What exactly should you be studying if you want a certain role?
Check Job Boards for Current Skills
Nowadays in careers where we get to drive our careers ourselves. We’re not waiting for an employer to do it and employers aren’t taking on that responsibility. Essentially what I would recommend doing is first and foremost, if you’re ready to look now, go out and pull up at least three jobs and those jobs should be what you’re targeting now, then go through the requirements area.
And if they are in fact asking for the skills you’re looking to study, then go ahead and study those skills, especially if you don’t feel like you’re very strong in them right now.
Use Skills to Search for Jobs
If the job descriptions are not requiring the skills you are looking to study, then the next step is to look for jobs with your target title. Go ahead and search for the skills and see what types of jobs come up. You can actually search for jobs according to skills and not just job titles. And that might help be insightful as to if that is a path you want to go, at least for what the market is asking for right now.
Search Market Trends
Now there’s a couple of other things that you can do to determine if, in fact, this is the right job or study pattern for you. One thing you could do is look at Google Trends, and start searching for that and see if that’s a popular term or skill in your area in the market. I’ve seen businesses use that to determine what they should focus on.
Network. Network. Network.
Now, something else that you could do is you could actually use this as a good excuse to network. Find somebody who is senior in their experience level, in their career, who’s been doing this awhile, and find out what trends they see happening in the area.
Ask them a couple of questions, get to know them, build that relationship. And I say it that way in case you don’t already know them, but this is a way where you could network and get a chance to answer the questions for yourself. By gathering the information for yourself so you can take ownership of your next steps.
