Identifying employer needs

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Identifying employer needs

In this chapter we'll look at identifying the steps you'll need to take to achieve your top role or industry. If you are already in a role or industry that you feel satisfied with, you can also use this method to determine steps to improve your value. A Gap Analysis is a method for identifying job requirements and then determining where the gaps are in your experience. Completing a Gap Analysis empowers you. It helps you to identify what steps you need to take to achieve a certain position or improve your value.

In your career development guide we've provided a Gap Analysis worksheet for you to fill out. We'll start by analyzing the employer's requirements first. For your top role and industry, find up to three job descriptions. This should give you an overall picture of the skills, knowledge, and qualifications required for this role. Let's begin with a job description from a University. The job is for an Instructional Designer. First, let's look at the skills. As you can see, there are many required for this job, so for this description, skills include: communicating proactively, collaboratively, and professionally.

We'll put this skill in the Employer Need column as proactive & collaborative communication. We'll continue writing every skill we identify in the Employer Need column. If you find that a job description has too many details, then categorize them into more general skill families or combine them together. So, work comfortably in a fast-paced, changing environment and work on multiple projects simultaneously can be combined as project management in a fast-paced environment.

Next, we need to identify the knowledge requirements for this job. They are web-based course management systems, streaming audio and video tools, instructional practices for collaborative learning with web-based tools. So we'll add these knowledge requirements to the Employer Need column as well. Finally, let's look at qualifications. The job requires a Bachelors degree, (preferably in instructional design or related field). Qualifications can be flexible.

Because they use the words related field, this is where the employer may be flexible with the type of degree as long as you can relate it to the job. These remaining qualifications may be flexible as well. Unless an employer requires a specific certification or degree, each qualification can be generally compensated by another area of strength. Now that you've identified the qualifications, add them to the Employer Need column. Remember to get an overall picture of the role.

You should analyze more than one job description. There should be some reputation which will tell you what some of the stronger employer needs are for that role. We now have column one, the Employer Need column filled out. In the next video we'll show you how to compare their needs with your haves.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/managing-your-career/identifying-employer-needs