Career Success Stories: It's Always Bittersweet When The People I Coach Land Their Jobs

Today is bittersweet for me. Starting this week, I will no longer be meeting regularly with two smart, wonderful women who I really enjoyed being a career coach to over the last few months.

Last week, they signed their offers, thus joining a long list of job searchers who have attained career success using The Dezzi Way (forever grateful to one of my Fullstack Academy grads, Joel Marcano for coining the term).

These two ladies have very different profiles. One is a brand-new software engineer who graduated from Fullstack Academy’s coding bootcamp in October 2022, and is pivoting into tech. The other is taking the next major step in her marketing career, going from several years as a freelancer to a full-time role working for a leading global commercial real estate company where she will be working closely with key executives on the growth strategies for its flagship property.

While their industries and roles are very different, what they both had in common were gumption, being consistent and having the willingness to go beyond their comfort zone and use the job search techniques that I taught them.

My software engineer's challenge was getting her first job as a developer amidst a tech landscape where layoffs were happening and she had to compete with more experienced software engineers, including those with Computer Science degrees, who had more exposure to data structure and algo than she did.

I focused on putting actionable items and strategies that shifted her mindset to that of a peer sharing a love of building exciting things with code within a community of fellow developers instead of being just another new bootcamp grad looking for her first software engineering job.

I also made sure to focus on making her aware that she was right where she should be, timeline-wise, and everything that she was feeling was exactly what others before her had been through at the exact stage in their own job searches.

One of the most frustrating things about job searching is not knowing where you are in your journey, and it helps to be working with a career coach who has walked the exact same path with hundreds of others who have done successful pivots tthemselves. Having someone who knows the job search and career navigation landscape like the back of her hand within a Slack, text, email, Zoom call away, one who can see the forest and not just the trees, reaelly does wonders for one's mental and emotional well-being!

On the other hand, my marketing professional's challenge was being told over and over by recruiters that she didn’t have the skills nor experience required. She had been struggling for several months with job searching on her own before she reached out over the Christmas holidays and we kicked our sessions off in January.

One of my favorite moments in her journey was how she went from being told by recruiters that she didn’t have what they were looking for, which I took as a personal challenge when I revised her resume (granted, I had the advantage of having been in marketing myself, so I could tweak her resume and Linkedin from the vantage point of someone who had deep knowledge of marketing from a former marketing director and recruiter’s vantage point) to having the company execs bring up key career achievements which had previously been ignored by recruiters on her resume but which I chose to highlight- that made her such a unique fit for the role they had in mind for her.

For both, guiding them to dig deep into their ikegai was extremely important because it laid the groundwork for everything else that followed. Their individual job search roadmaps looked very different, but they both followed their own roadmaps, even when they encountered the dreaded 2-month dip of despair.

I'm sure both of them must have thought I was crazy at certain points because a lot of the techniques I taught them were unorthodox and not exactly things that they were ever taught by Career Counseling from their high school or college days.

That said, the techniques that I pull from my training and experience in my own career pivots are the ones that work really well, especially in today's interesting job marketplace. The Dezzi Way comprises of things I've picked up over the last 25+ years - especially from my time as an ad agency account executive, as a marketing director working on numerous ad campaigns, as a salesperson establishing and nurturing business partnerships in a highly saturated environment where I had to hold my own against those who had years more experience than me, and as a recruiter who has to look for my own clients so that I could work on job requisitions, headhunt candidates, interview them, submit the best ones to the hiring managers, prep them for interviews and negotiate their compensation.

While both these ladies are now going to be earning significantly more than they’ve ever made in their whole lives, that’s just a nice bonus. It's not the most important part. When all is said and done, at the very heart of it all, they now have careers that fulfill the things on the wishlist that we used as the basis for their roadmap on at the start of each of their job search journeys.

No matter where they go in their careers, they will always have an advantage over their peers. They now know how to employ the techniques that work better than just throwing job applications out in the hope that something sticks. They have a method to counter all the job search madness because they understand not just how to job search the right way but the underlying why’s. They’ve gotten an insider’s view i to what happens on the hiring side, what kind of conversations occur, how decisions are made, what the hiring cycle is like.

I’m sad in what I suspect is how a parent feels when they drop their kid off at the college dorm. When I coach someone, I’m all in, which means I practically become joined at the hip with the professionals whom I coach. But because I’ve also been there with them throughout their journey- with all the highs and lows that come with job searching- I’m also incredibly proud of and happy for them, and as I watch them soar higher and higher, I’ll always be a resource for them to turn to throughout their careers.

Onward and upward, ladies. Excelsior!

#careercoach #jobsearch #careersuccess