[MUSIC] Welcome to the second course in interviewing and resume writing in English. In this course you'll build on what you learned in the first course. You'll learn strategies for successfully communicating your value through a perspective employer. In the first course, you undertook to assess your values, your confidences, your goals, all from different perspectives. You put together your accomplishments journal and learn the importance of keeping that journal current. You begin assembling your story file of accomplishments from your biography. These self-assessments mark the beginning of your research. In truth, the entire job search process is a research process. After all if you knew exactly the right organization and the right person and the right job for you, then you'd simply go to that organization that had that job and get hired. But that's not how life works. As the philosopher Kierkegaard rightly observe. You discover what's important to you looking back on your life but you live your life moving forward. You may have discovered that your current work related values have changed as you've grown. This points to the need to regularly reassess your values. At various stages in your career, you may value money or leisure time or independence on the job, or working for something you believe in. The new job hunt in the global economy is a continuous process. Searching for new opportunities is part of the regular routine of almost seven out of ten workers. For you, that means staying abreast of market conditions both inside and outside your present organization. It means learning what you have to offer to both market. It means developing new attitudes about your work life and new skills for doing well in a changing economy. Today's economy requires you to be more proactive, more sophisticated, and more willing to take your career into your own hands. You must look after yourself, know what you want, and know how to go get it. This is especially true if you're a younger job seeker. But it doesn't matter where you are in your career, you will always be engaged in research, continuous research of the evolving job market and continuous development of evolving job skills. This slide shows what I mean. It depicts six drivers of change in the evolving job market. These drivers of change are identified through research sponsored by the University of Phoenix. The research sought to identify the skills that are technologically advanced and changing world calls for in the near future. You can find the forum for [INAUDIBLE] to this lesson. I trust you don't find any of these drivers surprising. Certainly here at the University of Maryland, a research institute, they're mainstream, but they have significant consequences for your future career plans. Here you see the first three of the top ten skills required by workers in 2020. As we record this video, 2020 is less than 5 years away and these skills are already needed today. We've talked, for example, about social intelligence throughout this specialization and you'll learn more about related skills in the next module. Here you see the next set of future work skills of 2020. Notice the importance of cross cultural competency. It's exactly that skill that this specialization helps you develop. Here you see the next set of future work skill. I'd like to draw your attention to design mindset. As you learned earlier, the mindset you apply to your job hunting and your career planning is itself a real life demonstration of your designed mindset. You can use your efforts in this direction to convey your ability to represent and develop tasks for desired outcome. Here, you see the last of the top ten future work skills in 2020. The ability to work productively as a member of the geographically dispersed team. To work across time, space, and organizational boundaries using communication technology. Let me share with you my own observation regarding virtual collaboration. The creative team that's behind this specialization has been collaborating as a virtual team from the onset of this project. I wouldn't even call virtual collaboration a future work skill nor any of these ten. To my mind, they're all emergent work skills in demand today. That's the world of work you're job hunting in. To help you in this job hunting, here is a career planning diagram. Reflect on these headings, brainstorm all the target industries and companies you might be interested in. In the next lesson, you'll get access to the many online resources you can use to help you in this effort. At this point in the planning, you're not trying to get a job, you're conducting research. Of course if you're desperate for a job, you'll focus first on the target where you're most likely to get hired. But if you have time to explore, maybe your highest ranking target is the dream job you always wanted to explore. Next, count the possible positions available in your targets. These are not current job openings, but positions that you could fill. For example, there are roughly 16,000 engineering positions at Apple according to LinkedIn profiles. If the total number of positions you're going after is less than 200, that's not enough. Remember, you're not counting job openings, you're counting positions that you might be able to fill. A search that's too small will end up frustrating you. Finally, divide your targets into an A list, a B list, and a C list. Your A list includes companies where you'd love to work. Your B list are companies you would consider to be okay. Your C list are companies that don't interest you. This process is key to your research. It's the act of searching closely for organizations to contact and people to look for within those organizations. When creating your list of companies you want to pursue, Aim High. It's too easy to fall in to a rut and limit your search to one specific geographic area, or a company like the one you've been working in. Widening your horizons will help you more easily find a rewarding position. What I've outlined here is a proactive approach. It's an approach where you're creating your own opportunities, but it's an approach that demands effort. Think back on the top goals you identified in course one. Those goals should fuel your desire to undertake that effort. Today's successful job hunter is thinking two jobs out. Your next job will probably not be you last. So take a job that will position you for the job after that. Ideally, the end result of your interviewing efforts will be three offers to chose from. Having more than one offer makes you select the job that best positions you for the long term. The online resources available to help you in your search are vast. In the next lesson, you'll be introduced to some of the most useful. [MUSIC]
