JD's Journal
Everyone we know has experienced their unique journey of life, and along the way they have had their share of success and failure. Each of us have learned important lessons and gathered valuable resources that have allowed us to survive and thrive. This podcast is a place for sharing our stories and our resources for the benefit of others. It's a celebration of the resilience and tenacity of people in all walks of life, our local heroes.
Welcome aboard!
JD's Journal
Career Clarity: Finding Your Way Forward
Career transitions can be overwhelming, especially in today's job market with its frequent layoffs and technological disruptions like AI affecting employment security. Understanding effective strategies for career planning and job hunting is more crucial than ever for professional survival and fulfillment.
• Traditional blind job applications are largely ineffective, with most never reaching human reviewers
• Leveraging professional networks is significantly more effective for finding new opportunities
• Understanding your career motivations requires determining if you're moving toward something new or away from your current situation
• Transitioning from individual contributor to manager requires careful consideration beyond status or compensation
• Effective self-assessment involves analyzing past successes and failures to identify patterns
• Frameworks like StandOut Assessment and Ikigai can provide structured career guidance
• The "Miracle Question" technique can unlock hidden career desires when feeling stuck
• Connecting with professionals already in target roles provides invaluable real-world perspective
• Effective resumes are concise, accomplishment-focused, data-driven, and tailored to each opportunity
• Supporting each other through networking and connections is essential during challenging job markets
Resources referenced in this podcast:
Marcus Buckingham Stand Out Report - StandOut Assessment - TMBC
Ikigai - 5 Best Ikigai Books to Live a Meaningful Life [+ Summaries]
If this episode has been helpful, please share it with others who might be struggling with career transitions or job hunting in this challenging market.
Hi folk, and welcome to the JD's Journal podcast, where, every two weeks, my guests and I share some of our life's journey, our successes and failures and the valuable lessons and resources that we've gathered Now that I'm back here in Australia, I'd like to start by acknowledging that this podcast is being recorded on the traditional lands of the Dharug and Gundungurra people. We pay our deep respect to Elders, past, present and emerging. Our stories, opinions and recommendations are intended to inform and entertain you and, as with all well-intentioned advice, ours should be applied with your own good judgment. To keep it real, the podcast is largely unscripted and unedited and self-engineered by little old me, so you can expect some glitches from time to time, but hopefully nothing that takes away from the content being presented. Anyway, enough preamble, let's go. Hi everybody, and welcome back to the JD's Journal podcast. It's so great to have you here Now.
Speaker 1:Today, the topic I'm going to be talking about is career coaching. As you can imagine, with the change that I've just made in my own life, the topic of career has been pretty top of mind for me. I've been doing a lot of pondering about my career journey, and so it's been a kind of focal point for me. But, given that I'm semi-retired, I'm actually not actively pursuing a new career at this moment in time, and so the real motivation for prioritizing this topic right now is the frankly horrific number of layoffs and exits that I've been watching in the market over the past few months, maybe the past couple of years in fact Some of these affecting incredibly successful people who've had many years often decades with the companies that they've been working for that have suddenly been let go. If you're one of those people and you're still coming to terms with this potentially unexpected termination of your employment, my heart really goes out to you and your families. I know firsthand how unsettling it can be to suddenly not have an income and to face this harsh reality that you need to find some new source of income, particularly when the world is so screwed up and you're competing with so many others who are also looking for work.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to be sharing some information and tips later in this podcast that I hope is going to help you out here, including my own experience in being pretty desperate, frankly, to find new employment over an extended period about a decade ago, and the steps that I took that ultimately did deliver some results. So a lot of what I'm going to cover in this podcast episode is targeted to people who are currently employed and are looking at their next stop within their own organization to support their professional development plans. Many organizations have quite structured programs that encourage and in some cases mandate career growth conversations, and this is seen as a necessary step in the process for employee retention. And there's no doubt that professional development does have a substantial impact on employee sentiment and the likelihood that employees will stay with the company for the long haul. But sometimes these conversations are kind of less productive or at least somewhat forced, either because the employee is actually content in their current role or doesn't really have a clue what they want to do next, and I'll be providing some ideas for those that are feeling lost in these conversations.
