Promoting your work experience – Creativity
We are nearly at the end of the series of 10 blogs on digging deep into your work experience to find good evidence of key skills employers seek. The penultimate one we are looking at is creativity.
If you have worked in a setting where you have produced something tangible or helped others produce something and also encouraged their creativity then this can be easy to quantify and describe.
However don’t be put off if this hasn’t been your experience. A little ‘thinking outside the box’ may be needed here as creativity can be found in all kinds of settings. So designing and manufacturing products fits the bill but also think of being creative within any services, community projects and social enterprise or anything else you have been involved in.
Think back to a work experience setting when you used your imagination or a creative thinking technique to come up with a solution or an original idea.
- Did you invent anything ? Or even change something? Again this can be a product but can also be a system or a different way of doing something.
- Describe the invention, was it a product or a service?
- What gave you the initial idea and how did to start to develop this?
- What hurdles did you encounter along the way?
- Did you test it out on any group? Who were they?
- Were there ethical considerations to bear in mind ?
- Any health and safety guidelines that needed to be followed?
- Did you modify it after consulting others? How did you do this?
- What did you learn from this? How might you do it differently if you could start again?
- How would you demonstrate the final product or service to others? Also remember commenting on the process you went through is just as important.
As with all of the skills covered you will use other skills alongside them. So strongly allied to creativity are communication, problem solving and analytical skills, possibly teamwork. However when it comes to an application it is important to focus on what the employer has asked for specifically. Applications are scanned for keywords ( asked for in the job description) and if those keywords aren’t there your application could be rejected at the first hurdle.
Go to the university of Brighton Careers Service website for more help on how to evidence skills. There is one more blog in the current series of ‘Promoting your work experience’ and this will appear soon.
https://www.brighton.ac.uk/careers/looking-for-a-job/right-career/graduate-toolkit/index.aspx
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