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Career Development, Part III – Are you in the 30s or the 70s?

Lars-Christian Elvenes — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:14:01 +0000

We’ve covered some basics in career development and job search in part 1 and part 2. Before going into the practical side of your standard job searching tools, there’s an important thing to remember when looking for you next job - where to look.

There’s a common percentage division that says that the jobs and positions listed on job boards, be it online, or on paper, represents about 30% of the jobs that are actually available. That means that there’s a whooping 70% jobs and positions that you won’t get to if you focus your search on listed positions only. The exact percentage varies, but if we work from the 30/70 frame of reference, that alone tells you that for every three jobs you find, there’s another 7. What if the three you’ve found aren’t really what you truly want, and your dream job is somewhere among the “hidden” seven?

So how do you find the remaining 70%?

Answer: Do research on companies, network with people, and ask straight up questions like “are you considering hiring someone with my expertise?”. If you’re the right person, a company may create a position for you, they may realize that they need your competence. With more or less all companies having an online presence, this research is easy. Just as it is in many situations in life, if you want something, ask!

There’s no big magic trick to this. Keep your computer, or pen and paper, available, make notes as you do your research, make contact, ask questions, make notes during conversations, ask follow-up questions when you need to. Simply, be interested.

Also, keep networking. If you investigate your network, you’ll realize that you already have many contacts that can help you get in touch with people and opportunities. Never underestimate the opportunities in your network. You never what they may know, or who they know that they can put you in contact with.

Allow yourself to be vulnerable

This entails specifically to those out of a job. Suddenly having the label “unemployed” all over you yourself can be difficult, if not down right embarrassing. Most people don’t want to identify with being unemployed. Therefore allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and putting it out there that “I am looking for a job” can be a hard sell. However, today, with social media putting you in direct contact with a large network, who in turn can connect you to an even larger one, exposing your status is important. Who knows, maybe there’s someone out there looking for you, and who needs right now. Being able to start in a new job right away has its advantages. Being found, and finding professional people is the purpose of LinkedIn, and there many cases of people that have landed jobs after reaching out on facebook and twitter.

Consider of it this way: What’s the worst that can happen if you let your network know you’re looking for a job? And what’s the best that can happen?

In short: Network Network Network.

Career Development Part II – Searching and applying for positions

Lars-Christian Elvenes — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:53:05 +0000

You’ve done the first step covered in part one of this series, and now know where you want to put your focus when taking the next step on your career and job search journey. For this post I’ll keep the focus on traditional job search.

Create a daily plan

Create a plan for how to conduct your job search. This is especially important if you’re out of a job, and job search is you job. This is a time when it is very easy to slip into some less than constructive patterns and habits (like sleeping all day or becoming an avid day timeTV addict).

Based on your wants and needs for your career, your job search process could have two structures. If you’re already employed, you have some limitations time wise for looking for jobs. The advantages of this situation are that you’re not in need of accepting the first thing that comes your way, and you’ll probably be more focused since you have less time to do your search. If you’re unemployed, my suggestion is to structure your day as if you were employed. That means creating a schedule from 9 am to 4 or 5 pm. Here are some of the activities you’ll want to consider:

Searching for jobs online through job boards
Researching companies that interest you
Researching companies within your industry of interest
Resarch LinkedIn and other social media (I’ll get back to that) platforms
Do a thorough analysis of the positions and industries of interest
Write applications / cover letters
Tailor your resume to the positions you’re considering
Contact employers to get more information on positions
Examine your network (both online and offline)
APPLY FOR THE POSITIONS!

Work these activities into your schedule (and remember to take time off for lunch), and you’ll get a functional content for you job search.

Here’s an example

08 – 09 am	Get up, do your morning routine (shower, get dressed, breakfast, etc)
09 – 10 am	Research jobs (online, papers, google, linkedin… all that apply for you), and make a note of the top 3 in your opinion (remember, if you know what you want, you’ll know what to look for and focus on), and make them the focus for your day (or days, depending on the time you need).
10 – 11 am	Analyze the positions you’ve found (or companies if you’ve focused on industry). What are they looking for, what can you offer them. Why will they find you interesting? Write all this down to make sure you keep track of all the things that can get you noticed. Make a note of all the things you’d like to know about the job. Research the companies websites to make sure your questions are relevant, and not something you could have figured out on your own if you’d only taken two minutes to research it.
11 – 11.30 am	Call people and get more information based on your analyses.
11.30 – 12.00 am	Lunch
12 – 14 pm	Work on you cover letter. Why do you want this job? Why should they hire you? What value can you contribute?
14 – 15 pm	Polish and tailor your resume. You must show the employer also through your resume that you have written it with the job in mind. This makes it easier for them to pick you out of the pile, and it also tells them that you’re one of the people who cared enough about the job to do so.
15 – 16 pm	Apply for the jobs. Either online (which is the common way), through the mail or delivered directly if that’s appropriate.

