Same skills, different job

Too often, people fail to make the link between their existing skills
and the skills required for the job they want. As a result, they either
do not bother applying, or they apply with the view that they’ll
probably not get the position.

By the end of this chapter, as well as showing you how to prepare
for this type of question, I hope to persuade the skeptic in you that
skills are often a lot more transferable than you may realise. Once
you’ve assimilated this idea and learnt how to prepare answers for
duties that you have not performed before but whose skills you have
mastered, a whole new universe of jobs suddenly becomes potentially
available. What makes learning how to prepare for this type of
question even more important is that, unless you’re interviewing
for a job which is almost identical to those you’ve done in the past,
it is likely to be the most common question asked.

So let’s pose a question: what do a furniture salesperson and an
insurance call centre operator have in common? Using the four steps
to interview success, we can discover which skills are both available
and transferable. Before we start the process, however, we need to
work out what the overlapping skills are. In other words, we need
to link the skills and knowledge sets for what you’ve already done
and the job you’re now applying for.

Let’s say, for example, you’ve been working in an insurance call
centre where your only contact with customers has been over the
telephone and you wish to apply for a job as a face-to-face salesperson
selling furniture—two seemingly very different jobs. You will, amongst
other things, need to demonstrate how your call centre customer
service skills are relevant to the new job’s customer service
requirements.

An effective way of doing this is to work backwards,
by making a list of the customer service skills required by a face-toface
furniture salesperson, then thinking of all the customer service
skills in call centre work that are the same or similar. Table 4.1 shows
how it can be done.

As you can see, even though insurance call centre operators and
face-to-face furniture salespeople work in very different environments,
there is a great deal of overlap in the skills required for both jobs. In
the above example, the only real skills difference is the fact that call
centre operators don’t have to think about their body language.

The big difference, of course, lies with product knowledge. So, in preparation
for the upcoming furniture sales interview, I’d be rehearsing all the
similarities between the two jobs and thinking of the best way to
overcome the one obvious weakness—limited product knowledge.