With rising unemployment rates and cut-throat competition, getting a job has become an extremely difficult task for young students. In fact, many students despite possessing all the right academic degrees and work-profile fail to impress the recruiters during the interview process. If you are one unlucky soul among them, you must note that you are not alone. Today, employers look for many things in a prospective hire apart from their academic record and degrees. There are certain qualities that certainly set some candidates apart from others during the interview process. After consulting many counsellors and industry experts on this topic, we have come up with a general list of qualities that every 20-year old looking for a job should try and develop as part of their personality. These qualities will not only help you impress the interview panel and get the job, but it will also help you to advance your professional career.
1. Leadership:
We live in a highly competitive world where taking lead is something that is considered to be the primary quality required among good employees. Employers nowadays look for resources which can act as leaders and lead a team of professionals to achieve organizational goals. As a working professional, you must possess leadership qualities and ability to inspire your peers as well as your team members to perform better by overcoming obstacles. But in a professional environment, merely taking lead is not enough as you will also have to plan, ideate and develop concepts. In such circumstances, quick decisions and stable mental fortitude are also required to be a good leader.
2. Responsibility:
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Another very important quality that you must learn in order to build a career would be taking your job responsibilities very seriously. An employer has hired your services in order to build a product or deliver a service and the success of the entire company depends on how seriously you take these responsibilities and deliver upon them. You will have to deliver upon the targets assigned to you as part of your professional responsibilities. In fact, many studies have suggested that there is a direct co-relation between employees taking responsibility and their growth prospects. So, this quality will not only be pivotal for getting a job but also for securing an excellent career ahead.
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3. Discipline:
Generally speaking, discipline is a quality that we have been told to follow since our school days. Although it may sound like a cliché, but it’s true; discipline is an inexcusable quality that will determine your professional success. As an employee of an organization, you will not have the liberty procrastination, excuses, and general laziness if you want to fulfil your professional ambitions. In your professional life, you will have to exhibit discipline not only in terms of time management and delivering your targets but in your general demeanour. Be it reaching office on time or planning schedules or delivery timelines for your projects; discipline is something that will take you places in your work life.
4. Communication:
We live in an interconnected world where communication is key to success. The ability to communicate promptly and clearly via different mediums is pivotal in the professional success of a candidate. As a professional working or an organization, you will have to put your verbal and written communication skills to use, it be through emails, official letters, meetings, seminars and workshops. In fact, your communication skills will determine the 80% impact your overall body language has when it comes to your work life. Therefore, these skills need to be developed by every student and young professionals who are looking for employment opportunities.
5. Technical Competency:
The tech-savvy world that we live in requires us to work with different technologies. The impact of the technological revolution in the last decade has transformed the way organizations operate or work. The direct impact of this amalgamation of technology and professional life means that as an employee you would be expected to interact and use such technology to assist you in fulfilling your job responsibilities. Therefore, you must learn to use and adapt to the new technologies. For instance, MS Word is the most commonly used text editor used in majority of organizations for the creation of documents, similarly PowerPoint is used to create presentations and Excel is used to prepare spreadsheets. Learning to work with such common technologies will add value to your resume and give you the much-needed edge to stand out and apart from others during the interview process.
So, there you have it! If you are a fresher who is already looking for a job or will be looking for one in near future, you must try to cultivate these qualities as part of your personality soon. Even if you are a young working professional, these qualities will help you advance your career and leave your competition behind. If you feel that apart from the ones that we have listed above, any other qualities can also help students and freshers to get a job, do mention them in the comments section below.
