Employability: what does it mean and how to develop it?

What does employability mean? Developing your degree of employability is essential to enter the job market.

[caption id="attachment_5881" align="aligncenter" width="1200"] What does employability mean? The degree of employability helps us become attractive to the job market and develop the right skills and competencies[/caption]

What does employability mean? The degree of employability helps us become attractive to the job market and develop the right skills and competencies

For anyone undertaking any type of educational journey (school, university, academic, vocational), the goal isn’t just to bask in the glory of acquired knowledge, but more realistically to enter the job market and kickstart their professional career. While having the right technical knowledge, the so-called hard skills, is essential and necessary, it’s equally crucial to possess certain transversal skills that define what’s known as employability for every aspiring professional. Employability is defined by a series of characteristics and qualities that make candidates more appealing in the eyes of employers. The degree of employability each person has determines the success of their career: it goes without saying that improving your employability by acquiring or enhancing certain skills is extremely important.

Employability and market needs

But let’s not take anything for granted, because knowing what employability is and what it’s for is one thing; being self-aware of your abilities and your own employability and knowing how to develop it is another. Yes, because it’s not a trivial topic—and too often, fundamental traits are taken for granted or, worse, dismissed as irrelevant when instead they should be emphasized, nurtured, and leveraged. The job market is by nature ever-changing, and never as in the past year have we seen how quickly priorities and ways of working and job searching can shift (from both the employer and candidate perspective). In this context, adaptability and organizational skills, as well as productivity management, have played a crucial role. Being able to make yourself “employable” in light of the changing needs of the job market is fundamental. It’s clear then that to enhance your professionalism, you must know how to communicate and highlight the right talents, those most aligned with what’s required for the specific job. But even before that, what’s truly needed is self-awareness of your talents and how to communicate them.

Time for professional branding

There are many ways to communicate and showcase your professionalism, and these have evolved over time: from the traditional paper CV to setting up a LinkedIn profile; from cover letters to video presentations; from phone pre-interviews to online questionnaires and assessments. For a long time, these tools were the go-to for top candidates to stand out and win the job, but they’re starting to feel like a given—so finding new ways and paths to “promote yourself” has become necessary. As we said, the crucial factor is self-awareness: knowing who you are, what your talents and strengths are, so you can tell your professional story and abilities in a truly effective way. We can therefore talk about professional branding, meaning all those communication activities aimed at highlighting your value as a professional by sharing your skills, talents, competencies, and knowledge. What really stands out in this kind of practice is creativity combined with authenticity. In fact, to put it bluntly, what really makes a difference is telling a creative story that’s authentic: a recruiter will be far more impressed by reading or hearing an honest and original story told creatively than by a mere list of experiences and certifications. But creative and authentic storytelling is just the endpoint of a process that begins with self-analysis, of your innate qualities, characteristics, and your story. Only after an introspective journey—asking yourself the right questions about your goals and identifying hidden or dormant talents—can you produce valuable content that reflects and enhances who you are and your professionalism, making you “attractive” to employers: in a word, employable.   So we can conclude by saying that what determines your employability is your ability to bring out your professional identity and highlight its uniqueness and value. In this way, the end product—whether paper, multimedia, or digital—will capture and share the essence of who you are and what you do. If you can instantly captivate those reading or watching in just a few minutes, you’ll have achieved your employability goal!