 You're looking for a robotics engineer job, but you have no experience and your major was Materia Science. Why should I hire you? Because I work hard. Hey guys, this is Dr. Nancy Lee. I have transitioned from fashion design into engineering schools and I got five offers and all of them had full scholarship. Then I also transitioned from engineering PhD in Materia Science into a robotics engineer. Then I transitioned from an engineer into a product manager in a tech company. Now I manage a team of product managers. I believe I have lost experience to help you guys transition from one industry to the other even if you do not have prior experience. So you should continue finish my video. I believe you're going to get a lot all of this video. I became the youngest engineering PhD in our program. When I graduated, someone passed me a job opening that they're looking for MIT PhD in robotics. At the time I was a BU PhD in Materia Science. So I met one third of the qualifications. So applied for the job anyway, eventually I got a job offer and beat out all the MIT PhDs. And few years later, I transitioned from an engineer to a product manager. And now I manage a team of product managers. People asked me Nancy, how do you make the transition? I told them that because I knew how to sell myself. Do you know that employers will never pay for what you deserve the pay for the value you sell to them. Lots of people like me, they are either engineers or international professionals were never taught how to present yourself in the interview as a future leader of the organization. We're never taught and how to sell your value to the organization. And we never taught how to confidently show your strengths. And I have been learning how to sell myself in the past 10 years because earlier in my career, I discovered this is a key cornerstone to accelerate my career. So therefore I've been honing the skillset in the past 10 years. So today, let me use my personal example about how I got the job, even if I met only one third of the qualifications. I did six different strategies. That's very different from everybody else. Hopefully you can do what I did and figure out your dream offer. What I did first is I did extensive research to understand what is required for this job. And in addition, I influenced other people to tell me behind the scenes what it means to be a robotics engineer working on specific things. What the job requires and what do they do in the day to day? What kind of challenges do they face? And those insider information is going to help me to prepare to bridge the gap to understand this is what they want. This is who I am. How can I best understand the job opening so that they help me to prepare for the job? And second, I start to bridge the gap between the qualification I had before and also what they are looking for. This sounds very simple, however, lots of people do not know how to bridge the gap. Let me give you an example. What they need to do is they're looking for MIT PhD to write proposals about robotics race funding. And once they raise funding, they're going to build a robotics prototype. At the time when I read this job opening, I know that what they're looking for is somebody who is capable of writing lots of proposals, who is able to sell their ideas. And I start to immediately dive in to tell them about my strengths. In this case is public speaking skills, and I am a very good PhD who's very good at writing proposals for my own material science stuff. So therefore I was able to sell those key two strengths I had. And at the same time, because I did my research for the first step, I read a lot about what's robotics, what's a concept, and what kind of challenges do they face in robotics industry specifically for the application I'm going to interview for. So therefore, when I talk about my key skillset and the strengths, the value to the companies I always mentioned, like strengths and also was able to talk about the challenges about robotics and my vision, my ideas and my concept about robotics. So therefore, when interviewers see me who is able to show her strengths of public speaker writing proposals and know enough about robotics and compare with MIT PhDs who know robotics inside out much more in depth than I do, but they lack other skills. So they decide to hire me. And the third thing I did different from everyone else, because I know how to tell my stories. This is very fundamental, listen here, because in my stories, I was able to emphasize my impact and my values. I know lots of you guys heard of this framework of STAR. Honestly, if you don't know STAR, you can Google the STAR framework for interviews. I do not teach any fundamental like this. I teach advanced knowledge. So Google what a STAR is. Now I assume everybody know what STAR is. Everybody will say, oh, I just use STAR framework to tell stories. Believe me, I have interviewed more than 100 candidates, their engineers, and product managers. Only 10% of them knows how to use the STAR framework. If it's that easy, everybody can just get their dream job. Lots of people didn't know how to use the STAR framework in the perfect way to show their values. So let me tell you behind the scenes as a hiring manager what I'm looking for when people use the STAR framework. You need to do the three things. And first, you need