Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurs have the ability or talent to shift resources from
areas of low productivity and yield to areas of high productivity
and yield. They understand a marketplace need and how to serve or
fulfill that need.
Exponential
interviews
If you speak to three individuals from each of whom you glean three
contacts, and from each of them you glean three more contacts, then
you have access to twenty-seven sources of new information about
a new career direction hitherto unknown to you. Thus by successive
'generations' of contacts or 'degrees of separation' you can increase
your contacts exponentially.
Face-to-face
Meeting for the purpose of gathering information from a contact
or "target" are called "informational interviews", since you interview
the target. These are done most effectively face-to-face, rather
than at a distance, since most human communication is non-verbal,
and you can thereby learn what the target's career looks and feel
like.
Goals
If one goal fades, an optimist finds another and strives to reach
it. Optimism is one of the best predictors of career success and
satisfaction. By breaking down formidable goals into discrete specific
elements, optimists are able to accomplish much.
Health
Career well being resembles physical fitness; exercise improves
both. Diagnosis and check-ups prevents loss of health and muscle
strength (atrophy), just as career diagnosis and career check-ups
help prevent "career atrophy" and "career malaise". It's more important
to know what person has the career, than what career the person
has.
Hire
During a job interview, the invitation by a job interviewer, "Tell
me about yourself", is tantamount to. or the subtext of, asking,
"Why should I hire you?"
Implementation
The third phase of a career transition process (following assessment
and options exploration) which is designed to get you to where you
want to be: organizing a campaign of letters, resumes, one-page
bios (better than resume if changing career direction), interview
practice, negotiations, etc.
Informational
interview
The "opposite" of a job interview, in which you interview an individual
(a target) whose name you obtained through a credible intermediary.
The target works at a job or career that you think you might like
to know more about before you decide to pursue this potential career
direction. Ideally, you'd like the target to tell you: how she got
the job; what she likes and doesn't like about the job; who else
does similar work whom you could contact.
Interview (job)
A job interview is a dialogue (not a KGB interrogation) that leads
to one decision by the candidate (you), and one decision by the
interviewer (the hiring decision-maker). This dialogue allows you
to find out more about the job's opportunities, specifications,
and environment. Before the job interview, research the organization
fully so that you have intelligent questions to ask, which become
the basis for a dialogue.
Interview questions
(difficult)
Prepare candid positive answers to the most difficult job interview
questions, such as: Why are you changing careers/jobs? Why did you
leave your last job? What are your greatest weaknesses? Where do
you want be in five years? Describe a time that you failed?
Job search systems
Formal methods: ads, search firms, resumes, intensely competitive,
easy to send out resumes; ultimately unproductive. Informal methods:
research, investigate, use contacts, unpublished openings, "hidden"
job market, unconventional, private, your initiative, more work
for you, most professional jobs found this way, highly productive.
Journal
A career-transition diary or journal capture, preserves, and extends
your detailed thoughts, musings, jottings, ruminations, informational-interview
contacts and ideas, wisdom, and random notions about your contemplated
career transitions. The journal/diary format: prevents your insights
from slipping away; consolidates and incorporates new career ideas,
behaviors, and attitudes.
Knowledge
Embarking on a career transition, or choosing a career, requires
knowledge of oneself, knowledge of the marketplace for one's most
enjoyable skills, and knowledge of the "overlap" between them.
Law of the
instrument
Just as nails attract hammers, career problems attract certain career
methods. "Give a boy a hammer and everything he encounters will
need pounding".
Leads
Leads are people who you know, or can get to know, who are able
to "amplify" the intelligence within your own brain by "leading"
you to socially and professionally well-connected others, whose
assets, wisdom, and contacts you can mobilize. It's important that
you and your leads share reciprocal interests in common, and that
they do not feel exploited.
Letters
(e-mail)
Letters and e-mail require a considerable investment of time and
thought since they represent you, who you are, and what mutual interests
you seek to explore. A "contact" letter must exclude a resume or
else the target will assume you are asking for a job, when in fact
you are asking for advice. A "cover" letter includes a resume since
it is sent in response to an ad requesting your resume. A "thank
you? letter should always conclude with the phrase, "I will keep
you informed of my progress", to suggest the possibility of a continuing
relationship.
Life choices
List all career-related life choices (college, major, professional
school, first job, second job, etc), the alternatives available
at the time, your rationale used for your actual choice, and finally,
in retrospect how you feel now about your choice made then. You
can now determine if there were patterns than, and going forward
now. Early small career decisions made with imperfect knowledge
then can result in large career errors now.
