Re-energizing Your Career

The economy is rough nowadays, and coupled with the recent massive lay-offs and plenty of discouragement happening, it’s definitely a good idea to look for career advice to change your focus to something you can be passionate about.

I remember talking to an ex-colleague a couple of weeks ago – at the beginning of our conversation, she was all de-motivated in her current role because she felt there were nothing more she can contribute and that all her previous passion for what she’s doing is greatly diminished. She was getting frustrated at what she termed as her daily routine, which she had been doing for the last few years. She wanted to advance further in her professional development but was unsure what, how and when to do. In a nutshell, she was confused and had lost her sense of direction. There was absolutely no sign of energy in doing what she was doing at that moment

The difference between a job and a career is that the first option is labor oriented and usually does not have much advancement involved, and the second option is passion oriented, allowing you to advance and grow using skills that you have learned through some kind of formal or technical education. If you do not know what direction to go into, seeking advice is an excellent first step to organizing your goals while helping you head down a path that will encourage and motivate you to succeed. As you begin your quest for a career, you may not have an idea about what kind you should be pursuing. An easy way to determine what direction to take, and the first bit of advice to edge you forward, is to think about what you have always loved to do with your time. There are activities that you take part in because you enjoy them as hobbies, and activities that you take part in because you could see yourself doing them to make money seriously. Those activities that you could see yourself turning into a career should be your first stepping stone to paving the road to success for yourself

The second point of advice for is to consider going back to school or taking some kind of professional training to help enhance your skills. You may not be equipped with the necessary skills and education to begin your future plans right away, and finding a job without the right skills will be nearly impossible. It is best to research what institutions of higher learning you can attend that will allow you to get a degree, certification or license in the field that you are interested in. Choose a university or program that you will enjoy going to in a location that makes you excited to be there. This will help to motivate you to continue on with your studies

The final point of career advice is to learn how to negotiate your salary so that you can live a lifestyle that is enjoyable. Research the high, average and low incomes for your career so that you know what kind of base salary to expect with your experience and skill set. The skills you have obtained may be high end skills that allow you to select a salary that compliments what you have learned. Be confident when you negotiate your salary, but not arrogant or unrealistic. It is always better to be humble than to come off as obnoxious or snobby, so keep your attitude in check and enjoy making the money that reflects what you are worth

After engaging in a few “coaching” conversations with that ex-colleague of mine, she finally decided to continue pursuing her current career track, and in addition obtain additional professional certification in psychotherapy and to gain further overseas work exposure. We broke down the two major components of what she wanted to do additionally, and worked out a time-line for her to complete the sub-components and she’s now on track to meeting those targets. I spoke to her recently and she’s feeling motivated, re-energized and extremely excited about the changes she made to her career.

Changing Your Career

For decades, people thought that doing their job – and “doing it well” – was sufficient to ensure long-term career success, plenty of financial rewards, and job security well into the future. In this school of thought, managing your career was only like a tiny piece of the picture – when it came time to stop working for a time (in the case of parents wishing to stay home with their children, for example), or under extremely unusual circumstances (such as when someone wanted to actually change careers).

Today, working professionals typically change careers 5 – 7 times before retirement. Yes, you read that right – they change careers, not jobs, 5 – 7 times. Many people are still only equipping themselves to deal with the old reality and are unprepared to navigate in the new reality of career management, where jobs are only a subset of the overall “Career” bigger picture.

A Career change is a good way of getting that “oomph” back into your professional life. Most people battle with this idea all of their professional lives and a few of us choose not to take the beaten path and try something new. Most career changes if well planned do not require much additional qualifications or risk-taking.

So, you will ask, “when does it call for a career change?”

And I will answer you this – “career changes should be considered if you experience a few or all of the following criteria”.

