Having many years experience helping people find jobs and more recently working specifically in IT recruitment, I've helped people with a huge variety of skills into work. What never ceases to amaze me is the number of people who, for example have spent the last few years as an admin assistant and feel they have very little in the way of a skill set.

Part of my role as a recruiter is to help people realise just what their skills are. Sometimes 'they' feel that working in a shop, for example gives them few transferable skills. However even a shop job gives people experience dealing with customers, handling money, stock control and rotation and often ordering and taking deliveries, handling telephone enquiries and so on. And it's often the same story with the humble admin assistant.

I'll ask them if their job involved using a database of any kind and often the answer is yes. With a little more investigating it turns out that such people have not only used a database on a regular basis, but have developed in depth skills with one of the popular databases which are used by numerous companies all over the world. If a person has only used Sage, Oracle or SAP in their last job, they tend to assume that such software is 'in house' and therefore not as ubiquitous as it actually is.

Having real working experience with popular database software is invaluable, especially in IT recruitment. The SAP careers market offers excellent rates of pay, as does Oracle careers and Sage as it's not something many people can pick up quickly by learning on the job. Having experience in SAP and Oracle will certainly make a CV stand out from the crowd and makes my job in IT recruitment far easier.

With a little confidence boosting we can steer an individual’s career path from a series of admin roles which are often temporary and low paid in the more lucrative direction of SAP careers, or even Oracle careers if that is where their experience is. One needn't be an expert either, even having basic day to day knowledge of adding and updating such databases can be enough to put them above all other candidates for an employment opportunity. Using the same software for another company will further increase their experience and as a result, their standing as a specialist in Oracle or SAP careers will make them more employable and put them in a position to pick and choose employment opportunities rather than taking what's offered.

If you've in the market for a new job, go and see a specialist recruitment company as they may be able to highlight skills you didn't realise you had.