Some skills are more equal than others. I have been
encouraging you to identify your most powerful talents,
with the implied assumption that every skill can find
a home somewhere. While you value, you must recognize
that certain skills are universally greeted with enthusiasm
by almost every employer because these skills occur
with some regularity in every job having responsibility
and requiring decision-making and good judgment. You
should pay special attention to them in the work you
are now doing, look for them in the nonpaid activity
of your sparetime, and comb your past experiences for
evidence of them.
Budget management:Get your hot little hands on any budget you can find, no matter how small and take responsiblity for it. Manage how the funds are dispensed keep control of the budget, learn what fiscal control is all about.
Supervising:Take responsibility for the work of others in a situation in which some accoutability is called for. Have direct contact with the work of others; expose yourself to the difficulty of giving others, delegateing tasks, taking gruff, understanding the other person's viewpoint. Here is where listening can become a real feat of skill.
Public relations:Accept a role in which you must meet or relate to the public. Greet visitors, answer phone complaints, give talks to community groups, sell ads to business people, explain programs to prospective clients, or even collect taxes.
Coping with deadline pressure: Search for opportunities to demonstrate that you can produce good work when it is required by external deadlines. Prove to yourself and anyone else that you can function on someone else's schedule, even when that time frame is notably hurried.
Negotiating/ arbitrating:Discover and cultivate the fine art of dealing openly and effectively with people in ambiguous situations. Learn how to bring warring factions together, resolve differences between groups or individuals, and make demands on behalf of one constituency to those in positions of power.
Speaking:Take a leadership role in any organization, so that you are forced to talk publicly. Prepare remarks, get across ideas, and even motivate people without feeling terribly self-conscious. Good public speaking is little more than the art of dramatized conversation, but it must be practiced so you discover your own personal style.
Writing:Go public with your writing skills, or even the lack of them. There is nothing quite so energizing as seeing your own words in print; exhilarating if they look good to you, and a spur to improvement if they look awful. Practice putting pen to paper. Write letters to the editors of every publication you read routinely. Write a newsletter, however informal, for a club or organization to which you belong.
Organizing/managing/coordinating:Take charge of any event that is within your grasp. It doesn't matter what you organize - a church supper, a parade in honor of your town's 200th birthday- as long as you have responsibility for bringing together people, resources, and events. If nothing else, the headaches of organizing events or managing projects teach you how to delegate tasks to others.
Interviewing:Learn how to acquire information form other people by questioning them directly. Start by interviewing the neighbors, your friends, and other people easily available. It doesn't matter what you ask them, but imagine you are a newspaper reporter who needs the information for a story. Discover the fine art of helping a person to feel comfortable in your presence, even though you are asking difficult or even touchy questions.
Teaching/instructing:Refine your ability to explain things to other people. Since most teaching takes place not in the classroom but in ordinary everyday exchanges between people, you should become familiar and comfortable with passing information and understanding to others. Any position of leadership or responsibility gives you many chances to teach ideas and methods to others.
Original file name: tht - converted on Tuesday, 17 June 1997, 17:42