Job Hunting Tips #6 Assessing Your Personal Value

A week out of work is a vacation. You can sleep late in the
morning, revel in your newly found free time, shop when the
stores are empty, and get around to those chores you have
been putting off for too long.

Three weeks out of work and you are still relaxed. There is
a new and better position waiting out there and you just
need to get around to finding it.

Six weeks out of work and you are getting anxious. Fifty
resumes have vanished into a black hole and the telephone
refuses to ring.

Twelve weeks out of work and panic starts to set in. You
review your recent efforts to find work and seem to be doing
all the right things. You start to doubt yourself: Am I too
old? Are my skills outdated? Are the industries I know all
dying? Are there any decent jobs out there? Is there
something wrong with me? Does nobody need me?

Take a deep breath and remind yourself that no matter what
optimistic spin the government trumpets, it is tough to find
a good job when new job seekers exceed the number of jobs
created. A 5 to 6 percent unemployment rate means that
every job which arises has potentially eight million
applicants! Then sit down and look at yourself from a new
perspective.

1. You have the personal qualities employers are seeking,
such as persistence, loyalty, energy, independence,
enthusiasm, responsibility, punctuality, maturity, empathy,
flexibility, sincerity, and tolerance.

2. You have general job skills which work in any industry:
negotiating, inventiveness, sensitivity, understanding,
creativity, the ability to write clearly, assemble things,
or operate machinery and experience in computing,
classifying, investigating, evaluating, or synthesizing
data.

3. You have specific job skills which have been acquired in
all of your previous work experience.

4. You have multiple layers of value as a significant other,
a parent, a brother or sister, a child, a friend, a
community worker.

List out each area as a reminder that not finding a job does
not mean that you are worthless. Reread the list several
times a week, keep adding to it as you remember skills, read
it before every interview or employer contact.

The world may not seem to need you right now but it is
important that you know your own worth and stop buying into
that sense of incompetency and despair that prolonged
unemployment (caused by economic and political forces, not
by you personally) can produce.