For the past fifteen years or so, companies in most industries have been trying to cut back and eliminate their reliance on internal employees. This has had a number of effects on managers in those companies.
But for professionals seeking a job with those companies the effect has been nothing but negative.
Most professionals deal in technical knowledge. Whether that knowledge is accounting, IT, legal or even sales and marketing it has a heavy technical component. Unfortunately, that means that identifying and rating skill requires an equivalent technical knowledge. For that matter even interpreting one’s resume requires an equivalent technical knowledge.
Unfortunately, as companies reduced staff, technical managers became busier and busier. It became necessary to offload the search for employees to HR who were not trained or capable of making the appropriate technical evaluations. The result has been a steadily deteriorating professional job market.
So what’s a poor professional to do?
EBooks are one solution that every professional should consider. Here are seven reasons that every professional should consider writing eBooks.
1. Resumes no longer work if they ever did work. Bluntly resumes are designed to log the work you’ve done. They do nothing to convince people that you can do the job. Or that you have the skills that they need.
2. Managers are too busy to be as involved in the hiring process as they should. As we’ve discussed already technical skills are needed to evaluate and interpret resumes of professionals. Skills are often interchangeable and often related or counter-indicated. Unfortunately, HR recruiters are typically unable to properly interpret resumes for technical staff.
3. Business cards get lost or are misplaced. And after a while they all tend to look the same. eBooks help you to create a true differentiation between yourself and other professionals.
4. After a while everyone looks the same. As a professional you need to differentiate yourself from everyone else who is applying for the same position. The technique is called personal branding. EBooks are one way of ensuring that you have differentiated yourself.
5. eBooks can establish credibility by providing an example of your work. Unlike resumes which simply list the work you have done, eBooks demonstrate those skills.
6. eBooks establish expertise and knowledge in a particular field. Because they are an example of the use of the skills and knowledge they are more likely to be received and believed than a resume.
7. eBooks establish the ability to apply knowledge. One of the issues that professionals face is that having the knowledge isn’t enough. In fact, having too much knowledge of a particular area can lead to that well known phenomenon of “ten years of experience or one year repeated ten times”. What every employer wants is the ability to actually apply the knowledge which every professional is supposed to have. An eBook helps prove that you have the ability to apply knowledge to a specific problem.