In fact the reason why most people see CareerBuilders for career coaching is because they don’t enjoy what they do. People are often really in touch with what is not working and what they don’t like in their jobs.  Some of this relates to task, some of this relates to learning and development and some relates to poor working relationships with co-workers or the boss. Sometimes it relates to a lack of connection or alignment to what it is the company does. At more senior executive levels a key issue is that of a “values” conflict and/or a lack of appreciation for where they wish to continue to grow and develop. Senior executives are often so focused on everyone else that they forget to do preventative maintenance on themselves.

To solve these types dilemma people often change jobs hoping that the things will be better in the next job. At CareerBuilders we normally encourage any client we work with to explore all opportunities that currently exist within the job they are doing. On many occasions clients discover that they actually can mold their job into something that is more in alignment with what they want to do without having to leave. I for one would always embrace an employee that says, “I’ve figured out what I like doing and I want to do more of it and I have some ideas on how I want to develop, can we explore this?”

It is also important to explore that part of the individual’s career that they do not see. With most people focused on what is not working, having a solid understanding of what is working is critical. It is far better to invest your energies in factors that are within your control than to be focusing on things that are outside of your control. Who knows a little time invested working through these things could save years in your career development.

If you are not happy with your current job consider the following pointers:

1. Decide on the essential criteria that must be present in the job you do in order for you to enjoy it and to feel confident and valued.
2. Explore untapped opportunities to do more of what you are good at and like doing and what you would like to learn with your current employer.
3. Set some realistic goals that will make a difference to the company you work for and prove you can do the job well. Set some realistic learning goals, and seek out projects that will give you the experience to practice the new skills.
4. If the company won’t invest in your development invest in yourself. Don’t sit back expecting others to manage your career. You are the CEO of you.
5. When it comes to soft skills development such as communication skills, influencing skills, listening skills etc. keep learning. No matter how much you think you know in this area there is always more to learn. If you are experiencing difficulties at work because of conflicting behavioural styles this wont suddenly change by going to a new business. There will always be someone out there that you don’t quite connect with. See it as an opportunity for learning and focus on what is within your control – YOU.
6. Unless you are really underpaid money should not be a primary motivator for taking a job. If the best reason you can come up with for taking a job is it’s paying me really well you could be headed for a fall. There is nothing wrong with taking a high paying role, so long as there is an alignment to other factors.
7. Focus on being good at what you do. Look for ways to make a difference. Look for ways to measure the impact of what you do and be mindful of the work you do and of the work done by those around you. What interests you? What gets you excited and eager to come to work? What do others do that you would like to learn?
8. Sometimes we have to become skillful in things we don’t like and are not good at. Unless you were born perfect we all have to learn. Frequently people will resist these opportunities for learning and that is fair enough we can’t be good at everything. Balance is what is important here and a willingness to take some risks; who knows it may not be all bad. Set realistic goals and take little steps. Avoiding the subject all together by hoping it will go away is not an effective strategy.
9. Focus on maximizing the joy from your work. Seek opportunities for growth and development.  Be the most of who you are. That doesn’t mean you need to seek promotion. You could be just really good at what you do and be really happy with that.
10. Work does not have to be hard, difficult or a life spent in bondage. Work can be filled with joy, challenge, reward, meaning and purpose. Yes every job becomes routine and if it becomes too routine look for ways in which to learn and grow or do more of what you like doing. Look at what is within your control and change it.

One thing is for certain. Enjoy what you do… and the money will come.

More often than not, when someone asks me what I’ve done, or what I’ve been up to, they’ll get nothing more than a blank look, shrug of the shoulders and a “not much”, “working”, “this and that”, or  “same old stuff” reply. With that I’ll quickly throw it back to them, “how about you?”

