What skills are employers looking for when recruiting new employees? What skills and personal attributes would give you the best chance of a job and a successful career in an enterprise?
The Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) Employability Skills for the Future site highlights a range of ‘employability’ skills as important not only to gain a job, but to progress within an organisation.
Employers consider that employability skills are as important as job-specific or technical skills. Employers will seek those employability skills that are most important to their business and will choose workers who are strong in these areas – leading to improved matching of jobs and job seekers, better job satisfaction and more productive enterprises.
There are two facets to employability skills: ‘generic’ skills and ‘personal’ attributes (for example, loyalty, enthusiasm. motivation and sense of humour). The key generic skills identified, and how they contribute to the enterprise, are:
- Communication - productive and harmonious relations between employees and customers;
- Team work - productive working relationships and outcomes;
- Problem-solving - productive enterprise outcomes;
- Initiative/enterprise - innovative ideas and outcomes;
- Planning and organisation - long-term and short-term strategic planning for the enterprise;
- Self-management - employee satisfaction and growth;
- Learning - improvement and expansion in employee and company operations and outcomes;
- Technology - more effective work practices.
More information about employability skills can be found on the University of Southern Queensland website: What are Employability Skills?
Job seekers - finding your ideal job may be easier than you think with the
Employability Skills Profiler (ESP). ESP is an innovative online tool that can assess your employability skill strengths and compare them to those required in over 1,000 different job types. ESP is available through participating Job Network Members across Australia.
The ESP is a user friendly, online web system that caters to low language and low computer literacy and can be used by almost anyone. The ESP uses four assessment tools, specifically designed to measure a job seeker’s skill sets. These assess the job seeker’s ability to understand written and verbal instructions, numeracy skills, literacy skills and personality profile. The advantage of using an online web system is that the ESP is available at any time, in any location including remote areas.
ESP facilitates immediate feedback to job seekers on their employability skills and their potential job options by assessing job seekers’ employability skills against skills identified in over thousand Australian occupations. This will potentially lead to improved job prospects for job seekers and also responds to the demands of business and industry that require people with the right set of skills.
The ESP is the first tool of its kind in the world to objectively assess a job seeker against a nationally-consistent generic skills framework, and then match the job seeker’s employability skills to the employability skills required in various occupations. Please refer to the
ESP page on the
Australian Workplace website for more information.
Even before you start work you can start developing employability skills by gaining work experience, undertaking pre-vocational courses, sport and extracurricular activities.
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