Finding the Throughline

Your career success comes down to identifying where you want to go, and explaining how all of your experiences so far make you an excellent candidate for your next role. Finding your career throughline will help you appeal to your audience.

When you are looking for a job, your throughline must appeal to the broader audience you are trying to attract, but it should also consider what your current employer would think if they saw your social media accounts.

This means ideally, your throughline should tie in with your current job in a way that brings your primary duties to the forefront, as opposed to highlighting more obscure skills that have little to do with your role.

Sometimes these throughlines are easy to identify. For example, a waitress may become a sales representative and want to move into something like hospitality, where customer service is a highly sought-after skill. In an interview, this person can share how she’s always been in customer service and really enjoys helping people as her throughline.

Other times, throughlines are harder to identify, but in these cases it’s more important than ever that you come up with a good one. In the example above, an interviewer may make that obvious hospitality/customer service connection for a candidate, and no further explanation will be required. But, if your career path began in the hard sciences, moved to bussing tables, and returned to economics only for you to be applying for a role as a navy librarian, that interviewer is going to want to know what brings you there so that they can judge if this role is the right fit.

While I can’t create that throughline for you, you can by considering what you liked about each role, and by considering what kind of person the new job is looking for.

Maybe you always liked chemistry, so you graduated with a BS in it, but you found the entry-level work to be boring because you didn’t see the impact it had on the larger world. While you were going back to school for a master’s degree, thinking that would put you in more impactful roles, you worked as a busser. While you were in school and bussing tables you thought about the socioeconomic factors that influenced the creation of certain chemical compounds, inspiring you to switch your major to economics and become an economist. During this pursuit of knowledge, you found yourself interested in the makeup of materials used in defense, and have accumulated a great deal of knowledge on the subject, so that you can share this with other DOD specialists.

Your throughline might be that you have always been patriotic and you chose to study chemistry so that you could help support our country’s defense. All your pursuits have been towards that end goal.

Whether your career began as a Chemist or a Waitress, finding these throughlines are incredibly helpful because they show prospective employers that you are not “just starting” in the field, but that you are an experienced and competent employee who should be hired.

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