Recent research by Mark McCrindle and his team has indicated that a current school leaver can expect to have 17 employers throughout their career. This equates to three different employers every decade.

What some of you may find surprising is that the current data for people 45 years and older is that your job tenure average is six years and eight months. This means that more experienced people find themselves out looking for work more than ever.

In this context, conscious development of your employability skills is not just for young people. It is also critical for more experienced people to continually develop your employability skills, given you will also be looking for work at least 1.5 times every decade (and that number is predicted to climb over the next decade).

The challenge for those of you who are more experienced is that while you have experience, you haven’t consciously developed your employability skills. In fact, you are unlikely to know what they are!

If you would like to learn about what employability skills are and how to capture stories that show how you have developed them (which is vital for successful interviews) you can download the first two chapters of my successful book What Really Matters For Young Professionals! for free here. The first chapter explains what employability skills are, and the second chapter teaches you how to capture examples of how you have developed them so that you can recall these stories in interviews.

Once you understand how you have developed your employability skills it is critical that you keep developing them. Your reality is that as more and more people enter the job market with the same skills that you have, the key differentiator between you and someone else is not your skills but how well you have developed your employability skills. In fact, well-developed employability skills are much like a parachute for your career. So check out the free chapters from my book and get moving on protecting your employability.

Gary Ryan enables organisations, leaders and talented professionals to move Beyond Being Good.