If you ask friends, family or ex-coworkers for their best advice to prepare for you next job hunt and interview, they will suggest a lot of things. The very first one will be to update your resume, and then about dressing code, formal salute, firm handshake, eye contact, search company background, and stay calm, among others. All those advices are valid and true, but not good enough for nowadays highly competitive job environments.
Let me give your some recommendations that will help you to look and better perform on your next job interview. First of all, you should be bilingual. At least you should master your native language in reading, writing and speaking; but you should be proficient on any other language, specially English, Spanish, Mandarin or French.
You should also know how to work with various computer models, including laptops, tablets, desktops, and/or chrome books. Likewise, you need to know how to work with different computer operating systems like the ones I mentioned at the beginning of this article. However, what I really encourage you to learn is computer programming. It doesn't matter your profession or working area, you should learn how to program. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are putting so much effort, incentives and money on programs, communities and events regarding this topic. They are very interested for anyone to be able to code (program). Definitely this will improve your skills, career path, ascending potencial, and hire opportunities.
As you can learn to talk and write some other language, you can also learn how to code in any computer programming language like JAVA, Visual Basic, C-Sharp (C#), Python, C, C++, HTML, Objective-C, and Swift, among others. Some of these programming languages are easy to learn.
There is a huge amount of online resources that will help you to learn any of these languages (eg. for Java, you could visit http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/ or http://developer.android.com/index.html). On these sites you will find resources, training videos and tutorials. Programming in Java is still a trend, since it is one of the most used and powerful language around the world. You can get your Software Development Tool Kit (SDK) or Integrated Development Environment (IDE) online for free. There are two great SDKs, Eclipse and Netbeans. If your are interested in programming with Java for Android smart devices, I suggest to use Android Studio. It is easy, great, and fun.
If you take these advices in consideration, you will show your recruiters that you are out of your comfort zone, and that you always give the extra mile.
Autor
Gilberto Crespo, MSCE, CDIA+, CIP, ECMs, SMGp
Computer Engineer, Life & Executive Coach