Speaker 1:So to start off with a little bit of background context on my own experience, back in the mid-90s I became a mentor at Microsoft. I did the formal mentor training and then kicked off the process and I immediately fell in love with the whole mentoring experience and I've been a very active mentor ever since and I've mentored people in various roles from across the organization and different business units and different operational tasks and so forth units and different operational tasks and so forth, and for me, I learned as much through those mentoring relationships as I taught others. I think I often got much more out of those relationships than those folks that I was mentoring, and I also gained access to new resources. In many cases I added valuable contacts to my expanding network, and the network is a key thing I'm going to be talking quite a lot about. So all through my career since then, I've continued to mentor, and one of the most common topics in those mentor engagements has been career progression.
Speaker 1:It's very often the case when I sit down with a new mentee it's all about well, I want to know where to take my career, I want to grow, I want to expand, I want to earn more. I want to know where to take my career. I want to grow, I want to, I want to expand, I want to earn more, I want to take on more responsibilities. I'm not sure what to do next. And so I see these conversations are critical for folks who are looking at that and also critical as leaders for us to kind of sign up and be committed to having those conversations. We know that one of the greatest drivers of dissatisfaction and attrition is the lack of a sense of career progression or career development, and those conversations are critical for that reason. Now, in reality, most of the people I've spoken to this topic actually don't know what direction they want to take.
Speaker 1:I've sat through some incredibly awkward periods of silence when I've asked what do you want to do next? And I am a person who, in a coaching and mentoring relationship, will allow those moments of silence to exist. I actually believe silence is an important part of those conversations, but there's a limit right, and often these conversations just don't go anywhere, and so, as I continued my early mentoring journey, it became pretty obvious to me that I needed to develop some tools or some strategies that would help guide these conversations, that give these conversations more, more. You know strength and and impact, and so you know what I've learned, and also through my my formal coaching training, what I've learned is to really start by understanding the motivation, like what is really driving this intent, and I think the key question right up front is are you trying to move towards something, something new, or are you trying to move away from your current situation? Now, that question is a tough question. Sometimes people can be reluctant to answer that question first, as it can be an uncomfortable discussion if the direction is away and a lot of people are reluctant to say I'm trying to get out of a situation. But the answer does provide important context for the rest of the conversation, particularly if there might be some aspects of the kind of grass is greener mindset that's at play here. Often the case is the grass isn't greener, but the perception can be, as in all cases, that that this is a be a better situation if I get out of this. I'm going to deal with something.
Speaker 1:So if we focus on the towards motivations first, the most common motivations to move towards a new role or a new career are increased scope or responsibilities, higher income or potential income, learning, new skills or capabilities. It might be status, it might be title, it might be the opportunity as has been my case to work within or with people in different locations around the world, and that certainly has served me very, very well. When it comes to the desire to move away from the current role, the motivations are often fleeing a manager or a team situation that isn't working well. There might be some performance-related challenges. The person doesn't feel like the job is right for them, and that might be true. They might be feeling that the current role that they're in might be in jeopardy due to changes in the company strategy, the organizational structure or currently, of course, on the minds of most of us, is the impact of things like automation and artificial intelligence. I think there's quite a lot of people out there right now who, a couple of years ago, are feeling pretty content in their role, who are right now realizing that automation and artificial intelligence might be putting their roles at risk.
Speaker 1:Often, a motivation to move from being an individual contributor to a management role, a people leadership role, is a driver as well. This is a scenario that I tend to probe quite deeply into, as too often I've found the motivation to take on a managerial role is status or money. But over the years I've observed far too many cases where a person who's particularly good as a practitioner, somebody who's good at being on the tools or doing the hands-on work, they're not always the right people to make the transition to leading other people. And many times I've seen people who've made that transition and in the end they've been unhappy about being a people leader. It's taken them away from the work that they really love. They're not good at people leadership and ultimately it turns out to be at their detriment and the detriment of the team. And so you know I don't want you to feel like I don't support people making the transition from individual contributor to manager. I do, and I've enjoyed watching so many of my people in my teams over the years who've made that transition very successfully. I think it's fantastic. Nothing gives me more joy.