• When your job becomes mundane, overtly routine and boring, and you sense that you are not adding any value to yourself or to the organization. You have reached that burnout stage (or bottleneck) and you have advanced as much as you could in your line of work. Your work now no longer offers the challenges it used to
• You have changed employers in the hope that a new organization might offer new challenges and it has not.
• After graduating, any new recruit has two basic requirements of a job - lots of travel and lots of money. When you are no longer single, all that hectic traveling is bound to place a lot of stress on your family life.
• When you are young, you are more mentally prepared to take on the stress that your job entails. As you grow older, your tolerance to stress decreases and you might find yourself seeking less stressful jobs
• There are challenges, but there is no job satisfaction. And no amount of additional money in your current job is giving you that satisfaction. Though there might not be as much money in the job that you are considering, the thought of it itself is making you happy
• The current job does not hold as many opportunities as it used to or it is being phased out for a more technologically advanced function.

Ah-ha … you seem to fit into one or more of those “unfortunate” situations I mentioned and now you’re pounding your head as to what to do next? Take it easy… things aren’t as bad as you think. Let me share with you some steps when you are considering making a career change of your choice.

First and foremost, you should be suitably qualified to make that change in career. If you are less qualified, consider taking up distance learning or training courses to bridge the gap. The more the information you have, the better it is. Understand the industry well and be prepared for the challenges you may have to face. Also understand that this is going to take longer than planned

Next, carefully evaluate the reasons that are making you head for a career change. If it is bad performance on your part, try better it at your current job itself. Changing your career because of a tough boss is not a valid enough reason to leave your job. This might boomerang when your prospective boss does background verification at your workplace

When you consider a career change, you must be open to starting at lower strata in the organization. Since you are just starting out in that new career (remember this ... .it’s not a job you have done or experienced in doing), no employer might consider you for a senior or managerial position. But that should not be a stumbling block when you are working on your dream career

Then, as you begin to research on the industry of your choice, also begin building a network that you can fall back on for information. This provides a lot of leverage. Prospective employers will be aware of you as a potential resource. Also reading up on the Internet, joining discussion forums to help you gather information helps in making career changes.

Once you have completed the steps above, you are at least prepared mentally to make that career change. But this is not the end of it all… remember, making a career change is a long process and it takes time. I will touch on other elements of this topic in my next article so stay tuned in.

What Makes You Happy At Work?

Finally, I manage to log back on to my blogger… after 4 days of continuous no-success, and I had to get a few people involved before the access problem got resolved … Modern technology – you can’t live with it and you can’t live without it. Hah, what an irony!

Nonetheless, I’m back online again and this posting is to continue building upon where I left off on my previous article “What Career Is Right for Me?” As I have previously mentioned, there's nothing more challenging (or emotionally tearing) than changing careers half way through your life. Oftentimes, we find ourselves in a situation where we thought the job we chose was something we really wanted in our overall career roadmap, but as time goes by day by day, we find ourselves becoming more and more unhappy.

If we are unhappy, we know we’ve made a wrong choice. Now, the question is – how do we work out what we really want and what is that ideal job that goes with that territory? Here're some suggested ways and means to start formulating an answer to the above question (extracted in part from CareerExec International's Career Transition Program).

Ways & Means Number One: Understand why you are unhappy in your job
Good information comes out of understanding why you are currently unhappy in your job, and in my experience there tend to be six reasons why this is so. Which ones are relevant to you?

Your job is boring and unchallenging

This is often the case when people have been doing the same job for a long period of time, and colleagues and bosses can quickly forget that you have more to offer.

Dealing with difficult people

Often it’s not the specific tasks of a job that are stressful it’s the people you have to deal with that make life so difficult. Colleagues, bosses, clients and suppliers can all be difficult to get along with or be unreasonable in their demands.

Too much politics

It’s hard enough dealing with difficult people directly without having to deal with underhand politics as well. Even though it would be nice if everyone just got on with each other and did their jobs, the bad news is that politics will always happen.

You’re doing the wrong job for your personality

Imagine someone who likes working with details, such as an accountant or an engineer, suddenly being asked to take on a role in sales or a people management role with no additional training or support. You may feel that you just don’t “fit” into a role and that extra training just isn’t the answer.

A sign of other issues

If you’re unhappy in your job, it could be a sign of unhappiness or stress in other areas of life leading to a reduced ability to deal with what could be normal levels of pressure at work. Issues such as strained or failing relationships, poor health or money worries can all have a huge impact on your feelings of satisfaction with work.

