With a little of that creativity of yours, you can solve your dilemma without too much difficulty. Your first challenge is to quantify your achievements. Everyone in a company contributes to the company's bottom line in one or more ways. The trick is learning how to use language to demonstrate it. There are three major categories that define the ways most people contribute. They either:
- increase profits — by developing sales, discovering new customers, opening new channels of distribution, etc.;
- decrease costs — by reorganizing systems to decrease processing time, training personnel in efficiency, developing systems to avoid duplication, etc.; or
- avoid errors — by writing water-tight contracts, selecting better equipment, preventing accidents, etc.
Your contributions probably lie mostly within the latter two categories. You can quantify your work in two ways. You can list situations in which problems haven't occurred because of your work, i.e., "I followed up on invoices and 90% of our customers have paid in under 60 days." Or you can associate your work with the size of the project, i.e., "I was responsible for screening the application files of 1,000 candidates a year to fill more than 50 positions."
A professional with your skills can find a job nearly anywhere. Your challenge is finding one that utilizes the skills you most enjoy in a field that holds interest or passion for you. Look into your heart to learn what excites you and makes you feel interested and productive. For example, if you love sports and health issues, you might want to try to find a job with a company that makes state-of-the-art corrective eyewear for athletes. Once you've identified the very specific field, narrow your choices by selecting employers to approach. Find the person with the power to hire at each and send them a letter that describes what you've done, can do and want to do.