This setup may or may not work for you, but it is one way to do it. Creating a schedule like this will help you figure out just how much time is appropriate for you to spend on each area, it will keep you on top of your job searching process, and you’ll get better every day.

Career Development Part I – Productive Job Search

Lars-Christian Elvenes — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 11:48:35 +0000

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For some time now I have been working as a career advisor, and so I thought it was about time to do a few posts on the realm of career advice and job search. I won’t claim that the ideas and suggestions presented here are new or revolutionary in any way, but I will say that they can be useful and help you on your way back into a job, or onto the next step in your career.

I’ll cover some thoughts on how to have a productive job search process and/or a career development plan, the basics of your resume, your cover letter and the job interview, and I’ll do section on using social media and how it relates to job search, career and personal branding.

Productivity in Job Search

What kind of career you want will determine your job search. If it doesn’t, you might end up with a job you don’t really want, and in the worst case scenario, you won’t understand how it happened. Therefore, in order to achieve a high level of productivity in your hunt for your next job, it will help to understand the different between being effective and being efficient.

Being effective means doing the right things
Being efficient means doing things well

If you make sure you’re first working on the right acitivities, and then on doing those acitivities well, you’ve taken a step in a smart direction.

First off, figure out what you want to do. This is easy to say, and may be easy to do. However, there’s nothing wrong with taking some time into understanding some of the areas you want your career to revolve around, and not least, what this will give you. Meaning why you want to do this. How much you want to invest in your working career will also be influenced by many factors in your life:

Are you ok with spending a lot of time working?
How do you value the balance of work and spare time?
Do you have a significant other, or maybe a family you need, and want to spend time with?
Is your career focus long-term or short-term? Or, do you have career goals that require certain parameters to be met now in order to succeed later on?
Where’s your motivational compass? Intrinsic or extrinsic (do you value what you do and what that gives you, or are you driven by money and fringe benefits).
Are you willing to take jobs that are not necessarily the dream job, if it takes you closer to where you want to be long-term?

What do you want to do?

Here’s a couple of simple exercises you can do that may help you to figure out your next step.

Create a mind map with your various job positions (and other relevant experiences in case you don’t have that much work experience).
1. Put the position in the middle, and start associating to that all the different tasks and responsibilities you had. Put in all that comes to mind. In my experience one on the obstacles people create for themselves is that they sell themselves short. Remember, even as a store clerk, you may have had experiences with handling money, customer service (both the nice ones and the not so nice ones), ordering goods that need restocking, solving problems that happen unexpectedly, and maybe you’ve had to work on your communication skills in order to help people understand (and understand them) what products they would find the most useful.
2. Simply erase or cover the name of the position. What you’re left with is a range of knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs), and tasks that you are capable of performing.
3. Consider how these KSAs are transferable to other types of jobs, both directly and indirectly.

Take a sheet of paper or use your computer. Create to columns. One for “did like” and one for “did not like”, and go through your work history (or your other experiences depending on your amount of experience). Start with your current (or last) job. Jot down all the things you like about that job. Afterwards, jot down all the things you didn’t like. You may want to have somebody help you with this, making sure you’ve really covered all the likes and dislikes. This seems almost too simple, but it is a task worthy of attention. Remember that we often take the time to think when things don’t work out the way we want them to, and forget this step when everythning’s fine and dandy. But doesn’t it make sense to have an idea of want as well as what you don’t want? When you’re done you’ll have a clearer understanding of what you like, don’t like, and hence, what you ought to look for when checking out positions and companies that seem attractive to you.

When you’re done with these two exercises, hopefully you’re a few steps further on the road to figuring out what you want for your career and why. Having this information sets you up for a more productive process of career planning and job searching.

In addition, consider contacting a career advisor, mentor or a coach to help you in this process. Having someone else probe your mind with questions you might not have thought of yourself can be a great path to further your personal awareness.

