What skills and preferences should guide your professional job search?

"Understand What Employers Want Employers want to hire people who will make their businesses more successful. The most desirable employees have the specific skills, transferable career competencies, work values, and personal qualities necessary to be successful in the employers’ organizations. The more clearly you convey your skills as they relate to your job target, the greater your chance of landing your ideal job. 13 Job-Specific Skills. Employers seek job-specific skills (skills and technical abilities that relate specifically to a particular job). Two examples of job-specific skills are using specialized tools and equipment and using a custom-designed software program. Transferable Skills and Attitudes. Change is a constant in today’s business world. Strong transferable career skills are the keys to success in managing your career through change. The most influential skills and attitudes are the abilities to: • Work well with people. • Plan and manage multiple tasks. • Maintain a positive attitude. • Show enthusiasm. Employers need workers who have transferable career competencies—basic skills and attitudes that are important for all types of work. These skills make you highly marketable because they’re needed for a wide variety of jobs and can be transferred from one task, job, or workplace to another. Examples include these: • Planning skills • Research skills • Communication skills • Human relations and interpersonal skills • Critical thinking skills • Management skills • Project management skills Take, for example, a construction supervisor and an accountant. Both must work well with others, manage time and specific tasks, solve problems, read, and communicate effectively—all transferable competencies. They both must be competent in these areas even though framing a house and balancing a set of financial information (the job-specific skill for each field, respectively) are not related. In every occupation, transferable competencies are as important as technical expertise and job-specific skills. Find Your First Professional Job The next step is landing the job that fits your skills and desires. You need to consider not only a general type of work but also your lifestyle and leisure goals. If you like to be outdoors most of the time, you might be very unhappy spending eight hours a day in an office. Someone who likes living in small towns may dislike working at the headquarters of a big corporation in Los Angeles, New York City, or Chicago. But make sure that your geographic preferences are realistic. Some parts of the country will experience much greater growth in jobs than others in the coming years. According to recent research by Glassdoor, the online job listings and career site, the top 10 best cities for jobs in 2017 are: 1. Pittsburgh, PA 2. Indianapolis, IN 3. Kansas City, MO 4. Raleigh-Durham, NC 5. St. Louis, MO 6. Memphis, TN 7. Columbus, OH 8. Cincinnati, OH 9. Cleveland, OH 10. Louisville, KY 14 You might start answering the question “What will I do?” by studying the Occupational Outlook Handbook , published every two years by the U.S. Department of Labor"