Fearless InterviewingWhen the human resources director asked her how she thought
she could apply her teaching skills to training, Holly said some-
thing like this:
When I took over the fourth-grade class at Bowden Street
Elementary in Minneapolis, the grade point average for the
preceding 5 years had been a C minus. Using my skills in
researching age-appropriate program planning, interactive
learning approaches, and developing innovative presentations,
I was able to bring up the class average to a B plus. It’s an
achievement I’m very proud of—just the kind of improvement
I expect to make in your employee morale and performance.Using General Skills to Get a New Job
General skills can, of course, also be used when you are apply-
ing for the same type of job in the same type of industry. If
you were applying for a job of a social work case manager at an
agency where the caseload was particularly heavy, you might
want to emphasize some of your general skills having to do
with organization. Suppose your list of general skills looked
like this:
- Assessing
- Counseling
- Researching
- Reporting
- Coordinating
- Organizing
If an interviewer were to ask you, “What are your strengths?” you
might choose to answer in the following way, introducing your
three most salient strengths and then elaboratingon one of the
strengths, such as in the answer cited below:
QUESTION: What are your greatest strengths?
ANSWER:Well, some of my greatest strengths lie in the areas
of counseling, reporting, and organization. An
example of an experience in which my organiza-