How Employable Are You?

Some job searchers land a good job fast and stay hired, while others never find and keep decent employment. To get a sense of your employability and to discover what you might do to enhance it, rate yourself on these questions on a scale from 0 to 10:

1. Your skills and abilities.

10 = Your skills and ability to do your target job are top-notch.

0 = You lack much of what it takes to do your target job well.

Your score: ___

2. The rarity of the skills required in your target job.

10 = Few people have the skills to do your target job, for example, mastery of computer assembly language.

0 = Your target job requires only widely held soft skills: organizational skills, detail-orientedness, pleasant personality, etc.

Your score: ___

3. Your drive.

10 = You accomplish more than do most people, show considerable initiative and rarely procrastinate.

0 = You do the least you can get away with, show little initiative and often procrastinate.

Your score: ___

4. Your emotional intelligence.

10 = You have a knack for getting people to work well with you and you're well-liked generally.

0 = You're often befuddled as to why many people are often unsupportive of and/or angry with you.

Your score: ___

5. Your emotional well-being.

10 = You're usually at ease, able to - without much assistance - roll with work's and life's ups and downs.

0 = You're widely perceived as high-maintenance and are often unhappy, angry and needing lots of emotional support.

Your score: ___

6. Your thinking and learning ability.

10 = You're an unusually fast learner and you reason rigorously and/or scored above the 90th percentile on such tests as the SAT.

0 = You learn slowly and are poor at complex reasoning and/or score below the 20th percentile on most standardized tests such as the SAT.

Your score: ___

7. Your ethics.

10 = You always prioritize ethics other expediency, even when you pay a price for doing that.

0 = You always prioritize expediency over ethics.

Your score: ___

8. Your level of education.

10 = Compared with other applicants for your target job, you have a top-of-the-stack education.

0 = Compared with other applicants for your target job, you have a less on-target and poorer-quality education.

Your score: ___

9. Your job-interview skill.

10 = You nearly always win people over, even in cognitively demanding, emotionally stressful situations. One way to assess this, of course, is your success rate in previous job interviews.

0 = You make a poor impression when meeting people and in demonstrating that you'd be an excellent hire.

Your score: ___

10. Your employment history.

10 = Your target job is the logical next step in an employment history that shows a progressive increase in responsibility.

0 = You have significant employment gaps, have job-hopped and have little experience related to your target job.

Your score: ___

11. Your references.

10 = Your recommenders are highly credible and tout you as very qualified and with personality characteristics that make you a most desirable employee.

0 =Your references are weak and/or not credible.

Your score: ___

12. Your drive to job-search.

10 = Every week, for months if necessary, you'll have a number of high-quality interactions with people in your network, contact prospective employers who are not advertising an on-target job and answer at least a few on-target ads.

0 = You're burned out and would consider it a productive week if you answered one ad and made one networking call.

Your score: ___

Now review your answers. Anything you want to work on? Or do you want to change your job target? Or do you simply deserve a pat on the back?

The San Francisco Bay Guardian called Dr. Nemko "The Bay Area's Best Career Coach." His latest books are How to Do Life: What They Didn't Teach You in School and What's the Big Idea? 39 Disruptive Proposals for a Better America. He writes weekly for AOL.com as well as for USNews.com. More than 1,000 of his published writings are free on www.martynemko.com.