Your Job Should Be Your Calling

In May of 2008 I attended a career conference sponsored by The Ladders and Kennedy Information as well as Career Directors International. A lot of well-known folks inside Career Management Alliance and around the globe attended. As the conference blogger and photographer I also represented one of my key vendors. This experience put me back in touch with the kind of thought leaders that drive the career industry. Again in October I attended the Career Directors International Conference in Seattle with multiple and too many to mention thought leaders. 

One of the talks in May by Richard Leider focused on people who suffer from what he calls the “inner kill” and that kind of nails a lot of what I work on with my clients. He calls it the art of dying without knowing it. How many people die by a million small cuts? I mean people work so hard and then find out they are not fulfilled. If you want to be an achiever your job usually must mean more or should mean more than a paycheck. Richard Leider, Susan Whitcomb, Liz Sumner and Laura DeCarlo and really a lot of conference participants spoke about practices to help clients revitalize, renew and capture your work-life balance or as I like to put it your work-life mission. You can view this in a secular or non-secular way. But you should not pretend that it does not matter. It does.

Unfortunately most people only realize problems when they become a crisis. Or recessions and downturns in the economy show how people respond to setbacks and layoffs.

To prevent job or career crisis management I recommend that you ask yourself these questions first:

1. Am I completely fulfilled in my work-life? Remember your worklife does not have to be only what you do to make money. It can absolutely be a combination of work, family/home, volunteer and anything that adds to your worklife.
2. What am I doing to challenge myself to stay focused, happy and productive at work?
3. If work ended tomorrow what would I do short-term and long-term?

One way that I advocate you look at your career is to focus on your career third person, like you are a business.

From a work point of view consider this:

Would it surprise you to find that your company has been sold, your division cut or that your new boss decided that despite your obvious, multi-year contributions that you were expendable? How would you handle a career transition now? What if the ‘what if’ happened and you faced unemployment in the next 12 months? How would facts like these affect your attitude and your economy? In the 12 years of coaching clients and developing outplacement and job search strategies, few lessons learned come to mind quicker than most people at all levels of careers, entry-level to executive, run the business of their career this way – crisis management.

To run your career properly treat it like a business, anticipate change, embrace change and remember that you have made a rather serious business investment. Whether you own your own business or not you need to know that transforming change takes place daily. On a small scale the sand shifts underneath you as a business leader, business owner or person who works for an organization or company. Will you be ready for small changes? Will you be prepared to accept total responsibility for your business and career? Will you take ownership and not make excuses for challenges during your career? Will you embrace the new digital economy and challenge yourself to think differently? “Unfortunately I want to get out of management for a number of reasons,” a recent Fortune 100 human resources manager and client exclaimed to me. “Maybe it’s me but all I seem to do is babysit, deal with personnel issues and try to get people to understand the new realities of today. I wish people at every level would think about their job from the owner’s point of view.”

You own the business of your career. Now what do you do?

ResumeSpider offers Career Seekers an alternative approach to getting noticed which leads to more activity; like phone calls, emails and interviews.

We are not claiming this is the silver bullet or some great new idea. However, ResumeSpider is a common-sense approach to networking and targeted list building. Both activities are crucial to a well rounded job search and should be incorporated as soon as possible. For example, all you need to do is call into a company, find out if they hire your profile, get a contact name, phone number and email address. Now duplicate that task 250 or 500 or 1000 times.  Unfortunately this effort can take weeks or months with our own time and resources. ResumeSpider offers a proven time saving approach to this strategy. It is important to remember that your time is worth something!

Our matching technology closely resembles relationship matching websites; like Match.com and eHarmony.  You are matched to companies in our network based on your job function, industry experience and desired locations.  Then we email your profile to those select Member Companies. We have 1000s of companies in our network and add 400-500 new companies, on average, every month.  The Member Company network consists of employers and recruiting firms that have joined ResumeSpider to receive resumes.

To get more information on Resume Spider, read How it Works, Why Join, and some Resume Spider reviews and testimonials.

http://www.resumespider.com/

Now for a healthy outlook on your career path, I recommend you…

1. Accept Change. To open a door to a new career jobseekers must focus on accepting change as reality. So look at the ways you have learned and enjoy learning. Express this in achievements and keywords in your resume and career marketing materials. Be ready to respond swiftly to the needs of corporations by offering different aspects of your background. No longer are resume just dry ways to demonstrate your employment during high school, college, through internships, military or other experiences. You must give line and verse about what you have done and how it applies to the position you are going for next. That means get ready to edit your resume for each position you apply for online or offline. Change happens abruptly in business. It happens abruptly throughout many a career path. What’s in our control? You control your actions and your attitudes; that may be about all you can control. Control the content within your resume. Develop your volunteer experiences, key class projects, athletic or other achievements. Everything must be looked at, developed and considered. Some new graduates think they have nothing to offer. You do if you market it properly. 

