Career Transition: Upgrading Your Technical Skills

Vicki Lind, MS
www.vlind.com
vlind@teleport.com
503-284-1115
Vicki helps clients develop vibrant careers in Portland’s creative, sustainable, non-profit, and health-care communities. As a career counselor, she assists with tailoring resumes, practicing interviewing, and honing job-search strategies. As a marketing coach, she facilitates identification of a marketing plan that matches the individual.

Upgrading Your Technical Skills by Vicki Lind, MS
You probably have noticed that most position announcements today include a list of required or preferred technical skills, such as knowledge of Excel, MS Project, and InDesign. Some also specify a required level of competence—basic, intermediate or advanced.

These skill requirements lead many of my clients to ask questions such as:
· How do I know whether I am an intermediate Excel user?
· Should I just put down that I have Lotus 1-2-3 and they will know that I can quickly learn Excel?
· What is the fastest and least expensive way to brush up on an old skill?
· I have every requirement except MS Project. What should I do?

My answer to all of these questions is the same: check out the 63,000 video tutorials on Lynda.com. For the basic fee of $25 per month, you can learn at your own pace.

Staying up to date on technical skills presents something between a challenge and a nightmare to self-described “technophobes.” Since use of the web and other technology is now an important factor in the majority of professional jobs, employers are concerned about candidates without skills commensurate with the average current college graduate. Showing that you are out of date in your technical skills can be particularly harmful for the “older candidate” with the younger HR staff or manager subconsciously overgeneralizing that you will be “out of date” in other ways.

My clients have used a combination of strategies to tackle one technical skill at a time. First, try using the Lynda.com free trial to see if learning in your pajamas with a latte eases your anxiety. Another tactic is to invite a friend over and have “technophobe tea between ten minutes of practice.” If your friend can’t provide the hands-on solutions, take your teen daughter or nephew out for pizza in exchange for answering questions that arise when a tutorial or demonstration video doesn’t make sense to you.

You may be hesitant to add such skill building into your job-search calendar. You may have heard managers say that communication skills and critical thinking abilities play a larger role in their hiring decisions than specific skills which can be learned on the job. This concept sometimes misleads job applicants to hopefully apply to jobs for which they do not have the required technical skills or years of experience. The screeners (either the person in HR or the computer scanner) are more concrete and literal than the managers. Even small companies are using a computer scanning device which is designed to select for key words. HR is usually tasked with presenting the hiring manager with a small subset of the resumes—those with the best match on years of experience and technical skills- for the manager to make his or her more holistic assessment.

In this situation, driven by the over-abundance of applicants, the job seeker has two alternatives. You can acquire the technical skills to get past the screening process. Or, you can use networking strategies and find someone to put in a good word for you so that HR or the manager pulls your resume and cover letter into the shorter stack for the manager to fully consider.

Whatever you do, do not highlight older programs like Lotus 1-2-3 or Fortran programming unless you want your resume to go into the file labeled ‘Fossils.’