How to Win the Job by Communicating with Confidence

Building Your Skills Arsenal

ager, office manager, and accounts manager require the use of
management skills.
One exciting outcome of taking stock of your general skills is
that it will enable you to link the set of skills you have developed
in one career to the set of skills required in a different career.
Someone who has managed budgets, inventory, and teams of
people in the computer hardware field might find that he or she
can apply those skills in another industry such as manufacturing.
In other words, if you wanted to make a jump from being a
project manager in engineering to being a production manager
in the film industry, you would not be at a loss for some of the most
important general skills required for that kind of change. In the process,
however, you would probably be required to answer an inter-
viewer’s questions about your abilities to make that kind of
change. Your answer might look something like this:

Although I have not had direct experience in the film industry

yet, I do have management skills. I have managed budgets of

up to $1 million, teams of up to 48 engineers and technicians,

and schedules involving up to three different projects, each on

different deadlines. Through creative scheduling and careful

allocation of resources, I was able to bring one project in 18

days ahead of the deadline, thereby saving my company over

$147,000. That’s exactly the kind of savings I’d like to bring to

your film company.

Holly, one of my clients, was a teacher, but she was able to make
a career change into the much more highly paid field of training
and development for a human resources department of a large
computer firm. Though the occupations were different, she was
able to identify several important general skills that they shared.
Her general skills list looked like this:

• Curriculum planning


• Research


• Presentations


• Teaching


• Evaluation