COVID-19 Blues: Gaining Valuable Experience As An Entry-Level Job Applicant

You are out of school and in need of a job. Jobs which are much harder to find now that there’s a pandemic. So what do you do? What should you take into consideration when applying for an entry-level position during and after the COVID-19 crisis?

The Experience Conundrum

To answer this, let’s talk about the dreaded question of experience.

A lot of employers require “experience” when hiring and unfortunately this often goes for entry-level (???) positions as well. Some or any kind of experience that is relevant to the role you are applying for is usually highly valued. If the experience is in a similar organisation or industry, even better.

With the massive amount of job losses caused by the lock-downs imposed to curb the spread of the COVID -19 pandemic, many very experienced people are back on the job market. Many of them would be willing to take a pay cut competing for the same jobs with new entrants to the job market.

So what chance do you stand as a newbie on the job scene? How do you get some “experience” so you can be competitive?

Well, it’s a difficult question but not an impossible one to answer. Before going over what you could do to get that much-needed experience, let’s examine why employers are obsessed with experience.

Seeing The Future Through The Past

Most, if not all organisations exist to create value for their stakeholders. To accomplish this, employees function in their varied roles to contribute to the creation of this value. Therefore, before committing to hiring anyone, employers need to be sure that they are getting people who can lift their own weight and deliver their part in the value creation equation.

They want to know that they are hiring a person who has a history of creating the needed value. Your prior experience serves as a means of validation.

For this reason, they look out for experience in your CV and ask questions to validate the “experience” during the interviewing and selection process.

It’s why a lot of interview questions follow the pattern “Tell us about a situation in the past where you did X”. It’s also why they ask for references. The belief is that what you have done in the past is a reliable predictor of your future with their organisation. Even if this is not always true, it is the best means we have at the present moment

What This Means For You

It is therefore advisable that you showcase your capabilities as a job applicant by either building a portfolio or doing varied internships or apprenticeships. Both are great ways of showcasing yourself as a value creator. The choice for either route depends on your area of interest. An aspiring graphic designer, for example, can choose to build a portfolio without having any internship experience while a teacher is much better off working as an intern first.

So what should you do if you are an entry-level job applicant with no experience whatsoever? Or maybe you have some experience, a portfolio or some internships but they are not relevant or sufficient for your career or area of interest — what do you do then?

Well, start with the most important thing.

Know Yourself

Who are you? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What are your values? What do you stand for? What goals are you working towards?

All of these will give clarity to your career path which in turn will give light to the kind of job you should be applying for. Once all of these are clear, you can finally work on building some “experience”

Please note the use of the word “building” and not “seeking”. You shouldn’t be sitting around waiting for it to come to you. You should be going out to build it or create it. As we have mentioned before, positioning yourself as a value creator, rather than a job seeker is the best foundation of a successful career and it is a mindset needs to start before you apply for any job.

In building your “experience”, you don’t need to focus only on applying for official internships. You could simply volunteer or seek unpaid positions with companies or organisations that you admire and can get access to. Building experience like this will not only allow you to learn, but it will also allow you to have the necessary referee(s) for your resume.

How do you find such volunteer or unpaid positions? By going to networking events. By asking friends and family for leads. By finding leads online such as via Google Searches or through LinkedIn.

As a value creator, the amount of “experience” you can build has no limits. So don’t let anything limit you or your thinking.

The other very important thing you can do while building your “experience” is to actively up-skill yourself. You need to be constantly learning new skills and you shouldn’t necessarily be fixated on one singular trade.

The post-COVID world needs workers who have a diverse set of skills. If you are a value creator, part of that means that you are flexible enough to work in diverse environments or projects. Having a diverse set of skills also differentiates you in a pool of cookie-cutter job applicants.

The COVID-19 crisis doesn’t necessarily have to halt your plans as an entry-level job seeker. Use this time to build, to learn and to step even further into your potential.

Enter A New Kind Of Work Experience

Here at Qiesto, we are democratizing opportunities for young people to learn and prepare for the job market.

We understand both the limit in available opportunity and the need to learn by doing. Tackling youth employment requires giving young people opportunities to demonstrate the value they can offer not by talking but by doing. Unfortunately, there are not remotely enough internship available to meet the demand for experience that young people need.

To this end, we are partnering organizations around the world to connect young Africans to a new kind of work experience that is project-based, outcome-focused and executable from wherever you are in the world. Your work on these projects would count to validate what you can do and as experience in your resume.

By participating in the projects we source, we help unlock your journey into gainful employment, career advancement or entrepreneurship depending on what your interest is.

Does this interest you and do you want to access to these opportunities? Sign up on our platform at www.qiesto.com

Join our weekly webinars via https://bit.ly/qiestowebinar or join our collaboration zone via https://bit.ly/qiesto1 to start working towards your dream. See you there.