Make Today’s Job Market Work For You

Today, Jack Ma is the billionaire founder of AliBaba, but even he knows what it feels like to be rejected: “There’s an examination for young people to go to university. I failed it three times. I failed a lot. So I applied to 30 different jobs and got rejected. I went for a job with the police; they said, ‘You’re no good.’ I even went to KFC when it came to my city. Twenty-four people went for the job. Twenty-three were accepted,” he said.

Ma managed to turn this on its head by forging ahead on his own path in business when the job market wasn’t working out for him. But even if you’re not an entrepreneur, you can read the job market to improve your best chances of getting a job. Doing this requires research and preparation.

What Is The Job Market?

Try not to get hung up on unemployment numbers when you are looking up the job market, a concept demonstrating the competition and interplay between different labor forces. Instead, focus on what opportunities are like for someone with your education level, skills, and experience. The good thing is that there are tons of tools to help you determine this and how you stack up against other job seekers in your bracket, so to speak.

As of this writing, we are in a good place for job seekers, with plenty of opportunities out there if you choose your field wisely. If you are planning to change careers or are looking for some stable earnings while you pursue other ventures, some paths are better than others.

What’s Looking Good?

While things are always subject to change, there are a few areas that are rising in opportunity that are likely to stay that way for a while. A great example is the health care field. Becoming a doctor isn’t the kind of thing you decide to do off-hand. However, there is a rising population of elderly people who need care, and if you do the work, this can mean more job security for you. Good examples are personal care aides, nurses, home health aides, and therapists. These have less of a barrier to entry. There are also jobs like fast food and retail workers that will always have a need just due to the high turnover and amount of jobs in those areas.

You may have also heard of a little something called the “gig economy.” As work-life balance spirals out of control in many careers, some are deciding to become freelancers or contractors by choice to have more autonomy. While this path sometimes takes time to start earning money, many people are successful, in this path. Perhaps the biggest thing is that the platforms that are driving this business, like Uber and UberEats, Lyft, GrubHub, and Airbnb are all growing still.

What Should I Do?

When the time comes and you’ve narrowed things down, it’s time to start putting together your resume. Try not to put everything on there, as a resume that’s too long rarely gets read. However, try to keep a master list of all your accomplishments so you can swap them out as needed. Why is this so important, though?

An important thing to recognize is that different fields and even different companies within the same field don’t always warrant the same approach to a resume. For example, one company may use a certain platform like WordPress or Drupal that others don’t. If you know this going in, you can customize your resume to make relevant skills more prominent. This makes it easier for those hiring managers to know you are a good fit.

Granted, especially if you are a recent graduate or unemployed, you’re probably sending out a huge volume of resumes. This makes it difficult to customize everything to a T. Your best option may be starting with resume samples by job type. These will help you create outlines relevant to certain careers, letting you spend more time on the wordage and picking what accomplishments and jobs will help your chances the most.

Many people treat the job market as some sort of monolith, something impossible to understand beyond the fact that it’s working against them. This is the wrong mentality to have! By doing your due diligence and adjusting accordingly, you can use the data out there about the job market to make sure that you spend your time in the best ways when it comes to job searches.