Time Management: Children’s Style

Lars-Christian Elvenes — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:21:12 +0000

I’ve been doing some writing on the self-help area lately (post on the subject coming up), and one of the topics typically covered are time management. It’s a popular topic no doubt, and there’s probably a reason why people say things like “there’s only 24 hours in a day“, “wish I had more time” or “I don’t have the time” and so on. To a certain extent I understand this very well. I’m a project manager, and at the moment I’m working on building a new course from more or less the ground up, and believe me, If I could have a few weeks extra before launch, I wouldn’t say no.

The Time Mangement Process

Whatever you choose to call your approach to time management, it usually covers a few standard points:

Categorize where you spend your time
Define areas in a matrix, continuum or similar ranging from “highly urgent and important” to “not important at all”
Prioritizing your areas and actions that need to be done
Create a to do list
Do the most important action item, cross oit ff the list, go to the next one etc.

Some of the more advanced ones (which I like) go a step further (or before), focusing on your outcomes, purposes, and then planning (where many of the other programs start). If you’ve ever heard of NLP or Tony Robbins, this might be familiar ground.

However, this post is not about how to manage your time. There are probably more than enough resources online for this.

What’s Your Mindset Like?

There is a group in the population that has a very different approach to time and the amount of it that we have available: Kids. Remember when you were a kid and you were waiting on, say your favorite TV show (when I grew up in Norway we had one channel, and about half an hour devoted to kids at 6 pm) and it wasn’t on until an hour later? When you’re a kid an hour lasts five billion minutes if you’re waiting for something (consider waiting to unwrap presents when it’s Christmas). A kid will find a hundred things to do for an hour. There are trees to climb, action figures to play with, that lego car you’re going to build, run around with the family dog, say hello the kid next door… you know what I mean, right.

What are grown-ups like? “hmm…, well, I doubt I have the time right now. I’ve got a meeting in one hour. How about later?”

So the idea I have here is that maybe we (at least us adults) should adopt kids’ mindsets every now and then when it comes to time and time management. How much could you do in an hour if you thought of time the way kids do, rather than what you do as an adult?

What’s your take on it?

Challenge: Leave The Phone

Lars-Christian Elvenes — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:32:23 +0000

You know the scene in the movies where the main characters are about to finally get on with that kiss that you’ve foreseen since before you even started watching, and just as their lips are about to touch, the phone rings and destroyes the moment. This of course, has been used to the point of complete cliché, but what always ticks me off here is, why the hell do they bother with the phone? You’re right there with some superbabe or superhunk, things are getting really interesting and …you’d rather answer the phone?

The worst part about this scenario is that phone behavior today is frighteningly similar to this. A lot of people seem incapable of not answering their phone.

Cell Phone Addiction In Real Life Settings

Want to improve your meetings?
Want to get more out casual conversations with friends or colleagues?
Want to relax without interruptions?

Turn off your cell phone, or at least put it on mute.

Among the things I do, I work as a career advisor. Because of the economy, a lot of people in Norway, as the rest of the planet, are out of work. Some of the people I meet have little experience with work, some have lot, and they come from many walks of life. One frequent similarity, though, is their cell phone addiction. Whether in the middle of a presentation, a great discussion, or even moments of breakthrough for people struggling with self-confidence, I experience people grabbing on to their phones to answer calls or text messages.

This lack of social competence is strange to me. Is it really that hard to wait for a break or a moment where making phone calls or writing text messages are more appropriate?

The Need To Feel Connected

The times when I really become aware of this addiction in myself is when I forget my phone, and wonder what in the world I’m going to do without it. As if it’s a huge problem. I’m left with only e-mail, facebook, twitter, friendfeed, etc … Getting in touch isn’t really that difficult. On the other hand, one difference I notice in myself is that I don’t absolutely have to answer the phone when it rings. I have a cell phone. I can see who’s calling. I can call back if I don’t know the number, or check it online. If it’s an unlisted number it’s usually one of two people, and they can call back. Or, it’s someone I’m not interested in talking to anyway.

It’s not a problem!

The Cell Phone Challenge

So, here’s the challenge (and this is one I’ll work even more at myself): When your phone rings from now on, consider taking just a second to ask yourself whether or not you want to, or need to answer it. If you’re in a meeting, or having a great conversation or discussion, do you really want risk destroying that great state or atmosphere just because of a phone call? Is what you’re doing right now more important, or the phone call (or text message for that matter) when you don’t even know who’s calling.

Consider this: What if that great meeting or conversation doesn’t get back on track? The moment’s ruined. And all because of a cold call from someone trying to sell you on subscription deal with a new phone company?

Would it be worth it?