NYNP blog post 1-12-09

Recession-Proof Your Resume

Happy New Year! And welcome to the inaugural post of the new NY Nonprofit Press blog on training, learning, and professional development. In this blog, we’ll be exploring ideas about enhancing staff skills in order to best serve our clients. Because conversation is one of the best ways to explore ideas, I hope you’ll post your ideas, feedback, and questions, so that we can help each other develop our thinking about the issues we discuss.

To kick off this blog, since change begins at home, I’m going to focus on enhancing our own skills. It’s New Year’s resolution season, and you may be one of the folks who resolved to secure a new job or recession-proof your career by updating your job abilities and expertise.

To help target your resolution, it may be helpful to know about the specific skills NYC nonprofits wish their staff would develop.

Last year, Leta Malloy, Shannon Smith, Sherri-Ann Simmons Terry, and I conducted a survey to determine which skills nonprofit staff are lacking. (You can read the details about this survey in the October 2008 edition of NYNP, page 21.) We found that nonprofits wish their staff had better written and oral communication skills, interpersonal and teamwork skills, self-awareness, professionalism, and leadership skills. Updating your resume with training attended on these topics may give you an advantage.

If you are looking for places to get trained on these topics, survey respondents recommended the following organizations:
• American Management Association (several topics)
• Big Brothers Big Sisters (several topics)
• Community Resource Exchange (leadership)
• MediaBistro (writing)
• Gotham Writers Workshop (writing)
• The Leading Institute (leadership)
• Support Center for Nonprofit Management (several topics)
• United Way of NYC’s Nonprofit Leadership Development Institute (leadership)

Finally, since we’re a nonprofit community, let’s bring it back to our clients. The folks we surveyed let us know that a lack of staff skills can hamper their organizations’ ability to serve their clients well – which means that when you update your professional skills, you are not just helping recession-proof your resume, you’re ultimately improving your positive impact on your organization’s clients.

Good luck with your New Year’s resolutions, and if you’ve attended training that you can recommend, please share it with us.