Are you seriously interested in advancing your career? Then you better assess your job skills to make sure they're consistent with the growing expectations of your career direction. The fact is, whatever those expectations were when you entered your current job situation, they've changed.

Here some ways you can tell whether your current job skills may be outdated.

1. Are there more our fewer people unemployed in your industry?

2. Do you possess hard or content skills like technical expertise? Or are you expert in ?helping? skills like managing? Hard is good. Helping is not so promising.

3. Do you have a set of transferable skills that apply to any number of jobs? Are you good at managing people? Monitoring progress? Anticipating problems? Think about how these transferable job skills might apply to a new employer.

4. Where can you apply for your present or most recent job? If you can't think of a dozen companies that hire someone who does what you do, your skills may be redundant or obsolete.

5. Do recruiters ignore your calls?

6. Is membership in your trade association or professional society shrinking?

The answers to these job skills questions are not good or bad. They are information . . . information you need to assess as you consider advancing your career.

If the timing is right for you to move on, you want to make sure you're advancing. Of course, possessing desirable job skills is important to your success. But equally important is how you communicate and sell yourself going forward.

Unfortunately we've been brainwashed into thinking a resume will do that job. We think if we can come up with an award-winning resume our career advancement problems are solved. NOT!

Today's savvy employers need much more than a resume. In fact, they could care less about what you used to do for someone else. Bottom line is . . . they want you to come forward demonstrating that you've taken the time to learn about the goals of their organization and more specifically what their hot buttons are for successful management.

Rather than a resume, they'd like to see a proposal showing how you would solve or handle issues. All by itself this will demonstrate the content and transferable skills that you can bring to the table. This approach is just one of the many alternative job search strategies and non-traditional career advancement techniques that have been so successful in winning high-paying job offers fast!