Three Steps to Brand Your Part-Time Job for Career Success

Posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2017

A common question from students is how to build a relevant resume when you don’t have any relevant experience. You know you should create a resume that shows employers why you’re the best pick for the position, but if you’ve never worked in the field, how are you supposed to do that? With only retail or service industry experience, it can be daunting to try and prove that you’re a viable candidate for a professional job.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that the answer is to brand your experience. You want to take aspects of your part-time job and show why having worked it makes you the perfect hire. You need to make the position relevant.

But what does that mean, and what does that entail?

Below, we look at the three steps to brand your part time job.

Step One: Your Tasks

The first step to figuring out how to make to make your job relevant is to identify what your job tasks were. The easiest way of doing this is to take a sheet of paper and make a list of everything you did in a day at work.

Let’s say you worked at a bakery. You unlocked the store in the morning, counted cash, baked food on time for open, dealt with a busy lunch rush, ordered supplies, cleaned up, closed cash, and locked the doors.

If you’re applying for a professional job, this experience may not seem relevant. But, in reality, you picked up on a lot of skills that are important no matter your context. These are called transferable skills, and we’ve written a whole guide on identifying yours here.

Now that you know your tasks, you can figure out what transferable skills you learned at this position.

Step Two: Your Skills

If you follow our guide to identifying your transferable skills that we linked above, you’ll know how to transfer your daily tasks into skills that apply at whatever job you work.

Think about what part of those tasks you will take with you to every job you have. For example, if you dealt with a busy lunch rush, you gained skills like time management and prioritization. Those are important no matter where you work.

Do this for all your daily tasks. You’ll start to notice patterns and repetition. Take note of these.

Step Three: Describing Your Work

Now is the part where the real branding work begins.

It starts with some research. Read the job description of the job you’re applying to very carefully. Take note of what specific abilities, experience, and skills they’ve listed as requirements. Your goal is to show that your part-time work has taught you those exact things.

Take a look at the list of skills you just made, and start matching things. Does the job posting state that you should be comfortable in a fast-paced environment? Your time management skills from working those lunches are perfect. Does the job have a lot of small details to keep track of? Your experiences closing cash at night will help with that attention to detail.

Connecting your work experience to job requirements is the key to using your part-time experience on your resume. Service industry and retail jobs are valid, and the knowledge you gain in these positions is vital in professional environments.

Take the time to show employers exactly why your experience is awesome, and you’ll see all kinds of benefits in your job search.

 

If you would like to learn more about the Algonquin College co-op program, please visit our website at https://www.algonquincollege.com/coop/, connect with us at coop@algonquincollege.com or call us at 613-727-4723 Ext.7623. You can also follow us on Twitter @AlgonquinCoop.


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