I mean, who else, other than John Lennon, or a hiring manager, asks that kind of open ended, reflectively challenging ‘tell me about yourself, and what you’ve been up to’ question…. obviously someone who is dying to tell you what they’ve been up to… maybe they’ve just founded a social business, returned back from volunteering at an orphanage in Botswana, discovered the god particle, been published, donated blood, or they’ve just landed their dream job, and can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Well okay, maybe that’s not the case, and they’re genuinely interested, or just making conversation, but after having attended the Global Leadership Forum in Sydney this month, I’m feeling like everyone out there is doing a lot more than I am with myself. Listening to Muhammad Yunus, Russell Simmons, Jeff Taylor, Michael Fertik, George Clooney and Martha Stewart talk about what they’ve all been up to, which was a lot of good stuff, I was left feeling that I really could be doing more. Not just doing more, but also thinking more, helping more and achieving more in my life, and that it was actually possible, and I should already be doing it.

But what is the ‘it’ that I should be doing? What would I like to be able to say when someone asks me what I’ve done in the past year? What I’ve been up to lately? Or even, how I’m going?

Over the years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time contemplating what ‘it’ might be, worrying that I wasn’t doing ‘it’, wouldn’t find ‘it’, and had no idea how to follow ‘it’, live ‘it’, or if ‘it’ was something I would even notice if I fell over ‘it’.

So as I sat at the conference, with all of these amazing people sharing with us all what they had been up to, I began to listen (okay, I have to admit when George Clooney came onto the stage, there may have been more day-dreaming than listening going on), but what I heard, when I was listening, was that ‘it’ isn’t something that I had to wait to discover, worry about finding, or sit around contemplating, ‘it’ is what happens when you…

• get involved
• get out more, do more, say yes more, give more and don’t wait to be asked
  (at the very least you’ll have more stories to tell about what you’ve been up to)
• volunteer for things
• embrace feeling nervous – you’re probably learning something valuable
• learn something new on purpose
• ask what you can do for others
• support the things you believe in
• do more things you enjoy doing, and share them with others
• look for the white space, what’s missing that you could develop, give a voice to, or create
• if you don’t have a vision, help others achieve theirs
• solve a community problem
• think about being a job giver, rather than a job seeker, use your skills and your education to your best advantage
• surround yourself with people who know more than you, learn from others
• organise your wardrobe and that third draw full of rubber bands and paper clips and old tax receipts. Martha Stewart makes being organised look easy and fun – I’m not yet convinced of that one!

So, with that, bring on 2012! For me, it will be the year of me doing more things, being more active, getting more involved in life, and the people around me, and hopefully having more things to say when I’m asked, “so what have you been up to?”.

Job Seeking is a sales process. Anticipation and preparation for a certain amount of rejection is important if you are to function well, especially when you finally get to interview stage (which you most definitely will.)

We have noticed many job seekers over the years underestimate just how much they were being impacted by the seemingly relentless experience of being rejected for jobs. This experience was impacting their energy levels, their efficiency in the job seeking process, and of course their lack of results.

Many of our clients started applying for hundreds of different roles before they had done some important work on themselves – and before they had made some agreements with themselves about what they would and would not do when job seeking.

The results were terrible – hundreds of rejection letters, low self esteem, pessimism and a much longer period between roles than they necessarily needed to experience. Once they started to conduct the job seeking process more strategically, they found themselves being invited to more interviews, receiving less rejection notices, and feeling better about discussing their career achievements at interview. For most people they found the next position within 6-12 weeks once they started planning their approach more effectively.

So how then, do we overcome the tendency to panic and react, and start to plan things properly?

The first and most important adjustment that you need to make before the job seeking process begins is to understand your role in the process.

• You are now the salesperson, AND the product.
•  Employers considering your application are potential buyers.
•  Recruitment consultants provide screening services on behalf of the employer, who has paid them to carry out these services. They are of course interested in you and concerned for you, but they do not work for you. Recruitment consultants do however have other opportunities that come up in addition to the ones you are applying for so it pays to treat them as a kind of customer as well.
•  Your CV is your marketing document or brochure. It is the most important marketing document you will ever produce as it is designed to make the biggest sale of your life. It needs to be prepared very carefully.

Good sales people know the benefits of measuring their activity to results. They set targets not only for their sales figures, but also for their activity – for example, the number of qualified sales opportunities in their pipelines, the number of prospecting calls made, client visits per week, number of proposals out to customers, and the probability of the sales being made.

Think about your job seeking activity as a sales process. How’s your pipeline looking? What success ratios are you measuring?

