Understand the Terms and Their Meanings Related to Job, Career and Employment!!

Abstract:

To make a meaningful and successful career, it is necessary to understand the terms related to career. In career progression we came in touch with the terms of job, terms of employment and many other aspects.

This article provides the definition and meaning of important terms to make you understand and stay focused for your career.

Keywords

Career, Scope, Planning, Strategies, Resources, Jobs 

Learning Outcomes

After undergoing this article you will be able to understand the meaning and definition of important terms related to job, career, and employment .

Overview 

This glossary of job, career, and employment terms is designed to give job-seekers a quick definition and then from where to derive more details, samples, and much more information. 

 

Glossary of Terms.

Accomplishments — These are the achievements you have had in your career — including work, job, and life successes. 

Action Verbs — These concrete, descriptive verbs express your skills, assets, experience, and accomplishments. 

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) — Used by major employers to collect, store job candidate data — and screen resumes from potential job candidates. 

Assessments — These tests ask you a series of questions and try to provide you with some sense of your personality and career interests. 

Background Check — Used by employers to verify the accuracy of the information you provide on your resume or job application — and beyond. 

 

Birkman Method — A 298-question personality assessment and a series of related report sets that facilitate team building, executive coaching leadership development, career counseling and interpersonal conflict resolution. The Birkman Method™ combines motivational, behavioral and interest evaluation into one single assessment, which provides a multi-dimensional and comprehensive analytics.

Branding Statement — A punchy “ad-like” statement placed at the top of a job-seeker’s resume that tells immediately what he/she can bring to an employer. 

Business Plan — A complete overview for a busines, from development of a vision and mission of the business to the setting of business goals to the reasons why organization (or person) is in business to the detailed plan for reaching those goals. 

 Career Activist — Someone who is proactive in planning, evaluating, directing, and controlling his or her career rather than simply reacting as situations arise. 

 

Career Branding — Helps define who you are, how you are great, and why you should be sought out. Branding is your reputation; branding is a promise of your value to an employer. 

Career Change — Changing your occupation by devising a strategy to find new career choices. 

Career Coach — Also called career consultant, career adviser, work-life coach, personal career trainer, and life management facilitator. 

Career Exploration — The process of finding a rewarding career path, as well as specific jobs within a particular career path. Think of career exploration and planning as building bridges from your current job/career to your next job/career. 

Career Fair — There are many types of job and career fairs — from those scheduled during Spring Break for college students to industry-specific fairs for professionals 

Career Objective/Job Objective — An optional part of your resume, but something you should contemplate whether you place it on your resume or not. 

Career Passion — One of the most important elements of personal happiness is being passionate about your career and your job. 

Career Planning — The continuous process of evaluating your current lifestyle, likes/dislikes, passions, skills, personality, dream job, and current job and career path and making corrections and improvements to better prepare for future steps in your career .

 

Career Vision Statement — A set of career goals that a job-seeker sets for the long-term, typically five years or more. 

Cold Call — When a job-seeker approaches an employer has not publicly announced any job openings. 

Compensation Package — The combination of salary and fringe benefits an employer provides to an employee. 

Contract Employee — Where you work for one organization (and its salary and benefit structure) that sells your services to another company on a project or time basis. Compare to freelancer.

Corporate Culture — The collection of beliefs, expectations, and values shared by an organization’s members and transmitted from one generation of employees to another. 

Counter Offer/Counter Proposal — A salary negotiation technique used by job-seekers when a job offer is not at an acceptable level. Almost all elements of a job offer are negotiable, including the salary, non-salary compensation, moving expenses, benefits, and job-specific issues. Read more.

Cover Letter — Should always accompany your resume when you contact a potential employer. A good cover letter opens a window to your personality and describes specific strengths and skills you offer the employer. 

Declining Letter — A letter sent to an employer to turn down a job offer. 

 

Degrees & Certifications — Recognition bestowed on students upon completion of a unified program of study, including high school, trade schools, colleges and universities, and other agencies.

Diversity Job-Seekers — Numerous disadvantaged groups — women and minorities — often face extra challenges in the job-search.

Dress for Success — First coined by author John Malloy in the 1970s, the term Dress for Success signifies tailoring one’s attire, grooming, and overall appearance toward making a great first impression in a job interview — as well as maintaining a professional look while on the job to aid career advancement. 

Electronic Resume (or E-Resume) — A resume (see resume) that is sent to the employer electronically, either via email, by submitting to Internet job boards, or residing on their on Web page. 

 

Elevator Speech — A a 15- to 30-second commercial that job-seekers use in a variety of situations (career fairs, networking events, job interviews, cold calling) that succinctly tells the person you are giving it to who you are, what makes you unique, and the benefits you can provide.

Email Cover Letter — A cover letter that is sent to the employer electronically via email. 

Employment Gaps — Are those periods of time between jobs when job-seekers are unemployed, either by choice or circumstances. 

Entrepreneur — Someone who starts and runs his or her own business — who organizes, operates, and assumes both the rewards and the risks from running the enterprise. 

 

Follow-Up — An often overlooked and critical part of job-hunting. In the early phases of searching for a job, job-seekers must be proactive in showing continued interest in all job leads — contacting employers after you’ve submitted your resume. 

Freelancer/Consultant/Independent Contractor — Where you work for yourself and bid for temporary jobs and projects with one or more employers.

