Skills to Learn While Unemployed to Make Yourself More Employable
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As somebody who has been unemployed more than once, unemployment can be depressing, very frustrating and extremely worrisome. In addition to sending out resumes and networking, I highly recommend using the free time that you have at your disposal to learn new skills to either make your life more manageable or to increase your employability. Obviously, unemployed persons usually don’t have the money to enroll in formal training programs but thanks to the Internet and social media there are a variety of free tools and options out there for people looking to pick up new skill sets.
100 Skills You Should Learn (for Free) While You’re Unemployed
People Skills and Networking Become a better networker, small talker and listener to improve your job prospects. Life hacks From making your own coffee to saving gas, here you’ll learn valuable skills that save you money, too. Productivity and Task Mastering Stay productive and learn to stay on task, avoid procrastinating and set goals even when you’re unemployed.
Computer and Internet Skills
These skills will turn you into a better Googler, blogger and typer.
- Online research: Besides helping you find a job, solid Internet research skills will make you a desirable job candidate.
- Learn how to use different operating systems: Train yourself to learn how to use Macs, Windows and Linux systems.
- Hack Google: Learn all of the Google shortcuts and business tools.
- Build a high-traffic website: Promote yourself and show potential employers how you can improve their websites.
- Use Facebook productively: Turn Facebook into a business tool for networking, branding and more.
- Basic web design: Employers will snatch you up if you know even basic web design.
- Blog: Becoming an expert blogger takes time, so use your unemployment to learn the technical and business side of blogging.
- Telecommute: Learn how to work with others online.
- Learn to type: Typing quickly and correctly saves you time and makes your work look more professional.
- Create a podcast: This fun and simple skill could increase your job prospects too.
Organization
Organize your personal and professional life by learning these skills.
- Be punctual: Being punctual forces you to map out your day according to appointments and to-dos.
- Use spreadsheets: Spreadsheets are great organizing tools and are used at almost every office.
- Sort email: Set up folders, archives, filters and searches to organize all of your emails.
- Prioritize: Prioritize your tasks so that it’s easier to work down your to-do list.
- Use a calendar: Make use of an online calendar to set up alerts and more tools to help you stay organized.
- Improve your memory: Practice different techniques to improve your memory.
- Organize your closet: A better organized closet will help you stay on top of chores and get ready faster in the mornings.
Writing
Write better emails, use better grammar and influence others with your writing.
- Write better emails: Write effective, impressive emails and subject headings.
- Learn correct grammar: Poor grammar will hurt your career prospects in a heartbeat.
- Persuasive writing: Learn how to write more persuasively and passionately.
- Write for the Internet: Writing online pieces is completely different than writing for traditional media.
- Write the perfect cover letter: Write a better opening and remember to include all the important details.
Confidence
These skills will boost your confidence and make others take notice of you.
- Work on body language: Learn how to stand confidently, make eye contact and relax.
- Trust yourself: If you’re constantly worried about what other people think of you and your decisions, you’ll come across as weak and inexperienced.
- Examine your soft skills: Discover what soft skills make you a good employee: leadership, dedication, or the ability to motivate others.
- Master the job interview: Be prepared, be confident and research the company and person you’re interviewing with.
- Handle rejection: Stay confident and inspired even when you aren’t getting call backs.
Promotion and Branding
The skills you learn to promote yourself now will pay off later.
- Design for branding: Learn how to think creatively and visually in order to promote your brand.
- Understand copyright: Learn about copyright laws and how to get your own patent.
- Promote yourself without bragging: You’ve got to learn how to relate to people and make them interested in you and your experience, without bragging.
- Know — and own — your best attributes: Show off your ability to close a sale or put on your resume that you’re the one to call if a decision needs to be made.
- Being accountable: Monitor what’s being said about you online and on social networks, keep track of your brand’s reputation, and own up to any mistakes or issues people have with you.
- Use Twitter effectively: Learn how to use Twitter to boost your brand and reputation, not diminish it.
- Develop your message: Learn how to create a focused, engaging message.
- Write a press release: Even if you don’t work in PR or marketing, being able to write a press release is a valuable, desirable skill personally and professionally.
- Follow up: Make sure you follow up on promises and after meeting new people.
- Identify an audience: Learn how to rework your message depending on who you’re speaking to.
Speaking and Communication
From better storytelling to learning a new language or becoming an effective public speaker, these communication skills will make you more influential and confident.
- Learn a foreign language: Speaking at least two languages greatly increases your desirability as a job candidate.
- Storytelling: For presentations and networking, it helps if you’re a good storyteller.
- Keep it simple: Don’t babble; instead, learn to speak clearly and simply.
- How to make transitions: Making smooth transitions in your talks and presentations will strengthen your speech overall.
