Promoting your work experience – Teamwork
We often meet students who talk about having had a job but ask if the skills gained are ‘irrelevant’ to want they want to go into as they are not directly related. Employers do like relevant work experience of course, but are also very interested in what you have gained though being in any type of work or volunteering. These skills are often known as transferable or soft skills are useful in any job.
So over a series of blogs we will look at some key skills and dig a bit deeper to find out what to say about them.
The first one covered is teamwork – all of us at some point have worked in a team so think about an example and consider the following questions…
- How many have there been in a particular team at any one time? Numbers are good at helping to paint a picture.
- Did the makeup of the team vary? Did you work with different people on different shifts?
- Did you all do the same task or did you share tasks between you? How did you sort this out?
- What role did you tend to take within the team? Leader, diplomat, completer/finisher?
- What happened if you were short of some team members? How did you arrange the work?
- Have you ever trained anyone in a team? What did you train them to do?
Having thought about this you can use these examples to write about on in a skills section on a CV, to answer questions on an application form and also to respond the questions at interview.
You can use examples from work but also from group projects at university.
A common question at interview is to test you on the occasions when a team failed to deliver the product, service or project on time. Employers want to see that you can cope when things don’t work out quite as intended and what you as a team and as an individual learned from the experience.
- So think about what went wrong in a team or group activity?
- How would you seek to avoid this happening in the future or at least try and mitigate the risk?
There is more on our website about developing skills and providing evidence of these in the application process.
https://www.brighton.ac.uk/careers/looking-for-a-job/right-career/graduate-toolkit/index.aspx