How to uncover job opportunities

Starting a new career means not only developing a new skill set but also learning how to relate your previous experience and skills to the new role you’re pursuing. If you’re ready to start your journey on a new career path, this reading will help you position yourself for success in your job search. You’ll learn how to understand what your potential employer is looking for and how to connect your background to their needs. The strategies outlined below are designed to help you become a strong job candidate, even if you don’t have directly relevant experience.

The first step is to fully understand the role you’re targeting.

Understand your target role

One of the primary challenges for anyone looking to launch a new career is how to stand out against candidates who already have experience in the field. Overcoming this challenge begins with developing a comprehensive understanding of the role you’re targeting. You'll need to understand the role in the context of any company you’re applying to, and more broadly as well. Having a holistic understanding of what it takes to succeed in your target role will help you determine your suitability for the role, and identify any steps you can take to improve your chances of getting hired.

To understand everything from minimum must-have requirements to skills that might help you stand out from the crowd, you can begin by researching and analyzing job descriptions across different organizations.

Below you’ll find our recommended strategy for how to approach this process effectively.

Analyze job listings

The first part of the process is to gather information from multiple job listings:

• Pull up ten job descriptions for your target role. To do this, you can use job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, and LinkedIn. Make sure the roles you select come from different companies, share similar titles, and are roles you would actually apply for. In each job description, you should be able to identify a section listing requirements for the role.

• Combine all the job requirements. To do this, create a new Google document and copy over all the required responsibilities from all ten job descriptions.

• Order requirements based on appearance frequency. Certain requirements will likely appear in multiple descriptions. The more commonly they appear, the more likely it is that they’re essential for the role. Put the most frequently appearing requirements at the top of your list. For example, a requirement that appears in all ten descriptions would go at the very top.

After completing these steps, you should have a clearer picture of which requirements are most common and important for the role. You may also have questions:

• Why do requirements differ across job descriptions? One of the most common reasons for this has to do with overly general job titles, or job titles that don’t necessarily communicate the specific scope of a given role at a particular company. For example, a program manager at one company might be focused on customer management, while at another company, the emphasis might be on project management. A Data Analyst might primarily use SQL at one company and Python at another. Because of these differences, it’s important to look beyond job titles. This is why we recommend the process outlined above—to help ensure you’re targeting the exact roles that are right for you—and that you understand the requirements for those exact roles.