Juliette's Learning Tribe
How to use a job description to plan your next move
A job description is a free list of what to learn next. How to read one for the job you want, compare it with your own, and turn the gap into a plan.
I have spent most of this year inside job descriptions.
At Zavmo we hold thousands of them for UK roles. What the work involves, what experience it needs, what skills sit underneath. Some days I open the laptop and do nothing else.
So it pains me how most of us read one. Type a job title into Google, add “job description”, read the list once. Feel fine or feel frightened. Close the tab.
Read it properly and it is the clearest list of what to learn next you will ever get for free.
Read it as a list of work
When you read the description for a job you want, it is easy to treat it as a test. Can I do all of this? No. So that job is not for me.
That reading is wrong. A job description tells you what the work involves. Some of it you already do. Some of it you can learn. The job is to find out which is which.
Start with the job you have
Find the description for your current role. Go through it line by line and tick what you do.
Then add what is missing, the things you do every week that nobody wrote down. Most people do far more than their description says, and they never count it.
That is your starting point. It is bigger than you think.
Put it next to the job you want
Now find the description for the job you want next. Read it slowly, twice, and put the two side by side.
Some lines will match. Some will be the same thing in different words. This drives me mad in our own data. A skill in one document is a competence in another and a learning outcome in a third. Nobody was ever paid to make them agree. In your two it might be “stakeholder management” in one and “keeping the directors happy” in the other. Count that as a match.
What is left over is the gap.
Sort the gap into three piles
Go through each line in the gap and put it in one pile.
Done a bit of it. You have touched this, just not as your main job. Write down the example so you can talk about it in an interview.
Can learn it where I am. You could practise this in your current job, starting next week. Ask for the project. Offer to cover it.
Needs something formal. A licence, a degree, a qualification the job cannot do without. These take longest, so find out early what they are.
If the first two piles are the biggest, you are closer than you thought.
Let AI do the first comparison
This is a good job for AI, as long as you check it.
Paste in both descriptions. Public ones only, never anything confidential from your employer. Ask it to list what is in the second that is not in the first, and to put each item in one of the three piles.
Then check every line yourself. It will miss things you already do, because it does not know you. Now and then it will invent a requirement that is not there. Fix it. You know your work and it does not.
Do not treat it as gospel
Job descriptions are written by people, and people get them wrong. In August we found that most of the levels on our own job descriptions were set too high. One wrong number in one file had been copied into every one. We rebuilt them.
A description written for an advert is often a wish list as well. Nobody they hire ticks every line.
What it will not tell you
The pay is not in it. Look that up separately.
Nor is what the job is like on a Tuesday afternoon, or whether you will enjoy it. For that, find somebody who does the job and ask for half an hour. It is worth more than any list.
Where Zavmo fits
We publish job descriptions for UK roles, written for the role rather than for one company’s advert. Your AI tutor starts from the job you have and the one you want, and builds the plan from the gap. Then you learn on your real work.
Your first Future Fluency module is free. After that, learning is paid.