Marketing
Marketing oneself ethically and with integrity is one of the bases
for long term career success. Marketing is and exchange of value,
preceded by an understanding of the employers needs and wants, trust
and rapport, and high moral principles. Pressure to acquire your
services must arise naturally from the buyer, and not from the seller.
To understand the buyers needs, you must do detailed research in
advance of any meeting, job or informational meeting. Consequently,
you will be able to ask intelligent questions, and demonstrate your
eagerness to learn more about targets needs.
Mentors
Very few careers or career transitions occur without worthy role
models, coaches, guides, or mentors, who provide access to appropriate
up-to-date job market information. Having a worthy mentor enhances
a junior persons knowledge of how to navigate effectively in the
professional world of new colleagues and contacts. Mentors provide
sponsorship or reflected power from the senior to the junior person.
Research shows that a substantial majority of successful job/career
changers obtained their employment through personal approaches or
introductions to solicitation to people who know people, role models,
mentors, and contacts of potential employers. See (Networking).
Negotiation
Negotiation is a learnable skill, a process not a event, that can
be done only between equal parties before being hired, but only
after an offer is made.
Networking
See Exponential interview.
Non-traditional
careers
About 58 % of advanced degree professionals (law, medicine, science,
engineering, architecture, humanities) follow a straight-ahead career
path. About 29 % follow a broad career path, shifting fields slightly
or moving into administration within original career. About 13%
follow a variant or non-traditional career pattern, changing career
directions completely or significantly.
Obstacles
Poor interpersonal skills are leading obstacles to success in making
a career transition. If you have no master plan or ?theory of victory
you can get lost or fail. If you lack energy or optimism, you lack
key ingredients. Depression is a significant obstacle. If you have
difficulty distinguishing between what you know and don't know you
must acquire these distinctions. if you are a product looking of
a market instead of searching for a market that's looking for you,
you will fail.
Occupations
Occupations are what occupy us.
Occupational
mobility
The ability to change occupations or careers according to us bureau
of labor statistic, about 10 % of the labor total adult workforce
change occupations per year, and about 4 million per month change
jobs or employers.
Optimism
Optimism is one of the best predictors of success in a career or
career change. To convert justifiable pessimism into learned and
earned optimism requires career change planning and a theory of
career victory. Optimists live longer, have better health than pessimists.
Optimists tend to internalize good things that happen to them and
externalize bad things. Optimists break formidable tasks into specific
incremental elements.
Options
Exploration Research
The second stage in a career transition when a range of desirable
career options, deduced from an evaluation of ones preferences (see
assessment), lead to reality testing based upon true job marketplace
data, usually gleaned form informational interviewing and contacts.
PAR statements
Par statements are of the form: Problem, Action, Result. That is,
what Problem were you facing at a prior employer; what Action did
you take to solve it; and what the Results, preferably quantitative,
was. These par statements are useful in writing one-page bios or
resumes.
Persistence
Persistence is the ability to perceive each rejection as one less
obstacle on the way to an acceptance.
Personality
In a study of those with outstanding talent and performance, those
who had pleasing personalities, all other things being equal, were
found to be at the top of their profession ten years later. Those
with unpleasant personalities were found to be next most successful.
Those with no personality or and insipid personality, even thought
at the same original level of talent and performance, were at the
bottom.
Pessimism
Pessimism has a significant negative impact on career satisfaction,
and the ability to change careers. See optimism.
Preparation
Every interview, whether job or informational improves upon rehearsal
and practice. So does career changing. An old joke has an out-of-towner
coming to New York who asks an old Jewish lady, How do you get to
Carnegie hall? and she answers, practice, practice, practice.
Protégé
Mentors have protégés, disciples who are star pupils, favorite students
who carry the masters teachings forward, who are and extension of
the mentors ego. Becoming a protégé is a matter of personal chemistry
and elusive obvious.
Quesions
Another way to demonstrate ones level of interest in a job opportunity
or new career is to ask intelligent questions. This takes practice.
See preparation.
Recruiters
Recruiters are paid by the employer, and thereby represent the employers
best interests. They are assigned by the employer the task of finding
a potential new hire who meets certain very stringent requirements.
If you happen to possess those requirements, you will be sought
after, however, if you seek career guidance from a recruiter, do
not be surprised if you do not receive professional guidance that
is in your best interest.
Reference materials
If you are asked to provide the names of references, before you
provide these, check with the people you wish to use as references
to see precisely what they will say about you, and do not say otherwise
about yourself.
Research
Research is necessary to discover who you are, what's out there
as it pertains to you, and how well you and what's out there will
fit.
