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Blowing your own trumpet isn’t easy, but you can learn how

Posted on • Career planning

Blowing your own trumpet, learning to sell your skills and strengths to employers doesn’t happen overnight. We know many OU students find lack of confidence a barrier to a fulfilling career, you’re not alone. So we developed Build your future with career confidence to give you a systematic way to start gaining confidence.

Having spent a long time in the same job, I found myself looking for work. I discovered that selling yourself isn’t too different from selling anything else, like shampoo or toothpaste (though unlike big advertising agencies, only you can sell yourself). By looking at myself like a consumer product, here’s what I learned:

Step 1: Find your USPs (Unique Selling Points).

You are unique, and employers these days understand the strength in diversity. It’s true, knowing how to start auditing your skills and strengths can be tricky. We’re usually unaware of our own talents and often wrongly assume everyone else can do what we find easy.  If you can, ask a trusted friend or family member what they think you’re particularly good at, because those who know us well can usually identify our skills much easier than we can. Qualities which people often don’t appreciate in themselves include:

  • Communication skills (written and spoken – your OU study experience with TMAs, collaboration or giving presentations demonstrates this).
  • Numeracy (not everyone’s good with numbers, but if you are and can prove it based on a past TMA or previous work, it’s a plus).
  • Self-management and resilience (completing successive OU modules shows this).
  • Problem solving (find some specific examples – either from previous work or from your OU studies).
  • Initiative (have you done any volunteering, undertaken community activities or perhaps started a charity or business?).
  • Commercial and/or sector awareness (you might already work in the sector or a similar one, you might have had TMAs focused on commercial aspects of your studies).

Step 2: Understand your target market.

This is… recruiters and employers, of course. Explore labour market information (LMI) and read relevant industry reports. We also hold regular employer panel and application skills events where employers tell OU students what they’re looking for, so make sure you take full advantage.

Step 3: Get your wording sorted (and practice using it).

OU students and recent alumni have free access to great tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to refine your pitch to employers. Try out the CV builder, the CV360 review tool and Interview360 to plan and refine how you’re going to sell yourself. Also, don’t forget to come along to our live careers skills workshops run by our qualified and experienced careers guidance professionals.

Blowing your own trumpet may be something you’ve never previously done, but with a bit of help from your OU Careers and Employability Services, some time set aside for reflection and the confidence that comes from practice, you can sell yourself like a pro.

Careers and Employability Services are here to help you get your foot in the door from your first module to three years after qualifying.

The basis for this article was created using copy.ai. Using AI is a good way to begin thinking about what you could write or say but needs to be used as a starting point only.  It is often generated in US English rather than UK English. We’ve tried it, perhaps you can too.

 

David Foulkes is Marketing and Communications Manager in the OU’s Careers and Employability Services. As students with a clear purpose do better in study as well as in life, David’s job is to make sure information about our careers support reaches as many OU students as possible. He’s also a keen OU student of physics, astrophysics and space science and is at the ‘Discover’ career readiness stage