If You’ve Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything by Ann Crittenden was written some years ago to show that parenting skills translate to job skills.
In her book, Crittenden expounds in detail on transferable skills such as:
–calls for multitasking and the ability to function amidst constant distractions
- –enhances interpersonal skills, from effective negotiation to dealing with difficult people
- –develops skills in motivating and encouraging others to excel
- –teaches a keen sense of fair play and integrity, and much more
Each person should self-evaluate his or her own parenting to glean the job lessons from teaching, discipline, and feeding their child. I wholeheartedly subscribe to this not only in theory, but also as a participant and a witness.
Each jobseeker who is raising his or her children, should apply this thinking as part of an interviewing strategy:
Managing and handling difficult situations. Parents that take the high road here benefit the most because employers do not need to glean that you speak to subordinates or anyone like a child. A demonstration of a diplomatic approach always works without screaming, or yelling comes across better.
Multi-tasking and coordinating. Cooking, cleaning, and helping with arithmetic is no joke. Display your tenacity by sharing how you toggle between home applications (as they were software applications). Show employers how planning is a skill in coordinating your children’s events, activities, and academics.
Networking. Concentrate on how these relationships produced invaluable projects and processes in the Parent-Teacher world. To show that you can establish partnerships with others translates in building partnerships.
Adept to various kinds of learning. Since technology is constantly changing personal communication, and the way you conduct business, and demonstrate the way you monitor your child’s use of online tools on the Internet.
Microsoft Office and Budget. Have you used Excel and Access for budgeting? How about writing school letters and business correspondence. Have you balanced your bank and household accounts using Excel? These are hard skills that have project management elements.
Don’t expect any of these to land you an office of your own, but you can position these as relevant skills in most cases.
About Mark Anthony Dyson
Mark Anthony Dyson is a Career Consultant and writer championing the unemployed, underemployed, and the under-appreciated job seeker. We would love for you to subscribe to our monthly newsletter starting July 2013. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and Google Plus. Let us know what topics you'd like to see or hear from us. Career advice is our thing and learning is who we are. How can we serve you today?
