Career Management Tips from an Old Guy

The best time to act as a guardian of your career is when you’re not looking for a job.

The best time to work on your next role is when you’re not looking for a job.

If you discover that you’re being made redundant, or something happens that causes you to lose your employment you are usually under a lot of sudden pressure and stress. In comparison to the good times, this is the worst time that you can spend updating your CV, paying for CV services, finding good jobs sites and urgently connecting to people online that might be able to help you.

How do you strike a really confident tone in your CV when your confidence has just taken a big knock?

If you take care of these steps during the good times, you will thank yourself during the tough times. Connecting to someone and asking them to help you find employment when they don’t know who you are is really hard.

There are a lot of small actions you can take while in a good job position that will set you up for when things are not going your way.

Update Your CV Regularly

Update your CV monthly or at least quarterly. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar and keep it up. If you keep this up it will only take a few minutes every time.

Ensure that your CV includes recent experience, and that the format matches the market you would be looking in if you need a new role. As an example, I am from South Africa where a long form CV is the norm. I am living in Auckland where a short form CV is much more acceptable. When I arrived in New Zealand my CV was 16 pages long. About 14 pages more than people in New Zealand are willing to read (although up to 4 pages is acceptable).

Sending the wrong CV into the wrong market is a sure-fire way to fall off the hiring list. Recruiters and hiring managers are usually under pressure with a lot of applications. Sending them an unsuitable CV makes it easy for them to disqualify you and have one less applicant to worry about. Some jobs have hundreds of applicants and to disqualify yourself from the process when you’re a good candidate would be really disappointing.

Be honest with your abilities – if you can’t produce a great CV pay someone who can. Find a good (local) CV service and engage them to create a great CV. If you do this when you’re in a job and earning it will be easier to pay the going rate than when you’re looking for a job and under pressure financially. Once you have a great CV it is easy to keep it updated.

As per the later recommendations around LinkedIn, you should be connected to recruiters online. Contact some of these recruiters and ask them if you could send them your CV and if they would be willing to give you feedback on your CV. Try and get feedback from multiple recruiters and if you get feedback that is the same for a specific issue, act on that point. If three recruiters tell you to take something out, add something in or move it around, pay attention. Individual recommendations are good but it’s even better if this feedback comes through more than once.

Again, it is better to do this when you’re not looking for a job – waiting for recruiters to give you feedback is painful if you’re under time pressure.

LinkedIn

Update your Profile

Update your LinkedIn profile regularly (monthly would be quite manageable) and ensure it matches your CV. The education, experience and other highlights should all be on your LinkedIn profile and be the same as your CV. Double check dates to ensure they match and are correct. Have a few friends read your CV (especially language nerds) and ask them if there are any spelling or grammar errors, any unfinished sentences or other mistakes.

Connect regularly

Go onto LinkedIn once a week and connect to three people in your industry, you can do more but make this a minimum. This has a massive benefit over the long term. This type of action accumulates over years so that eventually you have hundreds or even thousands of connections. This is really useful if you’re looking for a role. Posting that you’re on the market and looking for a new role is so much more impactful if hundreds of people see it. It’s even better if other people repost it and this generally is more likely with long term connections.

Manage your Connection Requests

You can see your invitations to connect on LinkedIn and if a connection request has gone unanswered for a month I withdraw it. Don’t leave old connection requests. Curate the list and look after it. I find that if someone does not accept your connection request within 3 days the chances of them doing so after that are close to 0. It has happened here and there, that someone has accepted later than 3 days, like when people have been away or offline for other reasons, but it is the exception.

If someone you really want to connect to ignores your request, move on. Each individual on LinkedIn has the full right to ignore a connection request.

Connect to Recruiters

Connect to recruiters on LinkedIn but try and keep it to recruiters in your industry and your locality (and maybe a place you might want to move to in the future). LinkedIn has about 1 bazillion recruiters and connecting to hundreds of recruiters outside your space just creates noise you don’t need. If you have a great list of local recruiters in your domain, you will see a lot of relevant posts including open roles you could apply for.

Don’t Leave it too Late

Don’t leave connecting with people in your industry until you’re desperate. People will feel this in their interaction with you, they might feel like they are being used, and then they won’t be willing to help you. If you’ve been connected for 2 years and you’ve met in person at an event, they will be much more willing to go out of their way to help you.

