ASSESSING AND IMPROVING YOUR JOB SEARCH COMPETENCE

Searching for a job is hard work and may feel like an actual job with the amount of effort and time you put into it. As with other skills and competences, job search is something that you should get better at continuously.

As the process of searching for a job can become quite long and frustrating at times, you need to give yourself the advantage of tracking your progress and note your improvements. This will give you a chance to see which parts of the job search process you are good at - and in which areas you will have to improve. In other words, you will know where to focus your energy, and you will be able to celebrate your accomplishments step by step. 

The figure above, developed by our team, can be used when assessing your job search competences already at the beginning of your job search process. Thereafter, you can return to it occasionally to track your progress.

The idea is to assess how good you are at each of the job search activities listed in the figure, on a scale from 1 to 10 (10 being the best score). You can do the assessment yourself at first, but make sure to get a second opinion from someone who deals professionally with job search in Denmark or has extensive knowledge about the Danish labor market. There may be many differences between best practice in different countries, so your knowledge of effective job searching the “Danish way” may be limited.

In the table below you can see an example of an initial assessment and the assessment after a couple of months. As you can see, the job seeker’s own assessment was initially different from the second opinion. The feedback gave him an understanding of where to focus his time and energy to improve his job search competence. An assessment two months later showed significant improvement in some areas, but also indicated future focus areas. The assessment can be repeated occasionally, if needed.