Speaker 1:But it's important that the motivations behind that are the right motivations and that the skill sets that are required, or the attributes are required for them to be successful, are there, um, and otherwise the outcomes, as I said, for them and for the teams can be quite, could be quite bad, and so I would typically spend quite a bit of time with the person who, who wants to make that move, um, and so I typically will move into some validating questions. You know what, what? What is it about leading people that you're excited about? You know when you think about what that represents. Describe for me the activities that you think you'll be doing as a people leader and why they're going to be good for you. Do they understand just how much of their time is going to be spent doing repetitive, administrative, you know, somewhat boring tasks in many cases for certain folks If it's sitting there approving purchase orders and expense reports and those sorts of things, that's not the thing often. That is exciting for folks who think they're making that move. Equally are they excited about having the tough conversations, those performance conversations, or even the conversations of when you're making an employee redundant, dealing with a conduct or a harassment issue, and you know those various forms of termination you might have to deal with.
Speaker 1:And so there's often a misconception from people who want to make the transition to manager that they will continue to be hands-on, they'll continue to be the subject matter expert in their field, at the same time as they're going to be a people leader. And again, my experience is that's not the case, and so a strategy that I have adopted with people who really are thinking about making that change to leadership is to have them shadow a manager, spend a day in the life or even more with a manager, seeing what they do, seeing what their day looks like, experiencing the tasks that they're carrying out each day, the meetings that they're in and so forth, and then, if that's appropriate, have them act as a proxy. So when a manager's on leave or training or whatever. Have them step in and be the manager for that period of time, preferably for a week or more at a time, so they get into the depth of it all and have that real experience, and that will help them understand what it really looks like to be in that role and to see if it feels right for them. You're never going to get perfect.
Speaker 1:I've definitely had some people who've made the transition that I thought would be successful in a people leadership role, who have not quite a few, actually a few, not many of those, but a few of those the vast majority of people that I've seen make the transition and made the transition very successfully. And again, there's some people that I've managed in recent years in particular, who've just blown me away in terms of what they've achieved as people leaders. So then, the next thing that I look at in terms of career conversations is really what people have done in the past and the experience they've had in the past. I do believe, in terms of career conversations, is really what people have done in the past and the experience they've had in the past. I do believe that one of the greatest predictors of future success is the past, and there's a model that I've been using now for years. Pretty much every career coaching conversation starts with this same model, and what I do with the person I'm mentoring is I had them take a sheet of paper, divide it down the middle, so I've got a right hand and a left hand, and on the left side I asked them to list the roles or the times in their lives where they felt that they were achieving or overachieving their goals.
Speaker 1:They were really killing it. Where they were treated as a subject matter expert or a champion in their role. Where they work up in the morning and they were excited about going to work and doing their job and they felt energized or in flow when they worked. The time seemed to pass quickly and they just felt like they were like in the zone On the right hand side. I asked them to look at the opposite of that. So tell me the roles and the times when you were missing deadlines or missing deliverables, when you were receiving negative feedback from your peers or your leadership, or you're being self-critical of yourself in terms of your own performance, when you tended to hit the snooze button in the morning and you felt like that you were procrastinating or avoiding doing your jobs and so forth, you know you're in the wrong place or in the wrong situation. It's kind of a starting point to have that list of the really successful times and the really not successful times, on the left and the right, and then with that we delve deeper into the specific activities that related to each of those roles or each of those situations. So what were the strengths that they were leveraging, the skills that they were leveraging when they were really hitting it out of the park? What were their superpowers that were allowing them to be able to do those things in a way that was making them so successful and so respected?
Speaker 1:We all have a mix of natural strengths and preferences and generally we feel our most confident and our most competent when we're doing those things. If we're naturally comfortable with numbers, you know, then we will feel competent working with spreadsheets and pivot tables and whatever. If we are naturally, you know, structured and logical and so forth, maybe we feel like we're our best developing scripts or code or whatever, and those things kind of marry up. For me, for instance, I know I'm a communicator, I know I'm good with people and I feel my best when I'm actually sitting with small groups or large groups of people, and I'm engaging with those people and I feel like I can feel very much that I'm in flow in those circumstances where I'm doing that. And I feel like I can feel very much that I'm in flow in those circumstances where I'm doing that.