?Get LinkedIn Recommendations

Once you’re established on LinkedIn ask colleagues and previous colleagues if they could do a recommendation for you on LinkedIn. This is a low return activity. If you want 3 recommendations you probably have to ask about 10 people, or even more. Work on this regularly until you have at least 3 recommendations.

Network Regularly

Network regularly even if you don’t like networking. It’s that simple. This might sound bossy but building your career takes effort and often requires you to move out of your comfort zone. See how uncomfortable it is the first time you find out you’re being made redundant. It sucks a lot more than talking to someone at a networking event, especially if it is someone that can help you when you're being made redundant.

Find events in your industry and attend them. If you meet people connect with them on LinkedIn. Send invites to the speakers at the event too, they’re usually people you want to keep an eye on.

If you struggle to talk to people start by asking them simple questions. You don’t have to talk about yourself upfront. Don’t feel like you have to give your profile in person - ask people where they work, how long they’ve been there, what do they like about their company, etc. Just simple stuff and once the conversation is going it is much easier to sustain. If you’re at an event and someone has just spoken, ask the person next to you at the coffee station what they think about what was covered in the talk.

What I have found is that I have always underestimated the willingness of others to share their experiences. Most people enjoy talking and meeting new people. Don’t project your own worries onto them, give it a try you will nearly always be pleasantly surprised.

Network at Your Level and One or Two Above

Meet with and befriend people in your industry at your level and one or two levels above your level. This is where the action is for you.

Unless you’re a senior executive don’t bother connecting to the CEO of a company, you’re interested in working at, especially if it is a large corporation. Of course, this doesn’t mean as much if it is a company with 4 people. CEOs won’t have any interest in or spend time on getting you a job. Not only that, but it is fairly inappropriate for them to get involved in the hiring process and can be seen as unfair if they push a candidate forward. This is dangerous to the point that other candidates could actually sue the company if the CEO intervened in the hiring process on your behalf and that resulted in an unfair hiring process.

Register with Job Sites even if you’re not looking

Register with job sites and get saved searches emailed to you weekly for your role and roles you would be suited for. Review these job ads regularly. Maybe you can’t go through those emails every week but then try and review every second week or at worst once a month. If they pile up delete them and review the next fresh batch.

This keeps you updated as to the skills employers are looking for. Ensure your skills are current and take steps to upskill when you see you’re falling behind. Sometimes it is an opportunity to add a new skill that has recently arisen in the market, putting you ahead of other applicants.

Some job ads also include salary figures or ranges. If you see what skills are being requested, the years of experience for that role and the salary expectation it will help you to place your value in the market. It will help you add skills to make you more valuable. It will also help you if you’re applying somewhere and you get a lowball offer. If you don’t know what you’re worth you won’t know if you’re being taken advantage of.

Post on LinkedIn

Post regularly and don’t feel like you have to sound like a professor or someone with a PhD. Also try to keep the butt-kissing posts to a minimum. There are so many of them these days I regard it as a pollutant. I’ve posted a few of those in my time. ?

My most viewed post, by a long way, was a photo I took of the milk in the fridge at work where someone wrote motivational messages on the milk cartons with a sharpie. I loved it, people on LinkedIn loved it.

Post about an event you attended, something nice about a colleague, what you like about your office space, etc. Something positive. If it is genuinely funny or interesting that is a bonus.

Project List

Maintain a list of projects or specific pieces of work you have been involved in. Add as much details as you can without turning it into a novel. Be sure to document who you worked with, what your role was and what you contributed to the project. Also note any positive feedback and outcomes like time/money saved in the business as a result. Reviewing a project you were involved with 6 years ago really brings that old information back to light in your mind.

This is really useful to review before an interview. Interviewers often ask the same “give me an example when” type of questions. If you have a decent project/work history and you reviewed it before your interview it can really help to answer those questions.

This is valuable in the long term. My project list stretches back over 20 years now.

Delay Log

If you’re working on a deadline or time sensitive projects keep a log of every single incident that slowed you down. I find that sometimes you have to go into self defense mode to protect yourself from being made a scapegoat. This has happened to me twice in the past. Once I had a delay log and that helped me tremendously. Another time I was able to reconstruct all of the delays from emails and IMs but it took me an entire weekend.

Being able to show that you waited 3 days for something is very powerful when hard questions are being asked. Additionally, when hard questions are being asked you’re usually under stress making it much harder to remember the details.

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I hope this information is helpful. Feel free to leave any of your advice in the comments section below.