 With the holidays upon us, and the New Year approaching, I’ve been thinking about the opportunities that a new year brings. If you are like me, you’ll likely be making a resolution or two. Have you resolved to build a new career? A new year can be your springboard for re-invention. It is a natural starting point to set your career goals. But how can you be sure you achieve them once the buzz of the New Year is gone? Although I’d be first to admit there is no magic bullet, here are four insights I gleaned in my own career transition that may help get you to the finish line. Lay the groundwork – Separate your beliefs from those of others. At every turn, others’ opinions surround us. You can’t go through life without heeding others’ advice, but if you are not careful, you can get swept away in others’ views, forgetting or de-prioritizing your own. When I considered moving on from my old job, I heard a number of concerns. How will you re-enter the workforce? What about the years invested in your field? Are you prepared potentially to start over? You may be facing similar questions as you are off-ramping or on-ramping in your career. Whether expressed outright or simply implied, others’ views can subtly undermine your confidence, make you question your resolutions and thwart your best efforts to make a change. Know yourself. Prioritize your values. Heed others’ advice but listen to your own voice. Be the giver, not the networker. I had lunch with an old colleague some time ago. She recently launched her own business. I was working on launching mine. I sought her counsel and tips for overcoming challenges that might arise along the way. We talked about networking. I am not a natural networker so I listened carefully. Her advice? Approach networking as an opportunity to give, not to receive. What better way to build a relationship than to help someone out? Find a way to solve a problem they have, and they may return the favor someday. People who give are memorable – they inspire others to give. I got home after lunch to find an e-mail from my colleague with links to resources to help with getting my business off the ground. Helpful, impactful, generous. That’s advice I’ll readily follow. Follow a roadmap to the finish line. It’s a lot easier to reach your goal when you can envision it clearly in the distance. Have you ever run a marathon? It’s an analogy that’s applied often to job searches. The last mile is intimidatingly far, but if you are a serious runner, you’ve studied the map, you’ve visited the course ahead of the race, and you know what the finish line looks like. Then the race begins. Around mile 10 you’ll begin to lose steam. 26.2 is still far in the distance. But if you keep your eyes on the short-term goal – mile 11 is just around the corner. Soon you will celebrate and keep going to 12. Want to stay on course? Mile-mark your job search. Keep your long-term goal on the horizon, but strive to reach short-term targets. Fill in your calendar daily, weekly, monthly with what you intend to accomplish. Then run your race. Keep yourself accountable and energized. Any challenging endeavor is guaranteed to have some bumps in the road. A career transition is certain to. Your mile-marked calendar can keep you accountable, but probably not energized. When you are running on empty, you are looking for water not counting miles. Struggling to reach your goals despite your best efforts? Set up a weekly or monthly check-in with a friend or a mentor. Meet with your coach. Find fellow career changers to lunch with. You’ll leave energized to tackle your next challenge, whether it’s polishing your resume, looking for your next networking opportunity, or working on your next blog piece. I did this week. The result? This article.
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The common wisdom is that it’s easier to get an interview when you are applying for jobs, when you know someone internally. Wouldn’t it be great if you knew the hiring manager, or the HR director who posted the job? Those are usually the people who have the power to bring you in or keep you out as you are trying to get your foot through the hiring door. Of course it would. But if you don’t know that person, you can usually get the necessary introductions if you know how to tap your network.
We all know someone who can open doors for us. There are well known statistics that confirm that over 80% of job seekers get their jobs through someone they know. Oftentimes, however, we tend to rush the process. How many of those people land the jobs only to find out a short time later that they again are at the wrong place? Getting clarity about what you want takes time but is an investment that pays off in the end. The same people that make the introductions are there, just as importantly, to provide us with valuable information about the nature of the job, or the culture of the organization where we want to work. After all, that job that looks so good on paper may not sound quite so hot after you do a little more research. After I narrowed down my list of career options, I began to talk to people. I quickly learned that the best way to find out if the job is the right fit (short of getting the job), is to do it for a really short time – a day to be exact – the technical name for this is shadowing. Second best way? Informational interviews. The shadowing and the informational interviewing took me to some fun places. I spent time in an elementary school classroom. A few hours was enough time to help me realize I would not survive long in a room full of little kids! I had coffee with a social worker and a lunch with an HR recruiter. I was attracted to the helping professions and it was becoming easier to visualize myself in those kinds of jobs. The more information I got, the more I understood how my own personal preferences, interests and values would fit in with the various job descriptions. Going through this brought me back to my days as a student-athlete, when my swim coach would have the team lie on the deck and visualize our next race in detail. Seeing the picture of what you want to happen play out in your mind creates laser sharp focus. And there are no better prerequisites for achieving your goal than focusing exactly on what you want. These were great learning points, and as I got more information, I began to apply for specific positions in the non-profit training and coaching space. I looked at traditional job boards, company postings, but tried to focus much of my effort on tapping my network and, if the position seemed like the right fit, asking my friends, former colleagues and acquaintances to pass on my resume. In the end, though, I got my foot through the door in a very unlikely fashion. Cold call. If it’s not the first time you woke up with a sense of anxiety about going to work, you are not alone. Often we go through the motions of making it though yet another day while knowing deep down that we are in the wrong place. Yet something is stopping us from moving on. This was exactly where I was 6-7 years ago.
Deeply unfulfilled but nonetheless succeeding in my chosen field (banking regulation), I knew that something was amiss but didn’t know where to start to get my life back on the right track. I had ideas (perhaps too many ideas!) about where I’d rather be, but somehow felt that I wasn’t ready to commit to any of them. Was teaching a better fit for me? Or was it Education Administration? Or perhaps something more along the lines of Human Resources or Organizational Development? Should I get a Masters in Social Work? Or maybe a position in a non-profit where I could help to solve local or global problems? There were too many options and I was clearly lost. By then I had vague ideas of what I enjoyed doing and even better notions of what I didn’t. It turned out that was a good place to start. One day at work (desperate to do anything else but the current task at hand), I made a list of my strengths and everything I thought I was good at. A common thread that ran through the list was that I liked working with people (teaching, counseling, building connections, etc) and I liked to help them solve problems. So, what on earth brought me to banking? Well….it must have been my interview skills… I bought a few books on career change. I took a personality assessment. As I struggled to get through my days at the office, it helped to focus some of my energy on figuring out a way forward. The clerk at the self-help section of the Wall Street Barnes and Noble began to smile at me as I approached. I felt like I was playing a game of hot and cold. I was getting warmer. But I still was unsure of where I belonged. What do you do if you don’t know where to begin? How do you re-group and re-evaluate your options? First of all. Step back. Create some distance. I decided to take a leave of absence. My goal: uninterrupted time to evaluate options. I found an intensive month-long course offering in Coaching at NYU. The timing was right, the financial commitment was low, and it sounded like my cup of tea. This was the serendipitous beginning of my newfound path. |
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