Speaker 1:We all have other areas where we aren't naturally gifted or motivated or we're just not interested and despite, you know, best efforts, training, encouragement, coaching, whatever you want to call it it can be damn impossible to learn the traits to be successful in those. There's a kind of resistance to that. And so, again, looking at the right side of the page, where we've been looking at the areas where they haven't been successful, kind of peeling the onion and understanding well, what were you doing in those tasks, what were the strengths required to do what you were doing? And kind of, can we learn more about you in that circumstance? And so, if I look at myself again, so what do I know about me? That circumstance? And so, if I look at myself again, so what do I know about me?
Speaker 1:I know, when I look at the left side of my page, I've had my greatest successes when I've been leading large multinational technology teams. And when I look at why. It's the love of people and connections that I have, the fascination I have with the cultural differences and histories of the different countries that I've worked in. The joy I get out of watching people technical people, countries that I've worked in, the joy I get out of watching people technical people achieving breakthroughs and so forth. I know that I love to work with people and support their professional and their personal growth. I love problem solving and innovation. I'm a confident communicator and I get a real buzz standing on the stage, presenting and performing to audiences and this kind of bleeds over to the way that I think about how I lead meetings and how I run training and how I facilitate workshops and so forth and so um.
Speaker 1:And then technology. I get excited by technology. They're more as a consumer these days, which is why I've got a real buzz about artificial intelligence. I've also got some fears. I've got some significant fears about ai. But I'm working with it today to support the things that I'm doing in my own life and I love what it's doing for me and I and I and those things kind of get me excited. So that's where I know those motivations exist for me.
Speaker 1:Equally, when I flip on my right-hand side. I don't. I don't get excited about the financial or administrative processes. Repetitive and routine tasks Don't get me excited. I'm not big on bureaucracy it drives me crazy. Um, I love working with data. Don't get me wrong. I I love working with databases. If you look at my early career, I did a lot of work in databases and I got a real kick out of that. I love working with pivot tables today, particularly if they allow me to discover unexpected things from information. I think this goes back to my kind of troubleshooting interest and so forth. I am a curious person by nature and so I love the problem-solving piece of it. But beyond that, don't give me financial data. It just doesn't interest me.
Speaker 1:I'm not into software development. I've tried many times with different languages and different platforms over the years. I wish I was. I think it would be so cool to write software, but it's not my motivation and I'm not good at it, and I've come to terms with that. I also really don't like working alone, and I can work alone. I can work quite happily in solitude and, of course, work on this podcast. I'm working by myself quite a lot, but it's not my passion. I'd much rather work with people. Again, it comes back to my being a connector 'd much rather work, work and solve problems and create ideas and so forth with people.
Speaker 1:So with all these insights in terms of what's on my left and my right, in terms of those kind of strengths and those barriers, when I think about career progression, I'm able to kind of use those things to guide me. When I look at a role and I look at the job description or I talk to somebody that's in the role, I can pretty quickly get a sense to is this going to be exciting for me, is this going to motivate me or is it going to bore me to death or frustrate me to hell or whatever it's going to be? So that becomes a foundation for those coaching conversations and I've used this framework pretty much, as I said, in every career coaching conversation I've had for years now and it's turned, it's been an incredible asset for those conversations. So I want to talk about a couple more formal structures or more formal approaches to that. The first one is a thing called the standout report. Marcus Buckingham is the provider of this report. There are other frameworks that are quite common in the market today the Gallup's CliftonStrengths, the Langley's R2 StrengthsFinder and others. There's plenty out there if you search for them. But I discovered Marcus's standard report years ago and I recommend this to everybody.
Speaker 1:This report, like all of these things, you go into a questionnaire, it goes and asks you a whole series of questions and then, based on that, it will come back and give you quite a comprehensive in my case 16-page report which pulls out two of the roles which are your standout roles and we won't go through the detail of all the roles in this, but there's roles like advisor and connector and pioneer, and so forth. Like advisor and connector and pioneer and so forth. These roles reflect how you naturally contribute at your best, whether by solving problems, inspiring others, creating new ideas. And so, you know, for somebody who's considering their next career move, a report like this can be a real gem in terms of, you know, discovering at a more deep level where your strengths might be and where you might give your greatest value. It helps to clarify not just what you're good at, but how you, uniquely, can add value to the teams and organizations that you work for, and so, by aligning your career path with those strengths, you can make, you know, kind of more confident and authentic choices that are going to kind of take you down the right path. So in my case, the standard report, I said the 16 page report.
