational and business English, written and oral, demonstrated via storyboarding/slide development, report writing. There are so many skills that you can learn and write down on your paper. What does it say? Master’s or PhD, but I also know PhDs in humanities and social science that got this sort of job here, so it might not be a must to be in life science. When you now have learnt this, what you do is that you take it and copy this here into a Word document and save it because when they close the link, you can’t reach out to this one here again. So, as soon as you find something that you like, make a copy and paste, put it in a Word format and save it, and then write down the specific skills and key wordings. This is essential because now I will do another search from the words I’ve found here. I’ve found ‘analysing’, ‘supporting’, even though we had that in, but it was also ‘planning’ and ‘time management’. That could be interesting to see what happens if we put ‘planning’ and ‘time management’ in. What kind of job title comes up then? When you have found certain skills that come up again and again and again, most likely they are significant for these sorts of jobs. Of course, you should have that in your resumé, shouldn’t you? Then most likely you should have them on your LinkedIn profile as well, so you’ve really learnt a lot by having this look here. I find it really exciting. Now I will go down here and I will go back to this one here, and I will make a new share. We are here – I have to go back to this one here, so now we took these ones, so let’s just put in ‘planning’ and ‘time management’. Maybe we need to put ‘time management’ in a bracket. I do it like that. Not the bracket, but ‘time management’. I’m putting these ears here as a Boolean tracking. Oh, I’m spelling bad here! There we go. Otherwise, the computer will help me here. What happens if I put ‘planning’ and ‘time management’ as a PhD? Thirty-two jobs – oh, not bad. Let’s see – Pre-Sales Solution Consultant, Principal Consultant for AI and IoT (client and project management), Senior Data Scientist, Analyst Advisor, Associate Advisor, Senior Analyst, Data Scientist, Pre-Sales again – same job that’s coming up several times – that happens. Okay, Statistics Director – fairly different jobs, not really the same titles as last time, is it? That is sort of different, and let’s say, is there anything that you are interested in? Otherwise, you go up here and say, okay, ‘planning’, maybe ‘time management’ wasn’t the best ones. So you can decide that, okay, ‘planning’ and let’s say ‘analysing’ instead and see what comes up. I just do that because I like to do it! Let’s see what happens. Okay, 19 jobs, so fewer jobs if I put in ‘analysing’ in combination with ‘planning’, and then I see, okay, Energy and Sustainability Senior Researcher, Research Associate. Consultant comes up here again, the IQVIA, Research Associate, Doctoral Student, Deputy Director, etc., etc. This is how we can start doing things, but let’s now go back to the IQVIA job that we had here. Let’s say that you like that one. Now you have the company here. Now the next clever thing to do – and I’ll just stop sharing because now, if you say that you’ve found a company – say, okay, I’m curious. They seem to need consultancies at IQVIA, and let’s say that you need to learn more about the company or what kind of people are working there. Let’s say you don’t have a life science background or you’re more an engineering background or you’re social science, and you are curious about what kind of people are actually working. Now you’re going to do the next thing here, and this is again for exploration only. You’ve figured out at least one company here, so what I’m going to do here now is… Now I have a problem to share my screen. I need to actually make it a little bit there and then I go like that! I’m sorry for that one – just a bug in the system sometimes. I go to LinkedIn, and here I have LinkedIn. This is my profile, and I go to the search function. I go to IQVIA, and I scroll. Scrolling there, now this shows the power of why you need to build a network on LinkedIn before you start to apply for jobs. You should have roughly 500-plus connections. You need to start to add people in the region and in the field that you would like to go into. Then I press the People button here, and I can see it’s 94,000 people here in my network, and I can make a quick check only – okay, where are they working? Now this is globally here, so I decide, okay, that wasn’t really fair, so let’s say we go to London because we decide that I’m interested in the London area. I show the results, and I’m ending up with 2000 people in London, so that’s a fairly good volume. Then you can check where they are working at the moment because even though I wrote ‘IQVIA’, it doesn’t mean they work there at the moment. You will see here, okay, they are in ICON, IMS Health, AstraZeneca. Already here you’ve got four different companies that most likely are very interested in people that have been working at IQVIA, or IQVIA I think they say. I can now go down to a little bit less and let’s say I take 1st and 2nd degree people. Then I have 58 people and that’s a very good selection. You can basically check all 58. I check here, Urszula Kaldi – look here, that’s really interesting. She is a Talent Acquisition