You need to give a prepared and well thought-out initial marketing statement of yourself and your skills. Here are the 3 steps to follow:

1. Give a career summary statement
    • One-sentence summary of career history
    • Include the most important aspects of career
    • Example: “I am a five-year veteran of LAN/WAN Admin and Systems Engineering
       with substantial experience using Novell, NT, Cisco, and Lotus Notes/Domino.”

2. Single accomplishment that you are proud of:
    • One to two sentence summary that will grab the attention of the interviewer
    • Accomplishment must be easy to explain or illustrate and clearly highlights your
      bottom line impact
    • An example of this step would be showing how you directly saved or made your
      past employer money by something you initiated

3. Summary of specifically what you want to do next in your career
    • One-sentence summary that is specific
    • This must change from interview to interview to make sure it matches exactly
       what you are interviewing for
    • An example could possibly include the size of company that you want to work for,
      specific job duties, the ability to apply skills used in a past job to help a 
      company grow, the focus of the company, etc.

If you take the time to prepare for this, you will improve your initial verbal impression and get the interview off to a good start—confident and focused.