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Career Decisions & Transitions

Be Career Ready – 4 Ways to Proactively Manage Your Career

How many of us drift, or coast along, waiting for someone or something to tell us what our next career step will be? A passive approach takes control and ownership out of your hands – and you become a victim of situations by default. Active and strategic career management is the opposite of that, unfortunately not what most of us do. Here are four ways to take control and position yourself positively for opportunities that you uncover or come your way.

Establish an Annual Career Goal

Consider “What do I want to be doing in one year? Where do I want to be in my career?”

Examples of a career/workplace goal

  • Be the best in my business locally
  • Move into a new career or industry
  • Receive a higher performance rating in my current job
  • Get a promotion to ________

If you want to improve your performance in your current job identify what holds you back. What sharpens your edge? What feedback can you gather to help yourself improve?

If you’d like to do something different – what do you need to do or learn to move forward? What is your next step?

Developing an annual career goal and identifying and implementing specific action steps to work on each month will move you toward your goal.

Conduct a Career Progress Check-in

Schedule quarterly, one-hour appointments with yourself. Use this time to check in on your current level of engagement and attitude in your current employment situation and assess your progress against the goal and actions you’ve mapped out.

Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Don’t sacrifice this scheduled check-in meeting for the inevitable urgent crisis of the moment or put yourself last on the priority list. This is valuable time to pick your head up, assess where you are, and strategize on how to keep yourself moving forward.

Be a Constant Learner and Experimenter

Becoming a constant learner and experimenter is both a defense and offensive approach in your career management. It is defensive to continually add to your skills, experiences, and knowledge to maintain your current position and keep your edge. It becomes an offensive strategy when you are continually moving toward a goal which will increase your marketability in the arena you’re interested in.

Self-improvement activities are plentiful. Online or in person classes, LinkedIn learning, attending conferences or workshops, taking on new projects, doing volunteer work, or becoming involved with professional associations. Honestly, how many of us leave our training/tuition benefits unused?

Create time for doing small things that help break your routine, like using your lunch break differently, which can give you time for professional or personal development.

Practice Continual Networking

Finally, it is important to integrate ongoing networking into your life, not just when staff reductions are headed your way. It is often more comfortable to make a new contact or schedule a lunch meeting with a former colleague when you’re employed – you’re making yourself available for someone who may benefit from your time, and you aren’t asking for anything from them. Make it part of your professional agenda to continually meet and mix with people in your current profession or new area of interest.

Examples of networking activities

  • Reaching out to connect with people that impress you at conferences, workshops, and meetings
  • Joining an association and then actively participating, and attending their functions
  • Taking part in community events, joining committees, or volunteer with the intent of meeting new people as well as helping out

The payoffs will be many – you’ll hear about opportunities, (when you’re not looking the best opportunities can pop up) keep yourself industry current, and you’ll be building your contacts for the future when you may need help, or be able to help others out.

Incorporate these four strategies – annual goal setting, progress check-ins, learning new things and networking – and you will make forward progress in your career. You’ll be amazed at the positive difference applying each one of these will make for you. And you will be far less likely to feel like you’re on the gerbil wheel, moving fast and going no-where, or end up “without a plan” if your employer decides to cut back. Implementing this approach will lay the groundwork to reach your goals!

Job Change – It begins with focus

by Leslie Rothman

You want or need to change jobs. Even in a tight market, it is still possible to find good jobs. I have repeatedly heard job hunters say, “I don’t know what I want to be doing… I just know it isn’t this anymore!” or “The market is tight so I won’t be too picky. I’ll take anything, I just want to get in somewhere”.

Job searchers in this mode respond to any ads and postings, hoping that something will hit. In the absence of ads, they send resumes into companies without positions of interest identified, in the hopes that by remaining open, they won’t get ruled out of positions and someone else will figure out where they can make a contribution. Frustration with a lack of responses or unappealing offers are typically the result.This is an ineffective strategy for several reasons.

