Developing Skills to Enhance Your Career Opportunities

As the economy picks up there are going to be more opportunities to move on with your career. Graduate recruitment levels are moving back to pre-2008 levels and ‘frozen’ fast-track programmes are now hiring again. 2016 could be a great year to make that switch you have been thinking about for a while.

However, especially if you’ve been in your position a while, you may be a little out of touch with what employers expect from candidates.  Not only will they be looking for someone who ticks all the essentials – gets to work on time, polite and courteous, team player – but they are going to want to see something extra. So with this in mind, developing additional skills can not only make your CV stand out and get you the job, but can also make the job easier once you’re there. These skills can even open up whole new positions or sectors.

Here are some of the realistic key skills you can develop, to enhance your career opportunities:

Learn a second language

Language skills can be a major benefit throughout your professional and personal life. Getting to conversational standard in most languages is actually quite straightforward and often vacancies will specify that any language skills are a bonus and in the third sector, they are sometimes a necessity. If nothing else, language skills ensure you are a more rounded and proactive candidate and it’s always useful for the family holiday!

Develop a knowledge of SEO

If you haven’t heard of SEO, don’t panic. Though it gets more exposure every day, SEO is still generally the practice of marketing agencies and digital firms. It stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the practice of making a website Google-friendly. Unless you work in a large company or an organisation directly related to marketing the chances are that there won’t be too many experts at SEO.

The basics are easy to learn and the information is everywhere. One of the best tools is a free e-book from Moz. Understanding SEO adds an impressive digital string to your bow and shows that you are a modern, future-thinking employee. The skills learnt can have a great impact if you do have to contribute to the organisation’s website – it’s not just the job of IT anymore!  (An even more useful skill and one that is just as easy to learn is coding. Code Academy is an award-wining free service that is exceptionally easy to use).

Public Speaking

In a study on people’s fears, public speaking consistently ranks as one of the worst ones. In fact, one such study had public speaking at number one and death at number two meaning that, statistically, people would rather be in the coffin than speaking at the funeral!

Fear of speaking in a crowd can be debilitating if you want to progress in your career but thankfully, because it’s such a common problem, there are numerous seminars, workshops, and online guides to help you overcome the fear. If you can put on your CV or cover letter than you are comfortable talking in front of large crowds, you may find that doors start opening up for you as most sales or management roles will require some public speaking prowess to some degree.

Basic Numeracy

You’d be surprised how many people do not know how to work out percentage difference (it’s the difference, divided by the original value, times 100 – yes, we know you knew already, we were just reminding you). If you can add evidence of your basic Maths knowledge it can give potential employers peace of mind. From an electrician in the RAF to a primary teacher job with edustaff, a lot of positions require a good understanding of numeracy. By ensuring you are up to date with Maths, you also prepare yourself for any skills tests you may be required to take as part of a job interview.

If you have career development on the mind, by spending just a fraction of your time learning these skills, you can drastically improve your career opportunities both internally and externally.

Disclosure: This is a guest post.