Resume (s)
Resumes are problematical. Resumes tell someone who you are or were,
not who you want to be. Resumes also imply that you are asking for
a job, when in fact you may merely be asking for advice. The resumes
subtext is often: Help me I'm desperate for work. This is not a
great negotiating position.
Risk
Changing careers or jobs involve a certain level of risk.
Search strategies
Do you search where the jobs or careers are or where you will be
most satisfied? Or both? Or neither?
Self (-assessment,
-confidence, -esteem, -marketing)
Assessment of oneself may be limited by the long-established and
set habits of mind. Seeing oneself clearly is more difficult without
objective standards of measurement.
Shyness
Shyness may hinder a career change to the extent that social contacts
are avoided. Yet even shy people can learn how to expand their circle
of acquaintances and use techniques similar to networking and exploring
the hidden job market.
Skills
Among your total repertoire of skills, identifying your most enjoyable
and transferable skills is essential to a systematic examination
of what the marketplace has to offer--that would make sense for
you, given who you are.
Social competence
Social competence is the ability to win friends and influence people,
to deploy ones street smarts to make win-win exchanges. People who
are good at this say they are productive and enjoy life.
Success
Each of us has our own definition of success. One man says success
is a lousy teacher; it seduces smart people into thinking they can't
fail. (Bill Gates). Another says that you can wear out a particular
part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it. The tired
parts of the mind can be rested and strengthened by using other
parts (Winston Churchill).
Systems
Systematic approaches to career transitions assessment, options
exploration research, implementation have been shown to work for
those who are serious about attempting to change their careers.
Talent
Talent is a gift, but one not to be misused. If you think you are
talented, think again. You are better off being a plow horse than
a race horse. Plow horses win the race, like the tortoise beats
the hare. Slow and steady wins the race. Really.
Targets
Arrange a meeting with someone who works in a field or organization
that you consider a possible career or job choice. That person is
called a target. Interview that target to discover what they do,
how they like it, who they know you can speak to, and interview
their contacts. See networking, informational
interviews.
Telephone
Picking up the telephone and asking for a meeting or interview is
the cutting edge of any effective job-search or career-transition
campaign. The phone can be your first oral communication with a
contact or potential employer. Good telephone technique is a skill
learned through preparation, rehearsal, and practice.
Transformations
(career)
You can transform your career if you are willing to examine who
you are, to explore the real options available to you, and to organize
a campaign to get where you discover you want to be. See assessment,
options exploration research, implementation.
Trained
Incapacity
The more formal training, schooling, and advanced education each
of us receives, the more we are unable to achieve practical results
in mundane but necessary pursuits, and the less versatile we become.
The result is a pervasive decline in broad-band competencies. In
effect, by strengthening one muscle or set of skills, we become
muscle-bound in one set of skills, and enfeebled or atrophied in
other (perhaps more practical or street smart) skills. We need to
understand the anatomy of the atrophied muscles.
Transferable
skills
These are skills that you may transfer to other careers. Example:
if you enjoy writing briefs, you may enjoy writing novels. Example:
if you enjoy organizing and planning and scheduling a vacation,
you may enjoy managing people and projects. If you enjoy using your
computer to process complex tasks, you may enjoy using your computer
for other projects such as implementing programs. If you enjoy doing
research in one field, you may enjoy it another field.
Use/misuse
of Internet
Get real before you go virtual. Most human communication is non-verbal.
Therefore, you will get further in a networking effort by meeting
face-to-face, than if you communicate by phone or by e-mail.
Values
Values are those human needs, ingredients of work, and qualities
of life that we cherish, such as: collegiality; growth potential;
opportunity to be social useful; intellectual challenge; stimulating
work; control over our work schedule; location of work; compensation;
shared purpose; team work; and so on. We usually rank order these,
with some at very high priority, and others at lower priority. To
enjoy ones career, these priorities must be an integral part of
the career transition equation.
Web
A web is a network of contacts or intimately connected social system.
The World Wide Web is an electronic extension of this social and
information network.
XML, XHTML
Extensible markup language, extensible hypertext markup language.
These systems of computer language allow constant transitions to
and from a given document text or image, to other texts or images,
as the following examples: Network, Contact.
"Yes, but"
This is the way educated people object to an assertion they find
debatable or disagreeable. Objections may arise because the individual
is trained to be a skeptic (lawyer, doctor, scientist), likes to
debate, or actually learns from the process of disagreeing with
someone else.
Zone
In career transitions, an individual may feel a certain level of
comfort in staying in a future-less job or unpleasant career. The
comfort may be found in a large income, high status, or other benefits
that are difficult to give up: a comfort zone. When the discomfort
overwhelms and when risk appears to be manageable, we can begin
to see how to leave our career comfort zone and move forward.
