How to Leapfrog Your Competition in Today's Job Market
How to Leapfrog Your Competition in Today's Job Market

Ever feel like everyone has their career path all figured out but you? And when you look at your own skills and credentials, do you wonder if they’re a little too rusty to get you where you might want to go?

You’re not alone. With every profession and industry on the planet now evolving faster than ever, even well-established workers find themselves worrying about maintaining their competitive edge. Almost everybody is struggling to keep up with the new tools, technologies and methods that crop up every time you turn around.

But here’s the good news: Once you recognize this reality, you’ll realize that the playing field is more level than you think. What’s more, the pace of change today actually provides job seekers and career changers with an opportunity that didn’t exist back in the old job market, when hiring was determined primarily by time and grade considerations.

These days, if you view your career path and professional development options through a forward-looking lens — focusing on what employers will likely need six months or a year from now — there’s a good chance you’ll be able to leapfrog your competition and present employers with a set of enticing, modern and marketable reasons to hire you.

Intrigued? Let’s look at how you can get ready to make the jump.

Go Pick a Few Brains

For starters, if you’re serious about your career future and trying to decide where to focus, either in terms of job options or training possibilities, start by doing some legwork. Don’t wait for someone else to tell you what to do. Assign yourself some homework.

Go out and talk to some people in the field or fields you’re considering and ask them what they’re seeing on the horizon. How is the industry changing? What new software and systems are coming down the pike? What new problems are emerging? What new tools, terminology and methods are altering the landscape?

Given the easy access to almost any type of professional today, via LinkedIn and similar sites, it shouldn’t be hard to find a handful of people in your field — be it technical writers, project managers, data scientists or botanists — who would be willing to reveal a few state secrets for the price of a latte. I’ve advised many clients of mine to do this and, almost to a person, they come back reporting that most people seem genuinely willing to help as long as you’re reasonably polite and professional when making your request.

You might also consider reaching out to someone at your local university’s career center to seek similar advice. Or try talking to recruiters or staffing professionals in your target field or fields. These people all have a front row seat to the changing needs of employers and can often provide guidance into what’s hot, and what’s not, in a given industry or occupational area.

Make a Data-Driven Decision

As for another method that can help you see around the corner and determine what skills will pay off most down the road? It involves data-mining the web.

With a few hours of reconnaissance on sites like Indeed.com, you can easily find out what new skills or technologies are growing in demand and really starting to gain steam. Simply look up a series of job postings locally and nationally in the areas you’re targeting and analyze the listed qualifications.

Are more and more marketing jobs including storytelling or customer advocacy among their requirements? If so, mark these items down as potential areas you should study or certification courses to consider. Interested in the nonprofit sector? See if you can identify topics that are on the rise there, like donor retention, and then seek out some specialized credentials within these areas. You can do this for any job or career path that interests you.

What’s more, you can use Indeed.com’s powerful Trends tool (scroll down to the bottom of the site to find it) in conjunction with your networking and research efforts to validate what you’ve found out and further investigate demand. Using this tool, which analyzes keywords from millions of job ads over the past four years, you can search for job titles, specific skills, certifications or study areas and see what the demand looks like.

You might find, for example, that an HR professional who gets training in Workday software will be jumping on a growth curve — whereas somebody who studies PeopleSoft, which used to be the gold standard in the industry, might be boarding a sinking ship, so to speak, given that employer requests for this skill are on a serious decline.

Again, it’s the leapfrog thing. While sure, some companies and veteran HR professionals may still be using PeopleSoft, there’s a shift going on. And it’s wise to get ready for it. So if you’re smart enough to spot a growing trend, and have the time to capitalize on it, get busy and go add a skill to your toolbox that could easily end up catapulting you ahead of many of your competitors.

Final Thoughts

As always, the one constant in life is change, so try your best to view the turbulence out there as an opportunity from a career perspective, not a liability. Do some digging, figure out the skills and qualifications that are just starting to gain traction in the market, and start pursuing them!


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Author Matt Youngquist

Matt Youngquist

Guest writer Matt Youngquist is a recognized career coaching expert and LinkedIn trainer in the greater Seattle area. He’s the founder and president of Career Horizons, where he helps clients across the Pacific Northwest tackle the challenges of job hunting and employment transition.

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