The worst career advice I ever received

I was one of those people. Looking for a job without experience. I had just moved to the big city, ready to spread my wings, and getting away from that small town that was holding me back. 

Three months later I still didn’t have a job. My meager savings were drying up.

 Now, here’s the thing you might have noticed. In desperate times, people offer a lot of advice. It is all framed in a tidy parcel – “You just need to do this.” 

The majority of the advice I got was this: 

Take an inventory of your skills.  Use that to pound the pavement.

 What I know now is that focussing on skills is a bad idea. The worst idea. For the following reasons.

Employers don’t hire for skills.

They hire for the right fit. After all, when you are at work, you are representing the company or organization. The employer would like you to represent them in a good way, probably like they do. Or even better.

You can always learn new skills. Especially ones that are called hard skills. That might be a computer program or how to operate a machine. 

Soft skills are also learnable.  Examples of soft skills are communication skills or working with a team. But often they are part of the attributes that make up a good employee. 

I read a survey once of what skills employers look for in new hires. The entire list was soft skills. Third on the list was passion. I definitely wasn’t expecting to see that. But it makes sense. The upshot is employers want people who want to be there.  

What if you hate using that skill?

When I was just starting out in the work world, I was focussed on gaining skills. Accumulating them like some packrat. There was a vague idea that if I had enough skills, I would always be able to get a job.

I liked the idea of learning new things so that held my interest. For a while. I moved on to the next thing. At that time, I didn’t give much thought to whether I actually enjoyed what I was doing. I noticed that I was feeling frustrated with my work and wondered what was wrong with me because all of my co-workers seemed to be able to grin and bear it just fine.

I know now that those jobs were a terrible fit for me. It didn’t matter what skills I had.

Even though I had the skills, I had zero interest in doing them. 

How I finally came to shift my wonky perspective was actually doing something that I enjoyed. Eventually I saw that what was behind my work enjoyment was when I was using my strengths.   

Strengths are where it’s at.  

Want to find out your strengths? Check out this article. 

What do you think?  Leave your comments below. Feel free to share what your worst career advice was.