Sometimes you need a job, but you don’t have any experience. For young people, this is almost certainly the case. Whether you are applying for a part time job, summer job, internship, or your first job after graduation, most young people don’t have work experience in the field where they want to work.
A lot of people feel like they aren’t qualified for a job because they don’t have experience, but I believe a lack of experience can usually be a strength. It certainly can be a strength in sports, as I proved last week. But some might not see how that story can translate into getting a job.
Here’s another story for you.
photo credit: flickr.com/photos/usfbps/
When I was in college I interviewed for a job as an electrical engineer at a nuclear power plant. At the time I interviewed, check out my killer credentials:
- I had taken less than 30 hours of engineering courses and hadn’t even enrolled in a single junior or senior level electrical engineering course.
- I had no engineering internship or co-ops in college
- My most relevant work experience was as an assistant pool manager where I would occasionally work in the pump room if something broke.
Despite my obvious lack of relevant experience, and a job climate in late 2007 where opportunities were scarce as we entered a recession, I made it through multiple rounds of interviews and was offered a position as an electrical engineer with a starting salary of over $60k a year.
How to Interview When You Don’t Have Experience
- Tell the interviewer that your lack of experience is a strength.
- Apply skills and/or experience you have to the job for which you are applying.
- Acknowledge your lack of traditional experience, and promise to put in extra work to get experience and learn quickly.
That’s it. Steps one and three are pretty much the same for any job. The most difficult, and most important part, is number two.
For this engineering job, I used my assistant pool manager job and talked about some pretty unique ideas I had for safety improvements for the staff and in the pump room. Safety is such an important part of engineering that the seemingly irrelevant pool manager experience was good enough to get me the job offer.
A lot of people can’t relate to applying for an engineering position at a power plant, so let’s look at how I would address my lack of experience in an interview for a generic marketing position. Keep in mind that you can change “Marketing” to any other long-term specific college certification.
Also, keep in mind that you and I probably don’t have the exact same skills, so you would have to customize this to fit yourself.
Interviewer: Hi Kevin, I see you are applying for an entry level job in Marketing, but I noticed that you don’t have any experience or education in the marketing field. Help me understand what makes you qualified for this position.
Kevin:
Step One: Tell the interviewer that your lack of experience is a strength.
Of course. I actually believe my lack of marketing experience is one of the reasons I can excel in this position.
Step Two: Apply skills and/or experience you have to the job for which you are applying.
My educational experience in Math and Electrical Engineering gives me a unique perspective that will allow me to extract meaningful information from raw marketing data. I can use this analysis to determine which of our marketing strategies are most effective and help the company place more focus on the most effective strategies. In addition, through my experience in the IT field I have become very skilled at implementing process improvement techniques. I believe if we apply these techniques to our marketing campaigns, we can shorten the time to market and reduce the costs of developing the marketing strategy.
I’m sure you already have a team of great marketing minds. When I combine my analytical skills with their marketing expertise, we will be able to come up with new, unique solutions that this company hasn’t seen before!
Notes: The key is to make your irrelevant experience become relevant. If you do it properly, you are establishing yourself with a unique set of valuable skills that sets you apart from any candidates with traditional experience and skills. At the end, you can remind the interviewer that he probably already has a team full of people with the same skills, and make him wonder if he really needs another generic candidate with the same qualifications as everyone else.
Step Three: Acknowledge your lack of traditional experience, and promise to put in extra work to get experience and learn quickly.
I’m also very confident that I can learn marketing skills and techniques very quickly, and will use every opportunity I can to learn as much as possible. I think it’s a big advantage for me to learn the [insert company name] approach to marketing. You won’t have to un-teach me all the bad habits that other people may have picked up from prior work or educational experience that doesn’t agree with your approach.
Finally, I am well aware of my need to gain experience quickly, and I am happy to put in the extra hours to get caught up as soon as possible. Every assignment I’m given will be a new, exciting opportunity for me to learn and grow as a marketer and a person, and I will approach it with more passion and intensity than anyone who has been doing it for years.
Notes: When you acknowledge your lack of experience, it shows that you aren’t selling a load of BS. A lack of experience CAN be a strength, but it is DEFINITELY a weakness. The important thing is not to dwell on the negative and move quickly into how you are going to fix your lack of experience when you are hired.
Interview with Confidence
That’s how I would approach an interview for a marketing job. Would I get the job? I honestly have no idea.
But I do know that I could approach that interview with confidence. I would offer a unique skill set that differentiates me from anyone else interviewing for the position. When my interviewer is done with all his interviews for the day, mine will stick out from all the other ones where he heard, “I did this promotion…” and “I worked on this marketing project…”
To some people, it will stick out in a bad way. But for others, it will stick out in a good way. Just keep interviewing until you get one that likes you.
For more on getting jobs, what to do once you’ve got them, and what to do if you lose them check out these articles.
The First 90 Days of a New Job
5 Ways to Weather an Unexpected Job Loss
Get a New Job Every Two Years
If I ever have to interview for a job again, I am totally begging you to coach me just so you know…
You know where to find me 🙂
You’re such a stud 😉
I’ve used similar tactics before, and yep, they work. Use your individuality and uniqueness to your advantage.
Most managers I’ve worked with in my career believe that a strong employee with any background can learn most jobs. The key is to make them believe you will be a strong employee!
These are some great tactics, and I’ve been able to use them as well. My old position was computer science related, now I’m working in water pollution. While there is some overlap, I was able to emphasize a unique skill set that I was going to bring to the position and was hired!
You got it Jeff! Computer science can be related to water pollution if you make it.
I still don’t get how step 1 works. I mean, if I just plug in that sentence it seems incomplete. Like there should be a follow up sentence or something but what?
Step 2 immediately follows step 1. I just broke them up to explain. It would definitely be weird if you just left that sentence hanging out there.
I wouldn’t say that no experience is a strength so much as it’s an opportunity. I would point out (assuming that it’s true) that while you may not have experience in xxx department, that you’ve been successful in other areas, that you’ve worked with xxx departments in the past, that you have the educational background, etc. etc.
Interesting article – I work in a position where I have to help coach and prepare people who’ve been on welfare for a significant amount of time to learn and transition into becoming employment-ready. This is a great article because a lot of them don’t have any experience at all. Regarding what you said about strengths and weaknesses though – there’s a common idea that when an interviewer asks you about your weaknesses, you’re supposed to present it as “something that could be seen as a strength”. I think that’s a lot of BS – “I’m a perfectionist” or “I’m a workaholic” are total suck-up, brown-nosing answers that aren’t real at all. You’re absolutely onto something when you say that the best strategy is to acknowledge your weakness, but make absolutely sure that you convey the idea of being willing to and actively doing something to change that.
College students should overcome one of the biggest obstacle when it comes to finding jobs which is the lack of experience..You will often hear these lines from prospecting employers when you apply for a job You dont have enough experience then Well call you just to make matters worse. You can also think of the accomplishments and experience you have garnered in the past even if they were not considered job experience yet..Go for Pre-Job trainings.Bill Warner director of sales and recruiting at the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca says one of the best resume cover letters hes encountered lately is from a woman who described how being a rush chair at her sorority made her a leader fit to work at AstraZeneca..Warner was impressed and offered her a job even without experience in pharmaceutical sales. According to Warner They do have experience but they struggle with the bridge from what theyve done in college how to link it to the position theyre interested in..Build bridges.
Thankyou for your great advice and your time to conduct such a sound piece of writing