(From “New Beginnings”, CareerBuilders Guide to Job Seeking, 2009)

I am sure most of you will have heard about “climbing the corporate ladder” – where moving “up” in an organisation is the only way to further your career. Other kinds of moves in organisations – such as “sideways moves” or “backward steps” – are usually met with a raised eyebrow as though it implies a kind of failure, or lack of motivation to achieve.

The management hierarchy of most organisations is tapered towards a single point – that of the CEO or the Managing Director. Beneath that there are a series of functional heads, and then a larger number of middle management positions who have the rest of the organisation reporting to them. So it follows that we quickly run out of opportunities to progress to more senior management roles, as there are simply less of them, and we are faced with two choices – up or out.

This is what drives 50% of the job market – people who have reached “as far as they could” in their organisations before deciding to resign and try their luck somewhere else. We have seen a number of people staying in their roles for the wrong reasons, or leaving for the wrong reasons. This is driven by lack of clarity around career path – quite honestly a number of people accept more senior roles because they think it is expected of them, or worse – they don’t like what they do and they think it will get easier if they take a more senior role doing what they don’t like doing. In other words, they are using promotion as a way of escaping a role they don’t like.

At some point in our careers, usually in our late thirties, we reach a fork in the road. The only recognised way ahead is to choose the Generalist/Manager fork where we spend our time managing others – but half of us don’t want to do this. While many people aspire to doing less and organising the work of others to achieve the result, a great many of us are driven by specialisation – we have a strong desire to become a subject matter expert, a “guru” in our field, and a specialist consultant to others in a particular field.

We want to know as much as we can and be regarded as someone who can troubleshoot, give advice, execute, practice and specialise in a particular field of interest. So the other fork – the Specialist fork – beckons.

There are a number of equally well paid and recognised specialist roles in the business world, available to those who prefer this road. From consulting engineers, surgeons, marketing advisors, strategy consultants, financial advisers, executive coaches, other health practitioners, HR consultants, Lean manufacturing facilitators, IT solutions architects, sustainability or corporate social responsibility specialists, even senior sales consultants – where we can achieve our wealth goals without having to manage large numbers of people and attend endless meetings.

Think about this next time you have your performance review – which fork do you want to take?  If the path to this kind of role is not so clear for you, try sitting down with a career coach to clarify your goals. One indicator of the right “fork” for you is this – are you a hands-on, highly motivated achiever, who likes being busy doing thing, and values technical knowledge – or are you someone who is more steady, reliable, pragmatic, able to influence others, calm in a crisis, a good mentor to others and someone who enjoys working with people in a team and gets a real kick out of seeing people develop and grow? Your answer is probably helping you down one path – pay attention to this, as it is trying to tell you something.

Either way, there could be trouble, or so the song goes. Similarly, your next career move, whether orchestrated by you, or is something you’re in line for already, may lead you to trouble, or worse, it could be double.

Understanding how you’ve gotten to where you are now, what you really enjoy about what you’re doing, what you don’t enjoy, as well as what you’re good at, what you’re not good at, what you’d like to get better at, and your ideal working environment, can help you move forward with confidence, and enable you to take control of your next career move.

I’ve fallen into the trap of progressing in my career without really being in control of the process. A number of internal promotions in my mid-to-late twenties led me through the corporate ranks quite quickly, and while I accepted the work and the promotions, liked the extra money and felt proud to be recognized, I never once stopped to consider what it was that I really wanted to do, or even what it was that I enjoyed doing. I just kept doing whatever it was that was in front of me to do. After a few years of managing two departments, now in my early thirties, I had what is now known as a “Thrisis” (Thirties Crisis). I started to wonder what I was doing, why I was doing it, what was next and if this was really all there was. It felt like I’d progressed to a position I didn’t really enjoy, and the next step was even further away from that again. Problem was I had no clue what it I was that I would really enjoy doing.

I’d like to say that I sensibly took some time out for self-reflection, talked to people who could provide objective feedback and advice, and worked through each part of my job, identifying what I was good at, what I wasn’t good at, what I liked doing and what I didn’t like doing. That I mapped out a plan and carefully considered my options. But I didn’t. Instead I panicked, quit my job, and spent 3mths in Germany and Spain spending all of my savings, and when I came back, spent another 3mths wondering what on earth it was that I was going to do.

