How are you marketing your skills?

Marketing your Skills is simple as long as you know what your skills are.

For those of you that know me, you know that LinkedIn is my favorite social media platform. You may have even heard me speak about the importance of marketing yourself when you are in job search mode as if you were marketing your business. You need to know what skills you have in order to know how to market them effectively.

When teaching one of my LinkedIn workshops, I share that it takes 5-7 times for someone to see your name or face to remember that they have even seen it. It can take as many as 21 times for a person to take action. That means that you have to have your skills prominently displayed wherever and whenever you can.

Let’s define skills – they are the things that you can perform and possess that you use on a job. They can be digital, technical, or workplace related. Illinois workNet has a wonderful guide to help you discover the job skills that you need. Check here. Now we need to translate that to how you can market them.  For marketing purposes, skills equals keywords.

So how do you find out what your keywords are?  Read this article.  Briefly, look for 5 jobs to which you qualify to apply, copy the job description into a word cloud tool. Make the word cloud. The bigger and darker the word, the more important it is. Those are your keywords.

Next use those keywords everywhere:

• Resume – make sure that you use them in a skills summary list, in a functional resume – use them as section headers, in a chronological resume – use them within the description of that job. Make sure that an ATS reader will pick them out!
• Cover letter – be sure to include at least one paragraph that includes a bullet list of the keywords that apply to the job that the cover letter addresses.
• Business card – it has two sides. Use one side for contact information and the other for a list of your keywords.
• Leave Behind brochure – include a visual representation of yourself in a brochure format. Resume’s have too many words and aren’t easy to scan. Make something pretty that you can carry with you and ‘leave behind’ with a potential employer or business connection.
• Social media profiles – when you describe yourself in the profile on any social media platform, include at least two career related keywords.
• LinkedIn – the three areas that need keywords the most are the headline, about section, and skills & endorsements. Adding them to any other job listing is a bonus.
• Posting – whatever blog or social media post you do consider frequently interspersing a post about a skill that you have and how you are using it at the time. (Like right now I am talking about marketing with social media)

Without being overly pushy casually bring up an example of how you solved someone’s problem with a skill you possess. Marketing your skills is very similar to selling a product or service. As much as I hate doing it, always be selling. Just don’t make it sound like you are selling all the time!