Resume Services
Resume Writing Assistance:
Employment Services staff provides instruction and assistance to job seekers on the content and format of resumes and cover letters.
Portable equity includes a mix of experience, education, skills, networking, growth within an industry, and reputation. Portable equity is vital to understanding your value in the job market, and how to market that value to an employer. Understanding portable equity means answering the following questions:
- Experience – Do your skills meet or exceed requirements?
- Skills – Do your skills enhance the employer’s basic needs?
- Education – Does your education demonstrate your trainability?
- Network – Do you know people who can connect you with employment opportunity?
- Industry – Is your industry growing?
- Reputation – Will others speak highly of you?
After answering these questions you can think about communicating what you have to offer to potential employers by thinking of yourself as a product, and how your portable equity enhances of your product mix. Your product mix must be reevaluated for every new employment opportunity using the Seven Ps of Marketing, as follows:
- Product – your unique mix of experience, skills, education, network, industry, and reputation
- Place – the ability to be where the opportunities exist
- Price – your ability to negotiate a competitive salary
- Promotion – being able to speak, write and demonstrate the value of your skill set
- People – having and using your connections to get the job that you want
- Packaging – the way you and your application materials appear from the outside
- Positioning – gaining access people who have the power to hire you
If your experience does not exactly match the employer’s expectation, looking at other aspects of your portable equity might make it possible to compensate for shortcomings in experience. The pieces of your product mix that do not quite meet the employer’s expectations can be supplemented by those pieces that meet or exceed the employer’s expectation. For example, if you do not meet an education requirement, however you have more than enough experience and you have excellent references, and even better yet, you know people who work in that industry and can vouch for your skills and abilities, that may be the best way to market your skills for that particular position – by selling those attributes of your product mix that exceed the employer’s expectations.
