Military Employment Guide: Researching Jobs

Step By Step Guide to Employment: Researching Jobs

As you work towards finding employment, you need to first identify your focus. What do you even want to do and what will that look like? Once you figure out what your focus will be, you can move on to researching jobs that you are interested in.

Within any career field, you will find different opportunities as far as the type of job you can get. You will want to research different jobs to figure out if they might be a good fit. Just hearing that a job is “a good job” isn’t enough to tell you if that type of job is something you would want to work towards.

When it comes to researching a job or a career that you are interested in, you need to look at the skills required, the education that is needed, the experience employers will be looking for as well as the pay. Once you can figure out what each job you are interested in requires, you will be better able to pin down the right job listings to apply for. 

Skills Needed

Each job will ask for certain types of skills. Some of these could be something tangible such as if you know Microsoft Word or if you can type for a certain amount of WPM. Other skills can be more general such as if you have leadership skills or are detail-oriented. 

See if the jobs you are looking at matchup with your skillset. If they do, you know to keep looking into them. If your skills don’t match up at all, the job might not be a good fit. 

Education Needed

The education that is needed for a particular job can be the most important part. You might not have mastered all of the skills on the list, but if you have the right degree, the job can still be a good fit. With some jobs, education could be a requirement of the field, such as needing to have a master’s degree to be a licensed social worker. 

In other jobs, education could be something that a particular company is looking for. You may just need to take a quick class or pass an exam to be qualified to apply for a certain job. 

Experience Needed

Companies and organizations will want to know that you have the experience they think is needed for a job. This could be years working in the field, or years at a particular type of job. If you have experience in a certain field, you might want to start looking in that direction first. That way you will be more likely to fulfill their experience needs.

Pay

Pay is very important to each and every job seeker. However, pay isn’t always included in the job listing. What you can do is look at industry standards, and break that down by your location. Websites like Glassdoor.com, Payscale.com and Salary.com can give you insights about how much a job would pay you. You can use this as a guide when looking to see what jobs might be a good fit.

When you find out about what the jobs you are researching are looking for in a potential employee, you can take what you have learned and change things if need be. For example, if you are interested in one job but don’t have the education, you can find out what you would need to do to get that education before you would apply. If the job seems like a good fit, this can be a good way to still go after what you want.