First, take heart. You are not the first person in the world to find yourself needing a job. Your job does not define you. It is simply a vehicle that help you use your talents, applied productively, to fulfill your purpose in service of others. It is without question that you possess far more value in the market than you realize.
Before you go further, consider the time you have available to secure a job based on your current reality. If you need money for your kitchen table or family right now, go get a job.
If you have some breathing room, establish the timeline you can survive without having income from a new role. Once you have this timeline in mind, write it down and take your time to build a plan to secure your new position.
The market for talent is very good, and in some functions or industries, the market trend indicates that we will need more people to fill the needs for specific roles over the next 10+ years.
The aging population – the “silver tsunami” creating a wave of people retiring – and the dramatic and continuous technological shifts have left a tremendous amount of roles open. However, you must own your plan for securing your new position and not expect anyone else to find you a job.
If you have a career plan and create the right network for your targeted outcomes for work, a much broader list of opportunities opens up to you.
Finding a job is a job in itself, so don’t make a new career where you roll from one job to another because you didn’t take the time to find a job that fits your purpose. If you have the time right now to focus on a proper career plan that you build to fulfill your purpose, you can do this either by yourself or with a CareerTruth Coach.
Allocate a certain amount of time each day or week to work on your career and not just to find a job. Socrates was correct, all wisdom begins with knowing yourself.
There are a series of steps to build your career plan with purpose.
- Take account of your complete professional and personal inventories.
- Professional Inventory: this is a full accounting of your professional accomplishments, learnings, skills, competencies, and goals. Most people looking for work feel either too little confidence or too much. The key is to know your CareerTruth. Truly understand how much they have done or potentially can do.
- Personal Inventory: At the same time, you will fully account for your personal goals related to financial rewards, use of time, locations, and travel. These points are critical to helping you make good choices when you have comparable but different options.
- Define and document your values, purpose statement, and vision of success.
- Most people do not put words to who they are and how they see life. You are unique in the way your values and purpose match your professional and personal inventories. It is good to look at them all and consider what your definition of success.
- Build development action plans to meet your goals that fulfill your purpose and vision.
- Making actionable plans to be held accountable will allow you always to be moving forward. While your biggest goal is to get a job as soon as possible, it is best to look farther down the road and share these plans with people who will help you or hire you.
- Activate others you trust to support your purpose.
- Being on a career journey alone leads to anxiety, loss of motivation, and doubt. Having a board of advisors, a coach, or other key stakeholders help inform your plan or bring new ideas of support is inspiring, both for you and them. People are excited and, most often, honored to help.
Now you are prepared to consider where you should look for your next career role.
- Select “lanes” of work you can pursue.
- Suppose you want to keep using your past experiences in the same industry (i.e. health care, manufacturing, or software) or use your transferrable functional skills (i.e. sales, research, or human resources). In that case, you can quickly identify companies based on your preference of company size, location, role types, and/or business model (i.e., private, public, non-profit, etc).
- Your lanes should have consistencies resulting from the type of work or purpose you want to fulfill in any season. For example, you might want to work for a large global corporation with excellent training and a headquarters in your home city. Or, perhaps your location doesn’t matter, and you want to work in a privately-held medium-sized business where you can have an impact and your coworkers feel like family. When networking, applying, or interviewing, the type of lanes you pursue should be consistent so you can leverage your network well.
- A “lane” needs to have 10-20 companies as potential employers. If you can’t come up with that many, you need to do more search or widen your tolerance profile for one of your personal goals (money, travel, location, commute).
- Craft Your Career Narrative.
- You should apply to these companies if they qualify to be in your lanes, but more importantly, use your network (peers, advisors, mentors, friends) to meet people who work at your target companies.
- You can also look for people who may not directly work for the company but can help you learn more about your targets or help you find new targets.
- Most importantly, tell the “Story of You” well. It is only possible to tell your story well by knowing all the components of your career plan. By sharing your values, purpose statement (focused on others), and vision of success that ultilizes your current skills and detailed development plan, people will be impressed that you know your “business” (your career). The “Story of You” can show up in quick interactions, coffee meetings, or interviews. Always have your story ready by doing the good work on your business – your career.
People do not hire resumes or LinkedIn profiles, people truly hire people. Of course, you need all the tools to tell your story well when you are not present; your resume, LinkedIn profile, and references. But posting and praying is not a real career plan.
Make yourself easy to help. Never ask someone to meet you to help you find a job. Unless they have an opening themselves, no one wants to take that meeting. Ask people to meet instead for feedback on your career purpose and development plans. People will be honored to help, or they are the wrong person. Having a complete plan builds clarity, confidence, and results on the way to the job you may need now to have a purpose-filled career.