Franchising — A legal and commercial relationship between the owner of a trademark, service mark, brand name, or advertising symbol (the franchisor) and an individual or organization (the franchisee) wishing to use that identification in a business.

Gen Y Job-Seeker/Worker — The generation of people — roughly those born between the late 1970’s and the late 1990’s — 72 million or so strong. As job-seekers and workers, this cohort has very different views on hiring, perks, promotions, and managing — and are expected to transform all aspects of employment as they age and move up the corporate ladder. 

Green Jobs/Green-Collar Jobs — Jobs — moving from both white-collar (professional) and blue-collar (trade) — to positions in renewable-energy and energy-efficiency industries are on the rise. 

Hidden Job Market — Only about 5-20 percent of all job openings are ever publicly known, which results in about four-fifths of the job market being “closed,” meaning you can’t find out about any new openings unless you do some digging. 

 

Holland Codes — Personality types developed by psychologist John L. Holland as part of his theory of career choice. 

Home-Based (Work-at-Home) Careers — Numerous opportunities exist for job-seekers who want more control over time and work, who want job flexibility to spend more time with family — by working from home. 

Informational Interviewing — Just what it sounds like — interviewing designed to produce information. What kind of information? The information you need to choose or refine a career path, learn how to break in and find out if you have what it takes to succeed. 

 

Internships — One of the best types of work experiences for entry-level job-seekers because a majority of employers say experience is the most important factor in whether you’re hired. 

Job Application — Sometimes also referred to as an Application for Employment. Many organizations require you to complete an application .

Job Boards — Also referred to as Job Sites. There are five levels or types of job boards: general job boards and job-search engines (such as Monster.com and Indeed.com), industry-specific job boards (such as TeachingJobs.com), geographic-specific job boards (such as AtlantaJobs.com), job-seeker specific “niche” boards (such as MBAJobs.com), and company career centers (such as HomeDepot.com).

Job Clubs — Sometimes known as networking clubs or job-finding clubs, enables you to expand your network of contacts 

Job-Hunting Etiquette — There are certain rules or protocols that should guide a job-seeker’s conduct while job-hunting. Some people call these rules good manners, but more refer to them as business etiquette.

Job-Hunting Online — Not a magic elixir that will guarantee that you find a job, but still a door to opportunities and techniques not available before the advent of the Net. 

 

Job Interviewing — All about making the best matches. Both the employer and the job-seeker want to determine if the fit is right between them. First impressions are key (see “dress for success”), and preparation is critical to interviewing success. 

Screening interviews — usually conducted by a member of the human resources department, the screening interview is designed to weed out unqualified candidates. Providing facts about your skills is more important than establishing rapport.

Traditional interviews — uses broad-based questions such as, “why do you want to work for this company,” and “tell me about your strengths and weaknesses.” Interviewing success or failure is more often based on the job-seeker’s ability to communicate and establish rapport than on the authenticity or content of their answers.

Behavioral interviews — based on the premise that past performance is the best indicator of future behavior and uses questions that probe specific past behaviors, such as “tell me about a time where you confronted an unexpected problem” and “tell me about an experience when you failed to achieve a goal.”

Panel/group interviews — uses a committee of people, usually around a table, asking questions. The key to this type of interview is to balance eye contact with both the person who asked the question and the remainder of the group.

Case interviews — used primarily by management-consulting firms to determine how well suited you are to the consulting field. Case interviews measure problem-solving ability, tolerance for ambiguity, and communication skills along several dimensions. The idea is to find out how well you identify, structure, and think through problems.

situational interviews — sometimes also referred to as a scenario-based (problem-solving) interview, where the job-seeker is placed in a hypothetical situation (such as dealing with an irate customer), and is judged by how well s/he reacts to complex information and ability to resolve problem and arrive at solutions.

stress interviews — usually are a deliberate attempt to see how you handle yourself under pressure. The interviewer may be sarcastic or argumentative, or may keep you waiting. Expect these things to happen, and when it does, don’t take it personally. Calmly answer each question as it comes. Also called intimidation interviews.

Phone interviews — have only one purpose: to decide if there is a good enough match to justify a site visit. Make sure to set a specific time for your telephone interview — not just “sometime this week.” .

 

Job Satisfaction — A term to describe how content an individual is with his or her job. 

Job Scams — job offers and work-at-home businesses designed to deceive and defraud innocent job-seekers. 

Job Search Agent — A program offered by many job boards that allows job-seekers to passively search for jobs by selecting criteria for new job postings. At some time interval, the program emails the job-seeker a list of new job postings that fit the criteria, allowing the job-seeker to decide whether to take any action.

Job-Seeker SEO — A strategy in which passive (or active) job-seekers use proven search engine optimization strategies to increase the ranking and popularity of personal, branded career Websites. 

 

Job Shadowing — One of the most popular work-based learning activities because it provides job-seekers with opportunities to gather information on a wide variety of career possibilities before deciding where they want to focus their attention. 

Job Skills — The skills you need to do a particular job. For example, an accountant needs to have good math and accounting skills; a doctor needs to have good medical, scientific, and personal skills. Read more.

Job Skills Portfolio — Also referred to as a Career Portfolio, a job-hunting tool a job-seeker develops to give employers a complete picture of who you are, including samples of your work — your experience, your education, your accomplishments, your skill sets — and what you have the potential to become — much more than just a cover letter and resume can provide.