Your work is just not your passion

It could be that although you are doing well in the eyes of other people, your work just isn’t what you are passionate about. Lots of people have a dream to do something that is really meaningful to them, but they are too scared to take a first small step to achieving that dream, or just don’t know how to start.

Ways & Means Number Two: Understanding yourself
To understand what work would be ideal for you, you really do have to understand yourself first, and in four key areas – your work interests, work motivators, your personality preferences and your personal and professional values.

Your work interests

These are the things that interest you in the world of work. Do you enjoy adventurous and risk taking activities or are you more interested in things like science and technology? Do your interests lie more in finance and administration or in working with words and being creative? Do you enjoy managing, organizing and getting results through others or do you have an interest in caring activities?

Your work motivators

These are the things that really drive you at work. For example how driven are you for recognition at work, or the need for responsibility, having control over your own work and being accountable for your actions? How much do you need variety and change in your work, or are you motivated more by stability and security? Are you driven by the need to excel in what you do and to find new challenges to overcome or do you prefer to have friendly colleagues at work? How motivated are you by your interest in the work that you do, or is pay and other material rewards a key motivator?

Your personality preferences

These will impact on how you prefer to work, and therefore your choice of ideal job. For example, are you good with people and do you gain energy by being with them, or are you good with ideas, precision and complexity and prefer to think carefully before acting? Do you prefer to deal with facts and reality; are you objective and analytical in your decision-making and do you find it hard to relax until your work is completed? Or are you imaginative and sensitive to the needs and motivations of other people, and flexible, adaptable, research-oriented and tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty well?

Your personal and work values

A personal value is a belief, a mission, or a philosophy that is really meaningful to you. When you are engaged in activities that support your values, you will feel most like yourself. If your job does not allow you to do this, the outcome for you will be significant stress and frustration. In addition, studies of successful individuals have found that there tends to be one or two professional values that guide their career and job choices, and make working an enjoyable and ultimately successful experience.

Ways & Means Number Three: Your ideal work/life balance
Work is of course only one aspect of your life, but there is often confusion when mentioning work/life balance. People seem to think it means there should be an equal balance between the two. This is not necessarily the case – having an effective work/life balance is about what works for you, perhaps there will be periods of time where your focus will be more on work than on your personal life, and vice versa.

This is why you need to know how your ideal job will fit in with your other priorities in life. You need to be clear on what else you want to focus on in your life, and what financial and time commitment you are prepared to give to them. Whatever is important to you, for example your health, family, friends, personal relationships or hobbies, your ideal job will need to take these factors into account.

Ways & Means Number Four: Understand your options
Knowing what you need from a job to make it ideal is only one half of the answer. The other half involves understanding what, realistically, your job options are.

Transferable skills

You must identify the skills and experiences you have that potential future employers will be prepared to pay you for. After all, they will only hire you if they have a need for the skills you can bring to them. These aren’t only the jobs that you have done, but are the activities and behaviors that you demonstrated to make you successful in your previous roles.

Strategic career choices

Rather than just look in the newspaper or online to see what jobs are available, it is useful to think strategically about your career options. Inevitably, your ideal job will entail making use of your existing or newly developed skills within existing or new industry sectors.

For example, you could continue with a career within your existing areas of knowledge and competence, stay where you are in terms of industry sector and organization and look for a shift in the type of job that you do, carry on with the job you do in a different sector or environment or throw caution to the wind and follow a long-held dream or passion!

Ways & Means Number Five: Find that Ideal Job
Once you have done all the above, you now need to distill the information into a great CV. A CV that crisply and concisely articulates your skills and experiences to your future employers in a way that demonstrates that you understand the job that needs to be done, that you fit in with their company culture and that you have the experience and the skills to succeed in the new role.

To do this you will also create a personal positioning statement. This is, in effect, a personal "elevator pitch" in which you can start to tell your friends, your network, recruiters and potential employers exactly what job you're looking for, give them a relevant overview of your skills & experiences and tell them why you want to do the job you're looking for. The secret here is to create several different CVs and personal positioning statements, each one consistent with what would be an ideal job for you, but each one subtly different in its job focus.

