The Big Shift From Jobs to Careers

Career opportunities are increasing exponentially as everyone navigates our slow emergence from the Great Disruption. In giving guidance to anyone looking to make a big shift in their employment we offer the following advice: plan your move by talking to at least three people you trust as advisors.

Before shifting your career, this first planning step can dramatically avoid false positives (taking a great sounding job that turns out to be a disaster for your career). Most professionals we talk with want to emerge from the Great Disruption with an improvement in their the quality of work life balance. Commonly they will focus on changing location, or improving the quality of their work environment, but we are seeing a newer trend: a huge shift from just focusing on “making more money” to a more wholistic focus on “getting greater satisfaction from the money we make”. This big shift in how compensation is evaluated in the hiring process is generating very healthy career discussions by asking honestly: if I make this change will I/we(all the stakeholders in the person’s career) be better off”? A great question.

Our advice is simple: before applying in the job market, decide on just two things: issues and people. Specifically choose the issues you want to focus on in your next career shift and equally focus on selecting the people and firms you want to work with. Then after you talk this through with your advisors validate that in fact you and your family (all the stakeholders in your career) are really better off. Remember again as an example: great sounding job for a lot more money might be attractive, but if you have to move to an undesirable location, then you might want to reconsider. Once you have a solid career view, working through the job market is much more productive.

This also leads to our encouraging a paradigm shift from taking job opportunities to making careers choices. We note that fundamentally jobs solve other peoples/firms problems while a good career choice career solves your problem – with help from others. Research appears to support our view that most jobs seem to last 22 to 24 months. This means we encourage people we work with to view any job as a two year option for your career. Then if you get a great job, you know that you have two years to do things to become fully integrated at your new firm in order to de-risk the 24 to 36 month job to career hurdle.

This provides a clean framework for getting control of your career in the midst of a fundamentally chaotic job market. To summarize: pick advisors, pick issues, pick people/firms to work for and then talk through why should join them with your advisors – all before you apply for any job, send a resume or make a call. One final piece of advice is aimed at making this easy to manage – start with 12 people you know you would like to work for; pick issues they are interested in and call them and have an “issues based advocacy conversation” with them.

Finally keep it simple. Choose 12 senior connections to start and have calls that validate the issues you want to address are commercially relevant to your network. Then as people respond you will see who are advocates for your career. Talking with these advocates will often clarify what opportunities you should select to interview for. Then cleaning up your resume for those specific opportunities makes getting into the hiring process easier. This big shift from taking jobs to making career will help immeasurably to reduce job search fatigue and will lead, we think, to much greater job satisfaction.

#thebigshift #careecompass #careers # jobs