Funny how I’ve ended up working at CareerBuilders after such an experience!

My point is, that it’s difficult enough to weigh up opportunities, especially when you’re being lured by the prospect of moving up the corporate ladder, a higher salary, a promotion, recognition, experience, change, excitement or you’re moving away from where you are because you don’t like your job, or the people, or the company you work for, but when you don’t know what you actually do enjoy doing, or even what you’re really good at, or what your ideal place to work might be like, it’s even harder, and decisions to stay, or decisions to go, can both land you into trouble.

The key to making good career decision is in having the awareness, knowledge, insight, and perspective to be able to recognise the choices you have, and are able to consider all of the options, seeing each for what they really are, before you act. While it is possible to do this on your own, it can create a lot of unnecessary stress, (not to mention empty pockets!), and it’s true that we don’t always see in ourselves, what may be obvious to others, and getting truly objective advice from our friends or family isn’t likely. Being coached through the process can really help, giving you perspective and insight so that you can make better, clearer, more sensible decisions about your future.

So before you make your next career move, or decide to stay where you are, consider taking some time to really think through the options with a professional CareerBuilders coach and get clear about your next step today, so you can start really enjoying what you do!

Studies of memory have shown that we can only “hold” about 7 or 8 items independently in our short term memory before we need to start “chunking” or using tricks and devices known as mnemonics to help us remember larger “lists” of information.

Think about this when you apply for a job. Usually the recruiter or hiring manager has to go through 40 or 50 applications to decide on a list of about 7 or 8 applicants to interview. To help themselves focus on these 7 or 8 (in their short term memory), the first job is to reject the other 32 or 42 applications that they don’t need to remember. This is a subjective practice where basically three piles of resumes are formed – YES, MAYBE and NO. Let me assure you that the Maybe resumes do not get screened properly unless there are not enough YES resumes to make up the 7 or 8.

Some worthy candidates will not get to the first round because their resumes do not make enough of an impression. And when you think about it, as long as a short list of suitable candidates is identified, it does not impact the hiring process in the short term if other good people get rejected. The result will still be achieved.

So, how do we make sure we get into the YES pile?

Firstly, make sure your CV adequately represents you. For those of you who cut and paste, don’t make an effort to format, forget to focus on achievements and use dreary fonts with grammatical errors, you are wasting your time.

But let’s assume you have worked with someone on the CV, had a bit of coaching on how to promote yourself in writing with confidence, dignity and poise, and it really looks great. Why do you still sometimes get overlooked?

Now that the Internet has made it so much easier to apply for jobs, the double edged sword is that it is also much easier to be rejected accidentally. Resumes are scanned in seconds and if things aren’t leaping off the page they get rejected. It is a frantic, fast paced screening process that has replaced the more considered and reflective screening of the old days. What hasn’t changed is our ability to only remember 7 or 8 items in short term memory – beyond that, we lose interest.

Here’s the good news.

If you ring first to qualify your suitability for the position, you will double your chances of being called back for interview.

Why? Because you will make a stronger connection with the person screening the resumes.

Now I don’t recommend ringing up and demanding to know facts and figures about the role. That is annoying to a busy recruiter and frankly not a good way to start building a relationship. It might position you as a pushy person with bad communication skills – instant NO pile.

What I do recommend is that you ring, compliment the recruiter on writing a very interesting advertisement, share a few details of your work experience that are relevant to the position, and then ask them if they think your background is suitable.

If they agree it is worthwhile sending in your resume, you will create a link for them to remember you more easily when your resume appears in their inbox. “Hey, that’s that really nice candidate from this morning – they sounded great!”

In other words – instant addition to the YES pile.

Try this if you are applying for jobs – be respectful of the person’s time, but despite what anyone says, we admire a skillful communicator who rings and checks with us before sending their resume in.

We would be interested in your success stories (or other stories where this hasn’t worked) so please let us know by posting your experiences in relation to this blog at …