Speaker 1:It turns out that of the nine potential roles, apparently I'm a teacher and provider and by definition, uh in in marcus's guide um, teacher is empowering others through learning, celebrating progress and process-oriented approaches, and I believe in potential over-perfection to help others find their career path with care and precision. The kind of core behaviors and mindset that relate to the teacher provider is that you start with thoughtful questions to understand a person's journey and their learning style. You're driven by measurable growth, not just end results, naturally inclusive, looking to make others feel heard and valued, and you use emotional insight to navigate conflict, support others and maintain team harmony. And when I read those I'm like this feels like me. It actually resonates with how I see myself. So the ideal career themes is it pulls out is one to be a teacher to underserved communities, rehabilitation, crisis counseling, family therapy, something like that and any role centered on guidance, emotional support and performance management. Again, if I think about my aspirations and the things that I've been doing outside of my professional role and inside, that very much aligns to what I'm doing. So there's a lot more detail in the report that I can share today and, frankly, your report your own report is going to be far more interesting to you than my report. I will include a link to the Marcus Buckingham Stand-At report so you can go and do it yourself. It's free. Yes, he's going to probably try to sell you his services. That's fine. I've never done that. But I've used the report quite a lot with a lot of people and I've been using this in my mentoring relationships quite a lot and I've found that it's been very useful to support those things. And in fact, you know, if I think about why I do this podcast, it goes right back to the things that I just described in terms of what's in a report, of what I see my purpose.
Speaker 1:Another framework I want to talk about is Ikigai. Ikigai is a Japanese concept which is defined at a high level, about your reason for being. It's the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for, and it's not just about choosing a job. It's really about again trying to understand you know. Why are you here, what's the reason you're here, what do you contribute to the world around you. But what Ikigai does is it encourages you to have a kind of deep reflection, you know, are you passionate about the work that you do? Do your skills match the demands of the work? Is it serving the greater good and can it support your lifestyle? And if you can sort of bring that together, the intersection of all those things is really where you land.
Speaker 1:So how do you work out what your Ikigai is? Well, you can think of it as a kind of four quadrant exercise. Take a sheet of paper again, define it into four sections and, similar to the exercise that I shared, my own exercise you start in quadrant one by making a list of what you love, and then in quadrant two, you make a list of what you're really good at or naturally gifted at. In quadrant three, you make a list of what the world needs and kind of how that relates. And then finally, in quadrant four, you list what you could get paid for. And again, if you think about those kind of four quadrants, then you can start joining the dots. And the way that those align is you think about this what you love aligned with what you're good at, is actually your passion. What you love, aligned with what the world needs, is your mission. What the world needs and what you can be paid for is your vocation, and what you can be paid for and what you're good at is your profession. Now, that's a lot, and without the visual I don't think it has the impact, and so I will include links or a link to more information. There's a great book as well that I'll include a link to so you can go through that process yourself. But I love Ikigai. It's quite meaningful and I think the process again, it encourages you to think deeply about those things.
Speaker 1:The last framework I want to talk about is called the miracle question. A technique is based on a model from solution-focused therapy SFT, which is a therapeutic approach developed in the 1980s by Steve DeChasse and Iso Kim Berg at the Brie Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee. The purpose of the question is to help a person visualize a future without current problems, allowing them to kind of foster hope and clarity, and the intention is that, by describing or detailing the changes post the miracle, people can identify the actionable steps towards the desired outcomes. Now that sounds kind of complicated. Clearly, I'm not talking about therapy in this podcast and this is derived from a therapeutic process, but I have found that when a person is really stuck in terms of career change, the use of the miracle question can elicit some hidden clues about the changes needed for the person being mentored to feel more fulfilled in their career or move away from the factors that are impacting their satisfaction. So in its simplest form, the question is something like this I'll be in a coaching scenario with somebody talking about career and I will say okay, just imagine for a moment that while you were sleeping tonight, a miracle happened and tomorrow you find yourself in your perfect role and your perfect working environment.
Speaker 1:What will you notice has changed? That makes you aware of the change. What do you see, what do you hear and what do you feel that would convince you of the positive change? Now you're going to get potentially interesting reactions to those questions. You certainly may get long moments of silence while people kind of think about that, and some folks might be kind of jolted a little bit by the way the question's being asked. But I encourage you to have the patience to pursue that and allow the silence to exist.