  1. By not defining what you want, you are asking the people who do the hiring to figure it out for you, to direct your resume where they think it should go. Typically the person reviewing the resume will do one of two things, 1) assume you want to do the same work you did in your previous jobs and if that can’t be easily figured out – because you’ve had a variety of positions 2) pass the resume over because they don’t have the time or the inclination to figure it out. That’s your job!
  2. An unfocused strategy becomes overwhelming. You don’t know where to put your time and energy. It doesn’t help you target organizations or identify people to network with. Job hunting is about marketing yourself. Good marketers strategically identify their target markets and sell the benefits of their products. It is much more effective to present yourself and your experiences in a tailored fashion, emphasizing the skills and assets you have that are best suited to a specific type of work.
  3. Finally, and probably most important, just “getting any job” isn’t all that you want. You have criteria in mind – you want a “good” job.
How Do You Get Focused?

You can begin by defining what a “good” job means to you. Get beyond the dollar amount you want to earn. That’s important but what else makes a job good to you?

UNDERSTAND YOUR DIS-SATISFIERS

Start by understanding where your dissatisfaction is coming from in your current (or past) situations. Compile a list of things you dislike about your current and past positions.

  • issues with your boss or coworkers
  • the company or industry
  • type of tasks/responsibilities
  • meaningfulness of the work

Dig below the surface here. Approximately how much of your time do you spend on each task you don’t like? Do these tasks draw on skills that are not your strengths? Write it all down and look for patterns.

This list becomes your list of things to avoid or minimize in your next job.

TAKE STOCK OF YOURSELF

Next spend time taking stock of yourself. This is the critical foundation of any job change. Spend the time getting very clear about what you’re really good at, the 4-5 key talents that you have, and what’s most important to you at work.

Try listing the tasks and responsibilities you currently perform at work, home and leisure. Identify what you enjoy and do really well and identify the skills, abilities and personality traits that you use in doing these activities. Consider:

  • Why do others seek you out? What do they rely on you for?
  • What do others notice or appreciate about you?
  • What tasks have you enjoyed the most in past jobs? Why?
  • What talents do these draw on?

Think about the things you are really interested in, what matters to you and the activities that you’re drawn to.

  • What have been the most satisfying things you’ve ever done?
  • What made them so?
  • What does this suggest to you about what to do next?
Begin the Research

Now you’re ready to find both the organizations and positions where these types of activities are done, and the places that align with your interests and what’s important to you. Develop a list of organizations and types of jobs that have a relationship to your areas of interest.

Check out the on line Occupational Outlook Handbook which describes multitudes of jobs. There are lots of resources to help you identify organizations. MaineBiz, the Department of Economic Development, and the Chamber of Commerce all compile lists of organizations. Talk to your friends and find out if the organizations they work for have the jobs you’re interested in.

Continue your search by looking for the work you’d really like to have. Look in the papers and on line sites to see who’s hiring for these types of positions, the qualifications the jobs require and the titles and levels of the positions. Perhaps you’ll see that you need more experience or expertise to get the position you desire.

By doing some research, you can identify positions that can be stepping stones to your desired job. Or you can find a job using your current expertise in an organization that also has the jobs you aspire to do. Once you’re working at the organization use the internal hiring process to move into the new line of work.

Focus is Key

Identifying what you really want and focusing your job search on these opportunities will increase your ability to effectively market yourself, and without a doubt, your job success and satisfaction will be significantly greater doing work that you enjoy. As a wise man named Thoreau once said, “in the long run, we only hit what we aim at”.

 

“Job Change, It begins with Focus” is a copyrighted publication of Career & Workplace Directions, LLC and cannot be copied or printed without express permission of Career & Workplace Directions, LLC.

Outplacement: A Key Component of your Severance Package

This article describes the benefits of providing outplacement services as well as the prevalence and typical range of  financial support that organizations provide to departing employees. It stresses the importance of finding the right company, one that offers effective services and tracks their clients’ success.

Article link:

http://thebalancecareers.com/outplacement-is-a-service-for-laid-off-employees-1918584

 

At CWD we guide our clients to faster, more successful transitions to their next great employment situation. During this often unsettling time, we provide a highly personalized approach and a straightforward process to move our clients forward with renewed confidence, updated marketing tools and highly effective job search strategies that help them land on their feet. The vast majority of our clients end up in equally satisfying or better employment situations than they left!

Check out what our clients say about our Outplacement Services:

https://cwdirections.com/organizations/transitioning/