to show your impact. And second, you need to be very logical. And third, you need to be very concise, telling your stories. What I mean concise is each impact, each bullet point is just one sentence. Don't keep on going long and long and long and long because interviewers do not have much time to listen to the entire life story of yourself, guys. So know how to tell your story is a key fundamental of other people to perceive you as a leader, as a provisor who is able to do the job very well. Number four is show your leadership. Think about this. If you have no prior experience, they know that you probably know some technical stuff, but you really lack work experience and people skills. What does it look like in real life when you interact with people? So therefore, all the young candidates walking into job interview, you need to show your leadership style, your leadership potential, show them that I'm going to be the new leader in the organization sometime in the future. I'm here to learn and you are going to help me to grow as well. So leadership doesn't mean that you already lead a big team like I have right now. But what you need to do is you might have led student organizations or maybe in your volunteer opportunities, those are all leadership examples. Again, retail leadership examples use the right strategy methodology to tell the story. It's very, very important. And number five is show your personality. We do not want to be fake. We do not want to be the same. You want to be yourself. Very authentic. For example, I had my own personal brand. I am very outgoing. I'm very good at public speaking and also very authentic regarding who I am. What specific things I did was I was injured before the interview and I walk into the interview on crutches. I literally, I was like, oh my goodness. I was okay. I hurt my legs. If I went in with the attitude of pretending nothing is okay, no, it's not me. So I went in, I made jokes and told them how I got injured and also show them that I'm very resilient. Nothing can stop me from here. Some candidate will just cancel the interview and come back one month later. No, no, no. I came in with like crutches and cans. So this is who I am and people like my personality. So be authentic to show who you are as well. If you're introvert, you might show the outside of you, showing that you're very reliable. So be yourself as well, being very authentic. So number six is be confident and know your strengths. This sounds very simple, but lots of candidates do not show the confidence side of themselves. So do you know that during communications, only 7% is the words you say. Another 93% is how you say it. Your eye contact, your body language, do you smile, and how would you interact with others? Did you build trust and everything together composed of the other 93%. So therefore, when candidate already has written script of this is my leadership stories, I already memorized everything. But when you deliver the same story, would you be able to carry the other 93% of the key component? And in addition, lots of candidates, when they went in, like lots of you guys watching this video, you may not have the right experience exactly for what the job is looking for. They internally feel like they are not confident because you only met one third of the qualification. That's was because you haven't discovered your strengths, your values yet. So lots of my students in my book can, for example, I can see clearly their strengths as what they bring, it's like diamond in the sand. But to themselves, they didn't see that that's their unique value. They didn't know how they talk about their unique value to be perceived at the diamond inside all the sands and everybody looks the same. So that's what I help others. And that's how I help my students to achieve the other 93%. So if you're interested in learning more about how to sell yourself, how to be perceived as a leader and how to tell your stories at interview, you can check out my book and that's what I specialize in and helping engineers and international professionals. And especially for international professionals, English is not your first language. That's very, very difficult for you to even communicate very clearly about your value, even answer the same questions. So I'm there to help you because I have been there before and I know how to conquer those challenges and turn them into a stress. So I have developed a system, the cheat sheet and help you guys to identify as a gap and hopefully can convert who you are and match the sell your value to the company. So you can find the cheat sheet in the link down below and hopefully you can use it to land your dream job. And finally, please remember that you do not need 100% of the qualifications. What you need is only maybe 60% was asking for the other 40% is about how to sell yourself. If you want to know how did I get to put a manager offers with no prior experience, I'm going to make a new video like that. And in addition, I'm also going to make new videos about how did I became the youngest engineer in PhD, you might be interested. So make sure you subscribe. Once available, I'm going to put it right here and you will be the first one getting notified when those new videos are out. All right, good luck with your job hunting. See you next time. This is Dr. Nancy Lee.