What Career is Right For Me?

More often than not, I have heard this question being asked repeatedly. And many people who asked this are not your young fresh-out-of-university graduates but professionals who have been working for a good number of years. Recently, one of my clients approached me and asked me what he should be doing differently in his current career in order to advance to the next level, and amidst our conversation, the same question popped up – “What career is right for me?”

I have noticed for a while now that there are quite a lot of people out there who are confused about which career path they want or should follow, even though they have been on the same path since day one. They are always wondering if their current career the right one for them, and yet do nothing to find out the answer to that question.

Deciding which career (or the jobs within your career big picture) to plan for is almost about as important as a degree itself. There's really no point planning for a career in the wrong field, after all, this can decide your self-fulfillment, personal esteem, income level and overall success.

One suggestion I always make is that people (you) should literally make a chart when trying to figure out what career to plan for, and include the following topics into that chart –

1. Your personal values
2. Your unique qualities and talents
3. Your strengths & weaknesses
4. Your goals regarding money, time and quality of life (in 1 year, 5 years and 10 years)
5. What you enjoy and don’t enjoy doing,
6. The primary driver (or motivator) in your life and relate this to the work you like doing; and
7. Where you are at right now, and how does your responses to the above topics align with the current situation

After you have put these topics down on your own personalized “career planning chart”, you should start thinking good and hard about your responses to these topics. One small tip prior to the thinking process – make sure that you are in a “good place”, meaning that the environment should be quiet and peaceful, and you should be in a focused, clear state of mind, and able to go “deep inside” and access your true thoughts and feelings. You will be amazed at the type of insight you will gain after doing this exercise.

For those who are interested in finding out more about this exercise, do give me a buzz. My current company has a dedicated career program which contains a more comprehensive suite of introspective exercises to help individuals map out their career path.

If you’re still mystified about exactly what careers you may be suited for, even after completing the “career planning chart”, and think you would benefit from some help from a third party to gain clarify on your career roadmap, then you might want to think about talking to a career consultant or coach.

Career consultants offer a range of services, from assisting in an individual’s job search or career transition, to helping to identify suitable career paths, often through the use of some kind of psychometric instrument to pinpoint skills, abilities and preferred working styles. Some may offer CV assessment and CV writing as part of their services. There are many commercial career consultants operating, but also local government- or university-funded careers advice centers where you can meet career advisors and access their career resources.

One important note here though, career consultants should not be confused with recruitment consultants, who find suitable candidates to fill their clients’ vacancies. You will not receive objective career advice from a recruitment consultant – it is simply NOT their job, however sympathetic they may be towards you. Some unethical recruiters might even push you into a job you never wanted in the first place.

Talking to a career consultant can be valuable if you want someone who can facilitate your search for a new career, who you can bounce ideas off and help you focus your ideas with the benefit of their expert advice. But to get the most out of seeing a career consultant, you must have realistic expectations – he or she will not punch your details into a computer and tell you what your ideal career is; you must be prepared to provide input too, and work collaboratively with your career consultant to assess your opportunities.

Anyway…

Regardless of what career you're planning for, I will always strongly recommend doing your homework thoroughly before jumping into it head first. There's nothing more challenging (or emotionally tearing) than changing careers half way through your life. Try to get it right from the beginning and the ride will be much easier.

If you happen to be those who are going to change career midway, it’s not the end of the world yet. All you need to do is to be level-headed, do that self-reflective exercise I suggested to develop a perspective, consult your family, friends or a professional career consultant or coach and then make the best most informed decision.

At the end of the day this should not be a difficult decision to make. It might be a difficult task to accomplish but definitely it should not be a difficult decision to make. And this decision should be made by no one but you.

Why do I say this?

Because…it's only you who knows whether you want to have a fulfilling career or just an ordinary job; it's only you who knows whether you want to work for yourself or for another person; it's only you and no one else who knows whether you want to become successful and have “arrived” or simply live and lead an ordinary mundane boring life. Nobody is responsible for our lives except us.