Speaker 1:In my experiences, the responses that you'll receive to these questions are often launchpads for follow-up questions. That allows you to really steer the person being mentored towards better understanding of the roles that they're excited about and the roles that they should be exploring. There'll be things that come out, clues that come out, that again you'll have to drill down as you're doing your questioning. That will get you closer to the things that they're motivated about and also the things they want to avoid. So, in all cases, these three frameworks and there are others will provide some clues to the types of roles that should be explored, but none of them is going to give you the answer. In any case that I've experienced, it's not going to tell you hey, bing, bing, here's the role. It will give you clues in terms of where to go.
Speaker 1:What I've always recommended then is, if we've got some ideas around certain roles or certain types of roles, the next step then is to engage with somebody who's familiar with the role, somebody who's in the role or somebody who's worked in the role or has direct experience in the role, to get some real world perspectives on what a day in the life looks like in the role. In many of the career coaching engagements I've had in the past, I've encouraged the mentee to establish a relationship, a mentoring relationship with somebody who's actually in the role, and this is powerful because not only does it allow familiarity with the role to be established, to kind of pass on those perspectives and maybe have some shadowing experiences, but the mentor can also assist in closing the gaps in the knowledge and skills required to make the change happen, if it's decided that's the direction one person wants to go into. Get quite specific in terms of identifying here's a skill you don't have or a knowledge gap that you don't have to be successful in this role, and therefore the mentoring relationship allows that to support that. So everything I've covered so far is really focused on how do I work out what the hell I want to do next, how do I work out what the direction is next? And I focused on that first because I have found in my in the past that from a career coaching perspective, that's the hardest part of the conversation is helping people work out what they want to do. I want to say at this point in time, I've been talking actively about you coaching or mentoring somebody else, but I want to turn that on itself a little bit in the sense that everything I've gone through here can be used by you, for you, for your own benefit, and again, as I've gone through my latter career, I've used these approaches for myself to help me think about what I want to do, and it's been quite useful.
Speaker 1:Now I want to move to talk about applying for roles, and the first bit of what I'm going to say is going to be somewhat disheartening, I think, particularly if you're one of those people I talked about at the beginning. It might've been affected by recent layoffs, been affected by changes in organizations and so forth, and has found themselves unexpectedly looking for a role. And I'm sharing this information based on the experience that I had, and I'll talk more about that in a minute. But when it comes to applying for roles, my strong guidance might be that the traditional approach of submitting your application, your CV, for roles blindly is largely a waste of time. It's actually worse than that it's almost guaranteed to undermine your motivation and your confidence if you have an experience like I had. In reality, the number of people who are applying for any open role at the moment is in the hundreds, in some cases the thousands, and many organizations organizations, particularly, given the scale of the applications being submitted are leveraging technologies to screen and cull the applications based on keywords in CVs and so forth, and, of course, ai is playing its role in the space as well.
Speaker 1:In my experience both myself and also the people that I've been coaching over the period very few applications that are submitted blind ever make it to a human being, and very rarely do you even get a response, and so you potentially find yourself in a situation again, like I did, where you're submitting your CV for roles every day and getting silence, complete silence. So when I came back to Australia back in 2014, I took some time off to complete some studies and then, once I'd done that, I decided it was time to get back into the workforce, and I was pretty staggered actually, to experience nearly eight months of submitting job applications and getting nothing and you know I've got a fairly colourful career history. I didn't imagine that it was going to be that difficult for me to get anybody to respond to my applications. So you know it was quite disheartening and quite devastating. So I reached the point where I was so demoralised and at a complete loss in terms of what I should be doing before my bank account dried up loss in terms of what I should be doing before my bank account dried up, I ended up engaging a coach to work with me to help me, keep me on track and hold me accountable while looking at fresh approaches to my job search dilemma.
Speaker 1:My amazing coach, sharon, supported me in a number of ways that made a real difference. Probably the most significant way was to skillfully help me eradicate the negative dialogue that I was having with myself. I had convinced myself that my imposter syndrome was right, that the lie I'd been living for my professional life had finally caught up with me and I was never going to get employed again. I was at that point of, okay, I'm totally screwed, and so Sharon spent a lot of time with me, helping me overcome those thoughts and really helping me restore the confidence that I needed to move forward. She then guided me in approaches to be more structured in the way that I went through this process, and the starting point that is very clear is in terms of assets for any job seeker is your network, and and that was very much the guidance was go back, go back to your network, go back and nurture your network, refresh your network and leverage your network. Um, that was a turning point for me, no question about it. Um, one of my strengths has always been that I am a connector.
