What will be the keys to success among these customers?

Self-Marketing Plan Part I
1. Conduct an Environmental Scan and SWOT Analysis (2-3 pages) which includes:
a. Self-Analysis: A Process of identifying your qualifications, features, marketable career skills, and personal characteristics.
• What are your passions?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• Are there any constraints on your search (for example, family matters require me to stay in Virginia)?
The outcome is the description of your strength and weaknesses. While you are still in college, what are your goals to enhance your strength and minimize your weaknesses? How will you accomplish these goals?
b. Career Market Analysis: These would be potential employers, the companies, or industries you might target with your employment services. Briefly describe the market with facts and data – information you might gather online or from Longwood University Career Center. In this section, you will study one specific occupational area of interest to you including entry-level job characteristics and requirements.
• Focus the section on the primary industries or companies that you will be targeting for your services.
• This section should also highlight what types of jobs they offer and possibly estimate of how many openings are likely to occur.
• Some recognition of the different types of firms in this market.
• Note, if you are interested in multiple industries or different jobs, focus THIS plan on one of those (on your own you should develop plans for other firms).
• Who in these companies do you think (or know) would influence or make hiring decisions?
• What are the customer needs? What skills do they need? What will be the keys to success among these customers?
The outcome is the selection of an employment opportunity for you to pursue.
c. Competitive Analysis: A process of describing the ideal candidate for a particular entry-level job and comparing you with the ideal applicant. What type of background, experiences, strengths, and weaknesses do your competitors have?
• Identify competitors who might also be seeking the same jobs.
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of each type of competitor?
• This might be easy to present in a simple table – create a competitor matrix (see http://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/competitive-matrix to learn about competitor matrix).
The outcome is the identification of significant types of threats that you face.
d. Environmental Scan: A process of describing the other forces in the external environment that will impact your job and career development (i.e., technological, regulatory, economic, and social pressures).
• There should be some discussion of each aspect of the external market environment from chapter 3 – even if only a brief mention of an aspect that is not relevant.
e. SWOT Matrix: Summarize the above information in a SWOT matrix.
• Include a S.W.O.T. (strengths & weaknesses are internal to you – and opportunities & threats that are external)
• You probably want to list from 3-6 of each of these – choose the most important factors.
*Info on my career and goals: I am a self-taught hairstylist and entrepreneur, I want to own my beauty shop and sell hair care products. I am a creative, hands-on, and visionary kind of person