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If you’re a recent graduate or in your early career and are concerned that you don’t have much job experience to speak of in interviews, you probably have more material to draw from than you think. While formal job experience is, of course, always relevant, some of the most compelling examples of skills that employers value come from nontraditional experience. The key is to know how to market them.
Employers expect that recent graduates have limited job experience, but you can wow them in the interview stage with your ability to describe your nontraditional experience and how you’ll transfer it to their professional environment. It just takes a little more reflection. By identifying what those skills and experiences are, you can articulate them confidently in your interviews and stand out amongst early career applicants.
Make a List
Whether you’re entering the job search as a recent undergraduate or graduate student, start by listing all the activities and extracurriculars that you participated in on campus and in your communities, as well as group project work for your classes. Why list everything? You may need to go beyond your resume to find compelling examples of conflict resolution, leadership, and time management, among other essential skills that translate to the professional world.
Experience like running a food drive might appear on your resume, while participating in a college sport or Greek life probably won’t. By listing everything that you participated in, you may discover your strongest stories in unexpected places. With convincing examples in hand, you’ll be prepared to answer common interview questions such as, “Do you prefer to work independently or in group environments?”
After you compile a comprehensive list of your student life experiences, you can move on to defining the key moments that taught you essential and transferable skills.
Conflict Management
Consider a time when you managed conflict in a team setting. How did you handle the situation and how did you grow from it? This question is not only one that you’ll hear frequently in interviews, but it’s also a great tool to help you identify multiple examples of navigating conflict in a thoughtful way. During your interview preparation, you can consolidate an experience into an example of your personal growth and approach to conflict.
If you were a member of a sports team, for example, did you have to navigate any differences between teammates or coaches? Was there a time when you kept a level head or considered multiple points of view? Did you help teammates come to a resolution over a disagreement? Now, take it one step further. What skill did that experience teach you that you will bring with you to a new team environment at a prospective workplace? These guiding questions go beyond a sports environment; you can apply them to the group experiences that defined your student life.
Leadership
Leadership comes in obvious and more subtle forms, from titled positions to leading by example in a group setting. If you held a named leadership position, including captain of a sports team, editor in chief of a student newspaper or magazine, or president of your fraternity, these are absolutely examples that you should discuss in job interviews. To really market your experience, however, reflect on what you learned that you would apply to the position. How, as a leader, did you support and work with your peers? Did you make any adjustments to your leadership approach that were more effective?
Perhaps you didn’t hold a named leadership position while you were a student. In this scenario, you can think about the ways that you led by example. Did you lead by example as a participant in your classes? Were you ever the first student to ask your professor a clarifying question about an assignment? Did you take charge in a group living environment to ensure that your landlord received rent on time from everyone in your household of peers? Get creative to find the strongest example of leadership from your personal experience.
Shannon Hugard, a PhD candidate and NCAA All-American at 1500 meters, drew on her experience as a collegiate athlete in interviews shortly after graduation, especially in response to questions about her leadership style.
“Having teammate mentors that were 1-3 years older than me was an invaluable resource in college,” she said. “Watching role model teammates motivate and unite our efforts towards a common goal allowed me to shape a vision of the type of leader that I aspired to be. When I was repeatedly asked in job interviews to describe my leadership style or the qualities of a good manager, I could draw upon years of observing and implementing different leadership techniques on the track and describe how I had transitioned these skills to guiding group work in the lab.”
Time Management
Emerging from a university or college with a degree, there’s no doubt that you learned about time management and how to prioritize tasks. If you held a student or off-campus job while you were enrolled in classes, it’s worth describing how you balanced academics with work responsibilities.
It’s okay if your student job preparing food in a dining hall is completely unrelated to the position you’re applying to. What’s relevant is how you balanced multiple responsibilities and what tools you’re bringing with you from the experience. For an interview question about how you manage your time independently to complete your work, you can give concrete examples of how you budgeted time for school, work, and extracurriculars.
Collaboration
Group project work in a classroom or extracurricular setting can be unpredictable because it brings people together with varying goals and different academic backgrounds. It’s also an opportunity to practice communicating with others to accomplish a task — a skill you’ll almost certainly need in any workplace.
What role did you take on in group projects, and what did that teach you about your strengths in working with others? Furthermore, what did you learn about listening to your peers from discussion-based classes? In a club setting, how did you listen to others to reach common goals for the group? These are all questions to consider, helping you identify talking points in your interviews to describe your ability to work on a team.
Stay Focused
Everyone brings nontraditional experience and skills that they can transfer to a professional environment, but identifying and marketing how the experience will translate to the job is especially important for recent graduates with a limited resume. Stay focused on how your examples demonstrate the positive contributions that you will bring.
With a little reflection, organization, and focus, you can feel empowered to market your nontraditional experience in your job interviews. Practicing how to articulate your transferable skills will continue to help you prepare for interviews, even when your resume shows years of applicable experience later in your career.
For more support in preparing for your interview, check out our other interviewing articles.
