How to Gauge Your Job Qualifications: A Comprehensive Guide for Tech Careers

What's up YouTube family? I'm Alison Peck, aka Ali, from Corporate and I make videos about career development. And this one is for the tech job people. How do you know if you're qualified enough to apply for a job? Or how do you know during the interview process if you're overqualified for a job? Alright, so let's get into it. Have you ever been in an interview and they're asking you really easy questions and you feel like you're acing the interview and you read the job description and you checked all the boxes and you're like, yeah, I can do that, I can do that. I've done that before. I've done that before. You're probably overqualified for the job you're interviewing for and you might think that that's great because you can do the job. It might be kind of easy for you, maybe you can quietly quit or just skate by. But what your interviewers are thinking is, shoot, they're over qualified for this role, they're going to want a lot more money than somebody who's maybe 75% qualified. And a lot of people are wanting to save money right now. So I would not be applying for jobs that you think you're overqualified for. But how do you know? So there's something called the Confidence Competence Gap. And the Atlantic put out an article about this, I believe in 2014 called the confidence Competence Gap. And basically what the article says is it's comparing men and women. I don't necessarily think this is a gender issue, but the Atlantic pointed out that women tend to be more competent and less confident and they apply for jobs when they think they're 100% qualified for them. Men, on the other hand, apply for jobs when they are maybe 50% qualified and they still get the jobs and they negotiate higher salaries for themselves and they are sometimes more confident than competent. They feel like they can do the job but may not be able to as well. Now do I agree with that? Not sure. I thought in 2014 it was a really interesting article. But what I want to talk to you about in this video is how to identify what type of qualifications you need from a job description and if you should go for a role that maybe you think you're under qualified for. So first thing I want to say is I absolutely urge you to apply for the job if you think it would be a great fit for you or if you are interested in the company itself, because I've definitely been in situations where I'm applying for a job at a company, and I get through the interview process and they say, you know, you did great in the interviews. Thank you. We don't think you'd be a good fit for this job, but we think you'd be a good fit culturally. So we want to pass you on to another hiring manager who's hiring for their team, and we think you'd be a better fit for that role. So still apply for jobs if you think you're under qualified. But how under qualified? I like to apply for a job if I'm looking at the job description and I feel about 75% confident that I could do the job, meaning I look at the requirements of the job, and I hit about 75% of them. Now, sometimes they have requirements in the job like you must have FDA experience with medical devices. It's kind of hard to not have that qualification, still get the job. Because there's nuances to some regulatory bodies or some. Some jobs have nuances or details that you do have to have experience in. But sometimes they'll say a master's degree is required, or 10 years of experience in XYZ is required. I tell people, you know what, if you've got just a bachelor's, still apply for the job, because you could be a perfect fit fit. And they're still gonna give you the job if you're a perfect fit and you just don't have a master's degree, because guess what, you could still get a master's degree, or you could just learn the skills on the job that a master's degree would give you. So I like to go by the rule of thumb that apply for a job if you're about 70, 80%, maybe less qualified for the job. When I was working for certain surgical robotics company that we won't name in this video, but it would be very obvious if you looked at my LinkedIn profile 2016-19. So when I was working for that company, they started inviting me to be on interview panels. And they said, hey, you're a great employee. We'd like you to be on interview panels for some of these engineering roles. Back when I was a manufacturing engineer and they trained me on what to look for in interviews. And never once did they say to me, this person must be. They must fit the job description exactly. They never said that. Actually, what they did is they gave me. They gave everybody on the interview panel a worksheet, and it had some acronyms on it that I forget. But basically they were looking for your character and your charisma. Or your energy or being a good cultural fit for the business, for the company. And they told us that it should be about an 80% cultural fit or personality fit and a 20% skills fit. Because guess what, you can teach skills on the job and you will, you'll have to go through training. When you get a job, you have to maybe shadow somebody more senior. Maybe you'll be trained by the person who's leaving that role that you're taking over for. So I thought that that ratio was pretty incredible. 80% personality or cultural fit and 20% skills fit. So I hope that that demonstrates for you that if you feel under qualified for a role, go for it anyways. Because another thing that might happen is say you're applying for a director position. Usually in the tech world it goes individual contributor, manager, senior manager, director, senior director, vice president, senior vice president, executive vice president, CEO. So if you're applying for a director position and maybe you've only been a manager and you want to skip the senior manager role, you can apply for the director position because maybe they don't have any senior manager roles open and you still want to work for that company, they might decide, you know what, this person's such a good fit, we want to hire them anyways. And maybe they'll adjust your title or your pay. But companies, if they find a great fit, they will make it work. They will change the title, they will change the salary up or down, they will modify the job description based on their needs in your qualifications if they really like you. So if you're. So the point I'm trying to make is if you're overqualified for a role, you're aiming too low. I think they call it low hanging fruit. You know, instead, what I think you should do, instead of picking low hanging fruit off of a tree, here's a tree. Instead of picking low hanging fruit off a tree. Get that ladder out, get that ladder out. Climb up that ladder, reach for the top of the tree, get that fruit that's hard to pick because it tastes better. Trust me. And if you don't feel confident in applying for roles that you might be a little under qualified for, you just gotta keep interviewing and keep answering these questions about yourself. Like tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a co worker or tell us about a time when you wrote a report for this department or whatever. You do interviews, you practice, you start having more confidence about yourself with how you sell yourself. Because that's what we do in interviews. We're selling ourselves and we're our own, you know we're our own promoters. So if you're applying for roles and you don't feel so confident, keep at it and good luck. Let me know if you need any help with interviewing. I definitely do interview prep and if you were to hire me for an interview prep session what we would work on is making sure that your mission and your values and your goals align with the company's missions, values and goals. I would also help you do research about the company via their website and glassdoor.com and all of the things and LinkedIn. I would also help you identify which questions they might ask you and answers to them. Create a cheat sheet for yourself and I would also help you to develop questions to ask them. So if you think you need that help feel free to reach out to me. I'd be happy to do an interview prep session with you and happy hunting. I'll see you in the next video.