2. Look Beyond the Surface. According to career authors and other representatives from the major search engines, something less than 5% of leads are advertised on the big job boards. So where does the typical jobseeker or the typical new graduate spend their time looking for jobs? I would argue they spend 95% of their energy focused on Internet job boards. This is a good starting point. In fact, sites like Craig’s List offer opportunities and danger too. As a new graduate you need to search and find your target audience. Recruiters don’t just look on the major sites for resumes. They are working the social networking sites like Facebook and the more professional networking sites like LinkedIn. Those are not the only ones either! So if you information isn’t loaded there and you don’t know why you need to campaign in that way then you are out of date. You are not savvy or sophisticated. Weddle’s Guides and Peter Weddle himself an Internet guru stated personally to me that there are dozens of sites for niche industries being developed weekly. In fact, he suggested that recruiters are more interested in finding you doing something they might want to hire you for than downloading your CV from the big sites. So where could you go and what could you do to be seen as someone serious? Remember you must think this way even if you are in a path toward law school, med school or are not sure what you want to be when you grow up. 

3. Go for Your Mission not Just a Job. Take an entrepreneurial approach to your future. How do I want my life to be in 10 years and what career path may be the best vehicle to that path? What do I want my reputation to be in five years? What is my Worklife Mission? Everything you do should be geared toward these goals and aspirations. If you are looking for a job and not a career a lot of this advice might not matter. If you are just trying to pay bills then who cares what you do or who you do it for. But if you can compose more than your 30–second commercial - develop a Worklife Mission statement. Pick career opportunities that may advance you toward who and what you want to be in five or more years. Current Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers suggest that 65% of people don’t like their jobs. But what do they do about this dissatisfaction? Where do they go to take proactive, positive action on finding their professional calling, their next steps? To properly research new ideas you can use the big job boards like Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com. Other sources of information may come as easy as finding articles and information from a variety of sources: industry journals, company websites, blogs, volunteer organization sites, DOT, OOH, ONET and other resources. In a competitive job market, it’s hard enough for job seekers on a steady career path to get their resumes noticed. If you are pursuing a new direction, it’s all that much more difficult to convince hiring managers to take a chance on you. Study and read. Utilize insiders to help you network. Pick jobs that will give you part of what you want to be in 10 years. Move toward something specific. Also, please stop looking for a job and start looking for opportunities. Employers want people who want opportunities. If you want to stand out then take the attitude that you want an opportunity. 

4. Lastly, start dealing with the gaps and mistakes you made during college. So you didn’t get that internship that you wanted? You didn’t really have that great of summer jobs? You didn’t do all those volunteer things you thought you would do? Well then start doing them now. Start volunteering. Ask for the experiences you need and give away your time and expertise for free. No, don’t wait. Do it right now. In the meantime you may have to get two jobs, three jobs or even put up with being underemployed until you make up this lost ground. Mistakes that new graduates make usually means that they want to utilize the same poor decisions they made during school as they attempt to compete in the marketplace. That just simply won’t work. As professionals, many of my clients need a makeover and to understand they must self-study in order to research, define and emphasize key qualifications for these new goals and objectives. If you have not earned them start earning them now. With that attitude you will probably be hired into a position you want. 

5. Your Resume Must Be Outstanding. What do the potential hiring managers want to see in a resume? Here’s a tip - they want to see what you can do for them now and how you will drive revenue and reduce cost for them now. What do they want to see in you if you ran a construction operation but now want to consider selling industrial products? Hire a professional to interview you and market you. Good writing, proper use of keywords and a marketing oriented resume sells in person and online. You need to ask yourself tough questions to come up with original documents. In a behavioral interview for major account management, how will you relate your transferable skills or the experiences you gained to date? What if you were in the military and you want to be in a federal job? That may make sense. But how do you relate your class experiences, jobs, internships, military experiences and whatever you have into a corporate assignment in finance, sales or operations? The list goes and could go on forever. They don’t need to know dry work history or a listless listing of dates, times and responsibilities but they do need to understand the transferable skills, keywords and strategy you intend to take with them in communicating your specific and immediate value. Any savvy jobseeker and especially a career changer may need to clearly write down, analyze and synthesize raw data to feature why they are marketable and why they should be interviewed. A great resume or personal marketing material must brand you across many platforms - online, offline, personal, professional. 

Congratulations on earning your degree. You must look for an opportunity not a handout. You want to earn your future. Now go out and fight with passion for your career life and your all important worklife mission. And get out of the basement room at your parents house!

Read Part One.

Stand out by writing and living your Work Life mission and learn the new rules for careers. It also might help your parents if you moved out of your old room or the basement. 

Start with a new paradigm, a new mindset. Find organizations that support your worklife mission and fight to join them. Generations ago it was your parents and even grandparents that thought they would be in one career path and maybe with one company. That was the dream of dreams. Then you could settle down in life.

Well, forget that mindset. If that’s the lottery you want to hit you will probably have lottery odds to get into one career path, climb the corporate ladder and retire that way. Who checks time with a watch anyway? It’s on your IPhone or PDA or whatever. In many ways, you need grasp the idea that you will have some major career shifts and, most likely, change careers during your career. A career must be viewed as a sequence of jobs and probably a sequence of career paths.

How can I make this claim?

All industries change and as the industry changes then you must change with it. It’s Internet warp speed. No industry remains stagnant and if a business that serves that industry does not change then that business faces changes of its own. Look at the way the construction business or housing industry has changed in the last year. Look at the technology and software industries. Have they changed? How about the music and entertainment industry? Any changes you noticed? They change daily. How about the oil business, the airlines and others? Okay, you have the point. Either the business, technology, people and economies change or something shifts. For those shifts any jobseeker or person who intends to have a long career must embrace change.