When you step out in the job market to search for a job from pillar to post thinking you have enough skills, education and an expensive college degree. Soon you realise, all these are useless until you have experience.
The irony is that you need a job to gain experience, but you need the experience to get a job. Employers say that they have lots of educated candidates to choose from, but they can’t find enough applicants with job experience.
So what to do? How to get experience to land a job without having a job?
Start Executing
Here’s the thing. It’s that first, often unrelated, job experience that employers want to see on candidate resumes. They don’t care how many pairs of yoga pants you sold or how many coffees you served, but it’s the real-world job skills that you develop while working that are different from what you learn in school.
Or let me make it easy for you to understand, if you want to work in digital marketing, you need to start converting that knowledge into real results, start affiliate marketing, create campaigns, do freelancing work. Or let’s say if you are an application developer, start building apps that help people.
If you want to be a Data Analyst, get the publicly available data and derive meaningful insights from it.
Become an Expert in your field
Expertise your knowledge and skills, learn everything there is to know about the industry and the job.
To become an expert in your field area, interact with the professionals in that field, find a mentor who has experience. Mentor is the only key who can help you unlock the doors of opportunity. But many job seekers seldom have a mentor. Hence, they struggle when it comes to interviewing. Having a mentor is a big part of being successful. Read blogs and join groups for regular updates about the industry from experts, this will help you not only prepare you for the career but it will also help you in networking and interviewing for jobs.
“If you want help, start by helping yourself. People like to see that.” – Chris Rock
Don’t just Network, build Relationships
Many companies hire based on referrals or recommendations. For that to happen, you need to build a good network with people who are in senior positions in the companies you are aiming to apply. For networking, LinkedIn is the best platform to showcase your work and network with people.
What’s the difference between networking and building relationships?
Networking is showing up your palm out asking, hey! I need this, asking dozens of people the same question what do you do? Do you have job openings to refer me?
Building relationships is identifying a few people who can have the largest impact on your life. It is all about spending hours researching about people, their companies, their goals, and their challenges.
Building relationships is showing up and adding value from the very first interaction and then continue to add value every time you get a chance. If you want to get a job, you should start building relationships and stop networking.
Follow up
Even if you got rejected by the employer for the lack of experience do follow up with the recruiter. Convince them that even you lack the experience for the job role, you have the skills and abilities to perform that role effectively.
Avoid taking the first “No” as the final answer; keep trying to persuade that you are the perfect fit for the role.
Revamp your Resume
Make sure you highlight the whole story and focus on your talent and skills and not just on your job title. Make a resume that doesn’t dwell in the past, but looks ahead and showcases all great things you can contribute to in the future.
Don’t just prepare a generic resume standout your chances by preparing an info graphic resume. Use bullets to represent your soft and hard skills.
Do Value Validation Projects
75%+ of applicants rely on conventional methods to illustrate their worth during the job search process. By stepping outside of the box and generating something unique and valuable, you automatically separate yourself from the crowd in the eyes of your potential employer.
A high-quality validation project proves that you can beat the expectations for the role and you are someone who brings good concepts to the table. You are essentially proving your value to your contact before they take a chance on you. It makes them much more likely to support you during the process and increases your chances of landing a referral.
The Bottom Line
The most important thing to land a job being a fresher is to invest time in learning skills and then master those skills. Use these skills to bring real results through working on projects. Because in the end, companies won’t see your expensive college degree, certificates, and diplomas, companies do not care about your knowledge. Anyone can go out and acquire the knowledge. Companies want to hire the people who can show they know how to use the acquired knowledge.