- Deliver bad news: You should learn how to be diplomatic and break bad news considerately.
- Consider things from different points of view: Relate to your audience and act like a fair leader by considering various points of view.
- Give a compliment: If you’re uncomfortable giving compliments, you’d better learn how to get over it.
- Negotiate: Negotiate salary, job offers, payment, and more.
- Conflict management: Learn how to be more diplomatic and solve problems in the workplace.
- Speak to executives: Don’t be afraid to talk to the boss, just make sure you do it the right way.
Finance
Save money and learn smarter budgeting tips here.
- Open a Roth IRA: Use a little of the money you have saved to start a Roth IRA for the future.
- Pay taxes as a freelancer: If you’re freelancing between full-time jobs, you’ll need to learn how to do your own taxes.
- Turn eBay into a money-maker: While you’re out of work, learn how to use eBay to make extra cash.
- Haggle: Get better deals on food, entertainment, clothes and more when you learn to haggle.
- Lower your cell phone bill: Learn how to lower your cell phone bill when you’re tightening your budget.
- Get a tax extension: If you just can’t pay your taxes this year because you’re unemployed, learn how to get an extension.
- Consolidate debt: This skill may help you with a finance problem at work and alleviate some of the burden of high interest rates.
- Make a budget: This practical skill will save you money and help you trim expenses at work.
- Find a bargain: Learn when to go generic and hunt for bargains.
- Save: Practice restraint by setting up savings accounts and spending less.
Weird Skills
You never know when you’ll need to win a fist fight or have to know your tolerance for alcohol, so practice now.
- Win a fist fight: Man up and learn how to win a fist fight or street fight.
- Be more photogenic: Look more attractive and confident in photographs.
- Know your tolerance: Before getting wasted at networking events or office parties, know how much booze you can handle.
- Be a respectful house guest: Review basic etiquette and send a thank-you note the next day.
- Know when someone is lying: Be able to tell when someone else is lying to protect yourself.
Miscellaneous
From tying a tie to taking better notes, here are more skills you should learn while you’re unemployed.
- Stay on top of industry news: Make reading industry reports and niche news blogs a habit for when you’re unemployed and when you get a job.
- Get comfortable with international travel: Even if you can’t afford a plane ticket, read world news, learn a language and keep up with other cultures to broaden your horizons and show potential employers that you’re open to traveling for them.
- Tie a tie: Make sure you always look presentable by tying your tie correctly.
- Keep your brain active: Keep learning so that you’re in shape to tackle new challenges when you do find a job.
- Take better notes: Learn to take notes during interviews and meetings.
There you have it!
Until next time...
Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!
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For the first time in history, more people are searching the Internet for health information than asking doctors. Web 2.0 and social media tools are allowing people to discover new ways to connect, learn and engage one other in search of healthcare and drug information.
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Twitter is arguably the hottest new platform to hit the social media scene is the past five years. Twitter devotees are convinced that anything is possible if the microblogging platform is used correctly. In today’s economy, the most pressing need for many people is finding a job. While Twitter is effective for branding, marketing and occasionally some witty intellectual exchanges, its usefulness for jobseekers has yet to be demonstrated. To that end, there was a recent instructional case study on TwiTip—.jpg)
The whole world is atwitter about Twitter (pun intended). One of the reasons why social media tools like Twitter are so effective is that information can reach very large audiences almost instantaneously..gif){kind=icon}
Lisa Roner, blogger and editor for EyeforPharma, recommends a podcast on social media that was created by Dr. Andree Bates, CEO at Eularis, a company that applies analytics to determine the sales impact of specific marketing programs.
