Career Confidence: How to Talk About Your Experience (Even If You Feel Underqualified)
Discussing your work experience when you feel underqualified can be difficult. You might lack some of the essential education, skills, or experience mentioned in the job posting.
Emphasizing your transferable skills, reframing your abilities, and developing relevant skills help you confidently discuss your experience relevant to your targeted role. Demonstrating resourcefulness helps show the hiring manager your potential, increasing the likelihood of advancing in the hiring process.
Emphasize Your Transferable Skills
Show how your knowledge, abilities, and experience apply to different situations and contexts:
- Time management, communication, collaboration, and problem-solving are sought-after skills for virtually every role.
- Consider how your experiences in school, extracurricular activities, and internships can benefit the employer.
- Focus on how volunteering, hobbies, and projects help you overcome challenges and contribute to a team.
- Show that your potential can add value to a company.
Reframe Your Abilities
Review the job posting to identify the qualifications:
- Write down the essential required education, skills, and experience.
- List the relevant skills you have from your current and previous roles and volunteer work.
- Focus on how you can adapt your current skill set to fit the role expectations.
For instance, say your current role is in a calm work environment, and you volunteer at an animal adoption agency, helping reactive dogs that don’t want to be in kennels:
- If the interviewer asks how accustomed you are to working in a chaotic environment, rather than discussing your job, you could draw on your experience of calmly handling excited dogs at the shelter.
- Show how your ability to handle dogs that don’t always comply with your commands enables you to complete tasks by the deadline.
- Providing an honest answer that bridges your current skill set with the one required for the role increases the likelihood of advancement in the hiring process.
Develop Relevant Skills
Use your list of required skills to determine which ones to develop:
- Coding, social media, public speaking, and other in-demand skills can be developed through free or low-cost online tutorials.
- Taking initiative helps close skills gaps for your desired roles.
- Understanding the relevant concepts and language helps you explain your efforts to develop the skills.
- Employers appreciate candidates who engage in ongoing learning opportunities.
Demonstrate Resourcefulness
Consider examples of learning by necessity while at work:
- Focus on times when you had to learn new skills in the moment to complete a task.
- Explain the situation, the task undertaken, the action taken, and the results.
- Show how your resourcefulness helped you solve a problem by the deadline.
- Employers look for agility in candidates.
Showcase Your Impact
Emphasize how your accomplishments impacted previous employers:
- Highlight examples of how you improved a situation and made a difference within an organization.
- Clarify how you added value to a company or community
- Include numbers to quantify your contributions and results.
- For example, “Increased sales by 25%” or “Raised $25,000 for charity.”
Want Additional Advice for Your Job Search?
The recruiters at PrideStaff are here to provide the resources, feedback, and support you need to increase confidence throughout your job search. Contact your local PrideStaff office to start the process today!
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