Thursday, April 9, 2009

Career Objective: How to write an effective and original objective statement

What is a career objective?

A career objective, often listed as "objective", is quite simply a statement of your career goals. It sounds easy – you want to land a good job, utilize your experience and education, and get paid well. However, it's really not that easy. In fact, this is probably the most difficult part of the resume to compose, as you are limited to one to two sentences in which you are expected to convey your professional expertise, expectations from a job and an organization, as well as goals for your professional growth.

Common mistakes when writing a career objective

A common mistake that many people make is not listing an objective at all. They make the assumption that the objective is not necessary to include in a resume because it states the obvious – your objective is to get the job you are applying for. However, this is a big misconception. Employers are looking for an objective; they want to know what it is that you are looking for in order to determine whether or not you are a good match for their company.

The second mistake is including a career objective that doesn’t actually express your goals and your qualification. For example, a generic statement like the one below is commonly used is resumes:

“To obtain a position where my experience and education can be utilized and expanded.”

If you examine this statement, you will find it doesn’t say anything specific about what you are looking for in terms of professional growth. Avoid using weak statements like this. They will hurt you more than help you in your job search, because your employer will be left with an impression that you don’t have a set a goal in mind.

Four Tips how to create a winning career objective

Now that you know what you should NOT do, here are some helpful tips on creating a winning career objective that will get your resume noticed.

1. Make your career objective personal. Think of your whole resume as a sales tool; your career objective is your opening statement. You want your employer to know what you want, not just restate what other people want.

2. State your commitment to your career goal. If you are unsure of what you want, how is your employer to believe that you really want the job at their organization and you are not just applying because you want to get out of your current work environment? Don’t be afraid to state what you want from a job and from an organization.

3. Show that you are willing to take action to achieve your goal. Indicate what direction or action you are willing to take in order to accomplish your career objective.

4. Be specific about what you are looking for in a work situation. While you can say that you are looking for a “challenging” position, this doesn’t mean anything to your employer, as people define challenges in various ways. Avoid using generic and broad terms. Simply state what you want, and what you are willing to do to get it.

Keeping in mind these criteria, let’s rewrite the above career objective statement so that it effectively states what you want.

“To obtain a position of a sales representative in a computer industry, where I can utilize my management and customer relations skills, with the opportunity for performance-based advancement.”

This objective statement tells your potential employer that you know what you want, what experience you have in order to get the position, and what you are willing do to become a successful professional with the company.

Thus, you have just created a winning career objective for your resume.

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Read more tips on How to write a CV, Resume and Cover Letter main page.

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10 comments:

  1. These are great tips. thank u very much for sharing this very useful and important advice.

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  2. Objective part is very important part in your resume. Resume writing Edmonton can give you insights about this.

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  8. To build a suitable career, we need to go through several career objectives. So that, we can easily build a suitable career. But, we need to prepare a strong CV to build a better career, a CV basically consists of candidates information, details, and work experience, which attract the attention of organizations. I would like to follow some career objectives from here for career success. Thanks for this post.
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