Speaker 1:I've been pretty deliberate about building my business and my social networks. I've got large numbers of contacts, and so the blindly applying for roles had proven to be completely ineffective and completely redundant. So the new strategy was to search for roles in the same way that I had been searching, but instead of submitting an application. The next step was to find somebody who knew that I knew, sorry in that company, who was familiar with my work and my strengths, and to reach out to them. To reach out to them, make sure they knew I was interested in the role, get their perspective on the role and, if it made sense to help them, connect me with the right people or even refer me for the role. This very quickly became a far more fruitful approach, and even though there definitely were a number of contacts that didn't pan out, there was positive reinforcement that I was a viable, credible candidate, and this helped me immensely.
Speaker 1:It was the turning point for me, and it wasn't long before I landed my first role based on my network. And when I look back on my career, there's actually been very few instances where I landed a new role by blind application In fact, almost none, and in fact I'd love to hear from any of the people listening to this podcast who've had a different experience, as I'm always curious to learn if there's a trick that I missed in the traditional job application process. For me, I'm pretty sure that one of my hurdles is my lack of academic and professional credentials, and I do believe that also, that age does have a bearing on a company's willingness to take a punt on you, and I'm certainly at that point right now where I think it would be far more difficult. But again, my turning point was the use of my network and to stop doing blind applications and to really move forward with finding contacts who could help me get in the door and in front of people. Once I got in front of people, it was different. It was quite different once I got a chance to interview with people and talk to people.
Speaker 1:The final thing I want to say here before I wrap up is I don't want you to think for a minute that I'm dismissing the need to have a current CV or a resume. Even if you are referred for a role by somebody, you're going to need to present some form of a CV, and here's some tips that I've got for having a great CV. First and foremost, keep it succinct Two pages, three pages maximum. No manager I know has the time or the patience to read through a six-page CV and I'm stunned, frankly, how many times I see CVs that are like books. No one's going to read it. Focus on the accomplishments more than the duties. I often see CVs which are describing the roles like mini job descriptions of all things that you've done, and I don't care. That's not what's important to me.
Speaker 1:What I care about is what did you achieve? What did you deliver? How did you innovate? How did you drive positive change? How did you navigate? How did you? You know? What did you deliver in terms of impact? That's what matters.
Speaker 1:Avoid weasel words like substantial or excellent or significant or great. They don't mean anything. They're just words. Give me data wherever you can. If you can provide anything in terms of meaningful data that shows the impact that you had in a particular role. If you can't provide absolute numbers due to confidentiality, fine. Give us percentages or orders of magnitude, something that allows me to know that you moved the needle, you made a positive change or you delivered on a significant goal. That's what I care about.
Speaker 1:And, lastly, you want to maximize the hit rate by adjusting the language that you use in your CV to align with the language that's in the advertised job description or align to the language that's being used by the company. The reality is that companies and industries use different nomenclatures for the same roles, the same measures and so forth, and given that your CVs are often being filtered by electric matching and screening programs sorry, electronic screening programs aligning to their language and even for the interview process, aligning to their language is likely to give you a higher hit rate and improve your chances. And so that may mean that you've got many copies of your CV. It might mean that you've got a customized copy of your CV for each of the companies that you're applying for, but I do believe that talking their language will build connection or, more likely, get you through the screening process, get in the door. Anyway, that's my context on career planning and finding a job. I hope you've found some ideas in there, some food for thought. I'd love to hear from you if you've got some magical ideas and some techniques that have been particularly successful for you.
Speaker 1:This is a tough time for a lot of people. It's a very challenging time for a lot of people, and so if you think this might be useful for others, please share this podcast episode with others who you think might get value out of it. And again, I encourage you support each other, look after each other. If you've got somebody out there who's looking and you know somebody else that might be able to help them, connect them. Please help people get the help that they need to find the work. So with that I will end this episode. Please ensure you're living your best life and be good to each other out there. Bye folks, thank you.
