Career Coaching

Any shift from one fixed state to another is a period of transition. Within every transition exists an inherent vulnerability. If you are currently in between jobs, you know how vulnerable you are. If you are considering a change in career or leaving a job, the fear you feel is really a reaction to a perceived vulnerability.

The vulnerability you experience is uncomfortable because you are moving what you know to what you don't know. Transition is simply risky because we, as human beings, long for the comfort of the familiar. If we are not careful, our comfort zone can become our prison. It is important to reduce this risk of vulnerability.

A mentor or coach is one way you can reduce vulnerability. As a new resource, a mentor will help diminish vulnerability. Beyond that, a mentor's job is to help you accelerate. Why? A mentor is the most effective way to decrease any learning curve and simultaneously maximize any nuance of learning while avoiding common failures. You receive a direct download of knowledge and experience from a mentor. In doing so, you avoid making the mistakes they did. When you are in a career transition, it may seem counter intuitive to invest financial resources in hiring a coach, especially when money may be limited. With the investment for a mentor, you master in a few months what I learned over decades.

Any coach or mentor should have one of their own as well. After all, if someone is asking you to invest in yourself, shouldn't the coach be willing to live by those words?

Here is an important principle about investing in yourself as a professional: the degree to which you invest your thoughts, emotions, and actions into a process of change directly determines the extent of the change. If you put little time and effort into learning, I guarantee you won’t learn very much.

I learned this first hand when I worked with my coach. It was financially irresponsible to hiring my coach amidst a low salary and needing to provide care for my disabled wife. Because I invested such a high dollar in myself, I doubled the effort I put into my transformation. I wanted to be certain I didn’t waste any of my investment. My financial investment was symbolic of the time and energy I invested in the process.

Our economy has changed dramatically. Gone are the days of working 30 years and retiring with a gold watch. Layoffs are a standard way of balancing corporate budgets, and will continue. Selling off retirement plans and minimizing benefit packages is also common. This means your retirement is going to be nearly all self-funded. If that is the case, you need to start earning more money, now.

We now live in a "Gig Economy," where you essentially work for the highest bidder as an independent contractor until you find a higher wage elsewhere. Cost of living or merit wages may earn only 5% a year, but going external you can gain an increase of 15% to even 20%.

For people who are aware of this reality, they know career transition is an inevitable and continuous certainty. If career transition is a certainty, then you need to become very confident and competent with the skills require to make such frequent changes between jobs.

If the last recession didn't make this clear, the recent pandemic of 2020 should: there is no inoculation against unemployment.

I have seen the old and young, male and female, educated and uneducated affected by unemployment. It doesn’t matter if you are early in your career, or a top-level executive. It doesn’t matter if you have a Master or Doctorate degree, or if you only have a high school diploma. Unemployment can find anyone, and if it found you once, it is more likely to find you again.

No one can make promises that a specific degree, occupation or industry is exempt from the potential of unemployment. Therefore, it is essential that you learn the skills needed to effectively navigate the space of career transition.

With the introduction of new technology into the business of recruiting, along with the wave of remote work opportunities, you cannot afford to be a mediocre job seeker anymore.

Because of the pandemic in 2020, more companies than ever are open to the idea of remote work. This means companies previous off the table for your next job are suddenly viable options! But there is a flip side to that. For more companies, their candidate pool just grew exponentially. You are potentially competing with the rest of world. You need to become a master of the career transition toolkit. You need to become self-sufficient. If you continually need outside support, such as a resume writer, your job search is not self-sustaining. You only become self-sustaining by learning all you can about yourself and the skills required to transition in the marketplace.

If you are in transition now, or considering a transition soon, your job is to master these skills so you can leverage them now and in the future.