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Hi team just a short post today, tackling the career crisis in a different way. Now at some stage most if not all of us will have this, we wake up one morning and wonder if we’ll ever find another job, we wonder if our skills have become so generic or specialised that will anyone else want us. So to combat this here’s some humour with a bit of a message too about how you view your skills.

Axis of Awesome is a comedy group here in Australia, one of my favourite skits of theirs is actually a metaphor for our careers. The video clip below takes four chords and shows the variety of popular songs that simply use there same four chords in different arrangements. What does this have to do with your career you ask. The point is this, just like those four chords your skillset(s) can be applied across multiple areas.

Sometimes we can get into a hole with our skills – typically experienced as the career crisis, we see them in a limited way because we often use them across a limited range of activities – be it HR related, Finance related etc. Chances are your skills can be applied across a much wider range of roles and disciplines than you’re giving yourself credit for. At the end of the day your previous employers employed you for a reason, this may or may not be the same reason as your future employer will want you. The key is to first understand your skillset, and then ensure your future employer knows how you can add value – just like the songs in the video, your skills may be similar to others in the market, rearrange them and show with passion how they can be applied.

By Brendan Lys

Operating at the intersection of Human Resources and Data Science, I leverage extensive specialist experience within Human Resources, with the methodologies and approaches of Data Science. This focus on the discovery of actionable insights from data, has been applied to areas such as: remuneration & benefits, workforce planning, recruitment, health & safety, diversity, and training. But what does the application of data science to HR challenges and opportunities actually look like. Within an HR framework the data we work with typically comes directly from our HRMIS, an advantage of using data science methodologies is that we can bring in additional data either held within the organization or from external sources - data which is out of reach from a pure HR analytics approach. Consider for example position descriptions, these contain a wealth of data that we typically ignore as its not in a analysis ready format. A side project I'm working on currently (April 2019) is using text mining on job descriptions to provide insights into which job family the position may fit into. The insights of my work have been enjoyed by organizations across a diversity of sectors including: Government (Australia and New Zealand), ASX and NZX listed companies, utilities, not for profit and higher education.