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career career coaching career shift Uncategorized

Observations from coaching job seekers

I recently gave a presentation on, “How to Navigate a Career Transition” for the Hispanic Professionals of Greater Milwaukee.  As I was thinking about what to share in this session, I really felt torn because I really only had 45 minutes or so to present  some key take aways.  Navigating a jump in career can take different forms and can be a relatively planned event or a chaotic chain of unfortunate circumstances.  I decided to cover more of an outline of what I use as a process in identifying direction, strategy and resources to help people along.

One trend that really stood out to me in my experience coaching was that seekers had the most trouble with communicating scope in both their resume and the interview process.  I think that most workers in the field wind up doing their day to day jobs and hitting benchmarks, metrics, or whatever it is called in the organization.  Few stop (or maybe don’t have time)  to reflect on the depth of work they do.  Which is really too bad if you think about it, a worker may spend 8-14 hours in a work day and not even having the chance to contemplate what they have done before tending to the next committment.

Here is an observation I’d like to share: You will do better in position as well as in a career transition if you are aware and conscious of your accomplishments and understand your scope. Here are some examples:

-It’s one thing to tell someone that you are a supervisor.  It’s another thing to say you have been a supervisor in position for  over 5 years, had been responsible for performance management of 55 team members and led that team in the best safety streak the company has seen.

-It’s one thing to say you worked in a coffee shop but it’s another thing to communicate that you’ve trained over 25 employees in the last 18 months in a high volume store.

-It’s one thing to say you’ve taken on special projects but another to tell how you led a process improvement initiative which saved the company 100 labor hours every month.

One way to stay out of this trap is to meet regularly with a mentor to talk about your career experience.  A good mentor can have discussion to help see different angles in situations as well as be a sounding board for your concerns.  Also, by telling someone your goals it kind of forces you to stay on track.  Mentors can either be in your company or outside. A very wise woman in my network recently taught me you can have a ‘kitchen sink’ of people you can regularly count on to help you out.  It doesn’t hurt to tap your regulars for their perspective.

By utilizing this type of resource one can keep professional performance and goals at the forefront as well as get outside perspectives on the situation.  So when it comes time to write your resume or answer the interview question of ‘what was that result?’ you will have plenty of examples in mind because you had been regularly reflecting on them.

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career coaching self confidence take credit you're awesome

Take credit, You’re Awesome!

I’ve been coaching students in preparing to get ready for the job search and I’m finding a common theme…they don’t know how great they’ve done in the past! One thing I focus on as a Career Advisor is being able to pull out the experiences people have had and apply them to the upcoming career they want to do. The coach in me has to work on having dialogue to pull out those achievements and get people to be able to articulate them. So often I’m finding very good people that haven’t been told by supervisors or managers what a good job they did. Maybe it was poor communication or lack of priority but these employees sometimes didn’t know how much they went above and beyond for them. I see this as missed opportunity to harness the talent of these people, I imagine the things that could have been accomplished in those organizations. However these students have chosen a new path and I now imagine how well they’ll treat people in the medical field! And I imagine how well they can do in a new organization with something they really want to be doing. My main point is that there are in all of us far more successes and accomplishments than we’re aware of. We should stop and reflect on these and remember how well we did. Then going forward, think of how much we will accomplish in the future when we focus our efforts. Maybe you could do that career change. Maybe you could achieve a personal goal, the key is KNOWING your much more than you think you are 😉 There should be a Take Credit You’re Awesome day, that would be a cool holiday to celebrate!