BioCrowd co-founder, 
At the recent Social Communication and Healthcare conference I was invited to run a roundtable discussion entitled “How to Build a Social Networking Site for Bioprofessionals.” The discussions were well attended, primarily by employees several pharmaceutical companies and vendors who sell scientific equipment and reagents. Several bloggers and medical communications professionals also attended..jpg)
Pharmaceutical,biotechnology and other companies that sell prescription drugs and devices are deathly afraid of adverse events (AEs) associated with their products. For those of you who may not know, companies with approved prescription drugs and medical devices are required to track and report any adverse events associated with their products to regulatory agencies like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). If FDA receives enough AE complaints about a product, the agency will investigate to determine whether or not there may be efficacy, safety or tolerability issues with it. And, if FDA thinks that the AEs are legitimate, it may ask a company to conduct Phase IV clinical trials with the product in question or require that changes be made to the product’s label. Not surprisingly, these outcomes can be time consuming and perhaps more importantly, costly. Label changes—especially for blockbuster products—frequently lead to changes in physician prescribing habits which can translate into a loss of revenue. Despite the fact that ALL drugs exhibit AEs, many companies falsely cling to the hope that there will be few, if any, AEs reported for their products..jpg)
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While life sciences companies are still reluctant to take the “social media plunge,” many other companies (with active social media programs) frequently hire employees known as social media managers who oversee and run their social networks. This is because successful social media websites require daily attention and are extremely time consuming and labor intensive. In general, employees who are hired for these jobs have strong backgrounds in social media and technology but frequently possess little expertise in the industry that they are working in. Because social media is so new, many hiring managers believe that the social media and technology skills of these managers are more important than an understanding of the industry that they work in. However, while this practice may be acceptable in other industries, it won’t be the case for the social media managers who oversee pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical devices and diagnostics social media websites. These managers will likely be required to have a firm understanding of current rules and regulations guiding drug development and marketing and advertising of approved life sciences products. This will be necessary if the drug makers who hire these managers want to steer clear of regulatory scrutiny by the US Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies..jpg)
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Mark Sendak, a social media enthusiast and author of the 
The advent of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Linked In have been a boon to recruiters and human resources (HR) professionals. Social networks represent a vast and easily-accessible source of job candidates whose professional credentials and personal information are readily available to determine whether or not they may be potential new hires. While the effectiveness of recruiters and HR professionals to source new talent is debatable, I contend that there is nobody more qualified than employees at a company to identify prospective new employees who may bring value to an organization. A number of forward-thinking companies have realized that the best way to find “right fit job candidates” is to mine the social networking contacts of their existing employees. To that end,
The New York Times reported today that for the first time, Internet users are spending more time on social networking and video sites than on e-mail. According to a report by Nielsen, there was a 1,905 percentage change in the time that users spent viewing online video and an 883 percentage increase in social networking use from February 2003 to 2009.
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When Rupert Murdoch, the owner of New Corporation (Fox News), bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005 it was viewed by many as one of his savviest acquisitions ever. At that time, MySpace was arguably the most successful social networking site on the Web and its financial future was extremely bright. Shortly after the acquisition, a young, upstart college social networking site called Facebook began operations without much fanfare. Back in 2005, MySpace had 14 million monthly users and Facebook was still raising capital. Now, MySpace has 126 million users whereas Facebook’s user base has grown to over 200 million. Facebook continues to expand while MySpace’s growth appears to be stagnant. This led to the dismissal last week of one of MySpace’s co-founders and the appointment of a former Facebook executive as CEO..jpg)
While I was at the Experimental Biology meeting in New Orleans, LA this past week I presented a seminar entitled “Using Social Media For Career Development in the Life Sciences.” This was the first time that I presented this talk, and was expecting a large turn out given the popularity of Facebook and more recently Twitter, a microblogging platform. Much to my surprise only 15 students showed up for the talk—many of whom hadn’t heard of Twitter and were only vaguely familiar with Facebook. Luckily, a few attendees had Facebook profiles and one or two were on Twitter so the talk wasn't a complete bust. Nevertheless, the lack of interest in this talk was extremely puzzling to me—my other seminars, “Interviewing Tips” and “Alternate Careers for PhDs” were very well attended and I was booked solid for one-on-one resume critiquing sessions during the five days I was in New Orleans.
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Using Facebook and Twitter to find jobs is becoming routine in many industries including healthcare. However, the life sciences industry is lagging behind most others when it comes to social media and recruitment. Nevertheless, many companies and academic institutions are beginning to realize that Facebook (FB), Twitter and other science social networks are good source of qualified candidates for those difficult-to fill job openings. .jpg)
Today's New York Times reported that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued warning letters and ordered 14 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to stop running what it calls misleading ads on internet search pages displayed by search engines like Google. The agency faulted the companies for failing to identify product names (brand) and not listing potential side effects (only benefits) for the drugs. In other words, the ads lacked “fair balance” something that FDA stresses and that all drug makers are very familiar with. 
As many of you know, the life sciences industry, one of the most highly regulated industries of the economy has been hesitant and reluctant to embrace social media to reach out to patients, physicians and the lay public. This is because the US Food and Drug Administration, specifically Division for Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications (.jpg)
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I have been accumulating anecdotal information about companies,organizations and institutions that use social media tools like Facebook, Twitter YouTube etc. I decided to attempt to conduct an informal survey to determine whether or not the life sciences sector is adopting and embracing social media to meet its objectives (whatever they may be). 
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I first thought about starting a social network for life sciences professionals about a year ago after joined I Facebook and LinkedIn and then learned about SciLink, one of the first social networks for scientists. Apparently, others had the same idea and today, there are currently, by my reckoning, no fewer than 20 social networks for scientists—each promoting a unique approach to networking for scientists..jpg)
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