Get your hands on any budget you can find, no matter how small, and take responsibility for it. Manage how funds are dispensed, keep control of the budget, and learn what fiscal control is all about.

Search for opportunities to demonstrate that you can produce good work when it is required by external deadlines. Prove to yourself and anyone else that you can function on someone else’s schedule, even when the time frame is notably hurried.

Learn how to acquire information from other people by questioning them directly. Start by interviewing the neighbors, your friends, and other people easily available. It doesn’t matter what you ask them, but imagine you are a newspaper reporter who needs the information for a story. Discover the fine art of helping a person to feel comfortable in your presence, even though you are asking difficult and even touchy questions.

Discover and cultivate the fine art of dealing openly and effectively with people in ambiguous situations. Learn how to bring warring factions together, resolve differences between groups or individuals, and make demands on behalf of one constituency to those in position of power.

Take charge of any event that is within your grasp. It doesn’t matter what you organize – a church supper, a parade in honor of your town’s 200th birthday - as long as you have responsibility for bringing together people, resources, and events. If nothing else, you learn from the headaches of organizing events or managing projects that require delegation of tasks to others.

Accept a role in which you must meet or relate to the public. Greet visitors, answer phone complaints, give talks to community groups, sell ads to business people, explain programs to prospective clients, or even collect taxes.

Take a leadership role in any organization, so that you are forced to talk publicly, prepare remarks, get across ideas, and even motivate people without feeling self-conscious. Good public speaking is little more than the art of dramatized conversation, but it must be practiced so you can discover your own personal style.

Take responsibility for the work of others in a situation in which some accountability is needed. Have direct contact with the work of others; expose yourself to the difficulty of giving orders, delegating tasks, taking guff, understanding the other person’s viewpoint. Here is where listening can become a real skill.

Refine your ability to explain things to other people. Since most teaching does not take place in the classroom but in ordinary everyday exchanges between people, you should become familiar and comfortable with passing information and understanding to others. Any position of leadership or responsibility gives you many chances to teach ideas and methods to others.

Go public with your writing skills. There is nothing quite so energizing as seeing your own words in print; exhilarating if they look good to you, and a spur to improvement if they look awful. Use every opportunity to practice your writing. Write letters to the editors of every publication you read routinely. Write a newsletter, however informal, for a club or organization to which you belong.

Source: Howard Figler, The Complete Job Search Handbook: Presenting the Skills You Need to Get Any Job and Have a Good Time Doing It.