Job seeking is a daunting task for anyone. With a clear understanding of your strengths and limitations and how best to promote yourself you can significantly increase your chances of finding and keeping a job.
We have developed this guide to provide you with practical tips on how to promote yourself and your skills to an employer.
Prepare—know yourself, your skills and limitations
To be able to promote yourself to an employer you need a full understanding of your skills, interests, abilities, limitations and job goals. You should also consider whether or not to disclose your disability to an employer and when you might do this:
Be clear on any special requirements, workplace adjustments or modifications that an employer will need to know about, including any strategies for meeting these requirements. You should also ensure that you can communicate these clearly to an employer. For example, when the requirements of a job are discussed, identify simple adjustments or accommodations to enable you to perform these requirements, or point to sources of expert advice on adjustments.
You might like to draw the employer's attention to help available through JobAccess and the Workplace Modifications Scheme. The Workplace Modifications Scheme helps to pay for the cost involved in modifying the workplace or purchasing special or adaptive equipment for employees with disability. You can print the following fact sheet for your employer:
Gain a full understanding of your skills, interests and abilities and make a list of potential jobs you are interested in. Identify the tasks involved in these jobs and ensure you can safely perform all or most of these tasks.
Providers of Australian Government Employment Services can assist in working through these steps. For details on locating an employment service provider in your local area, visit:
It is a good idea to know about the financial help and wage information available to employers of people with disability so that you can discuss them with the employer if needed:
Talking to employers
It can be a challenge talking to employers positively about yourself and your disability. Some prior planning and discussion will go a long way to meeting this challenge. Face to face discussion gives a better opportunity to explain your skills and circumstances so try to organise a meeting with an employer rather than have detailed discussions over the phone.
When talking to employers:
- keep discussions brief and to the point
- provide strategies and solutions for addressing any restrictions you may have or any special considerations, workplace modifications or adjustments you may need
- use positive words, for example 'I am able to….'
- highlight your skills and abilities
- don’t dwell on your disability
- think positively.
We have developed the following useful guides on phoning an employer or writing to an employer:
Be aware of and pre-empt employer concerns
Employers may have concerns when employing a person with disability. For common concerns employers usually raise, together with common sense solutions for dealing with them, visit:
Need more information?