person. That means that this person you most likely can contact because she’s probably looking for people. You go down and you check here – Data Scientist at IQVIA, Consultant, PhD MRPharmS, Talent Acquisition Manager. You have Jay Foster, Talent Acquisition Manager, and you go on and you go on, so you actually learn to check people here. Here they are, and you could go down to Urszula and check. Now my computer’s a little bit slow. You read, okay, IQVIA Manager – now she’s in Poland at the moment. Okay, great area – maybe that… Let’s check what she did before. Senior Recruiter – she’s a recruiter at IQVIA. That could be a good connection to have, Recruitment Consultant. Recruitment, okay, so you check her background. Then you say, okay, I need to change that, so what I’m going to do now, I’m going to change the area. I go to London again, but I’m going to go to the next – they had ‘London, England, United…’ here, not ‘London Area’, so let’s say I take the ‘London, England’ area, let’s see what comes if I choose that instead if it makes any difference. Yes, a little bit. We have Ana Lisica, Consultant. We go down and we check the people again. Here we go, here we go, and we can go in and check another person here. What has she been doing? North Lambeth, England, United Kingdom. We check her background – Consultant, IQVIA, full-time. Before that, she worked at Innovation Forum. She was a Medical Consultant, Independent Contractor. Before that, she was at King’s College. She worked as a Life Sciences and Medicine Doctoral Teaching Assistant. So you learn about people’s backgrounds and what they do at IQVIA, what kind of people actually work in that specific company, but you can figure out here that they for sure at that company recruit PhDs. They’re very interested in that because there are many of them. That is another thing, by the way, I can do. I can put ‘PhD’ in here, so I add that to ‘IQVIA’ and then again, I notice that I have 13 people left. For example, if I go and check Yein Nam, she’s a PhD – I go, check her profile, and here we go – IQVIA Associate Principal. Before that, she was at Adelphi Real World. Go down, PhD Student at the University of Manchester, so she has a PhD, been a postgraduate researcher, and now working at IQVIA in London here. What did we learn by doing this? First of all, you can connect to these people. You can reach out to these people, particularly if they are recruiters or internal recruiters. It’s actually their job, and many of them also have contact data, and that’s the moment you can ask them questions like, ‘How is it to work as a consultant in your company? I notice that you are looking for people. I realise I don’t match fully all the competencies, but I have this, and I would like to work at IQVIA. So what could be your first step-in position or what could I add, what skills could I add for you to be interested in me?’ This is sort of stepping into the hidden job market. All jobs are not advertised, but this is also why, as I said, the paradigm shift is that you can negotiate your job title. Yes, you can negotiate your job title, so you simply call them and say you’re interested in them, and consultancy companies are usually very keen on bringing prospects in for interviews. So it could very well be they ask you some questions and you say, ‘Okay,’ and you come in for a further interview, and they say, ‘You maybe don’t match up to what we are looking for, but you’ll learn,’ and you’ll learn what you either can improve or you actually do get a possibility to negotiate the job title. With that said, this is the way you do for an Agile job search. You go in and search for skills. Then you cross with these skills and go in and read in the job ad yet more skills and search for more. You’re saving – you save the job ads. You learn and check on every job ad. You’ll write down the skills carefully, so you remember that and save it. Then you figure out some company names which you write down in an Excel file, so you have skills, job titles and companies. Then you go to LinkedIn. If you want to fish out even more, you can simply google. Google always works, so with that said, welcome to the new paradigm shift in job hunt. It’s your opportunity, so let the algorithms and the AI work for you. Use the technology so you can headhunt your own job. Thank you very much for listening. This is Tina Persson. Take care.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
Recording your findings
As you use this strategy, keep notes of people and organisations of interest to you. If you find an organisation that particularly stands out for you, why not expand your knowledge of that organisation and similar ones. Or if you connect with more people as a result of using this strategy, add them to your network map.
You may wish to structure your thoughts in a table, log or spreadsheet. You can include things like role, location, connections and any notes specific to conversations you may have had. You could use this editable template to record your findings.
A note about job titles
Don't obsess about them! They often change and mean different things in different organisations. However, when you're searching job boards by skills, if some job titles appear frequently, it is worth making a note of them.
Suggested task
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