Walk out on the right thing

You’re tired of putting in sixty-hour weeks. You feel like your ideas aren’t being heard, that your work is rote. You can’t even remember the last time you were excited to come into work.

You don’t even have time for a life!

No one would be surprised if you started thinking a career change was in order. After all, that’s what all the career bloggers advocate, right? Find what makes you happy and pursue it as a career.

Well, what if you are actually in your dream career, but in a bad job? Is it necessary to completely change your life, or just change your workplace? Think about why you want to leave your career. Will changing your career make the situation any better, or would it be best to change your job?

Make sure you’re changing what really needs to be changed. It will benefit you more in the long run.

Tacit vs. explicit skills

In education, we often worry about what our students know versus what we know they should, know, but can’t pull out of them. We call any knowledge we can assess “explicit knowledge” and anything the student knows, but we can’t assess “tacit knowledge”.

In business, we face the same thing, within ourselves and our employees. When we create a resume to showcase our skills, we have this wide range of skills that are harder to demonstrate. These are our “tacit skills”. These are the skills that we may not be aware we have, or they may be soft skills that we don’t know how to present. These are the skills that often end up coming out during a behavioral interview, training, or the adjustment period after starting the job.

The skills that we can demonstrate are our “explicit skills”. Our schooling, our training, our accomplishments in previous jobs. These are the skills interviewers and recruiters look for because they can quantify them, but in the back of their mind, they also have some tacit skills in place that they are looking for.

What does this mean for you, the job seeker? It means that while you should present your explicit skills to best showcase what you’re capable of, you should also think about those skills you can’t show off so easily and then practice your interview in that light. Become comfortable with those aspects of yourself to help present you in your entirety to a prospective employer.

The art of career management

As part of my personal branding project and developing my application materials for grad school, I’m reworking my resume for perhaps the third time this year. I’m trying to develop a complementary About page for my websites. I’m working, editing, and reworking each of my small blurbs to deliver the most useful information about some facet of myself in the fewest words possible.

I probably work on my resume and about pages and blurbs every three months or so to reflect any new job responsibilities, skills, and achievements I may have accrued. It helps keep my resume from getting too far out of date, and gives prospective employers and clients a mostly updated view of who I am.

Most of the people I know only update their resumes when they want to go looking for a new job (more often than not within a couple of weeks of losing their previous job). By then, skills and achievements earned a year ago are completely forgotten and don’t make their way into the updated resume. (Keeping an updated resume has the added benefit of helping remind a manager of your work during performance reviews!)

Dust off your resume every few months. Create and maintain a portfolio of your best work. Again, dust it off and update it every couple of months. Create and maintain an elevator speech, and revamp it when you update your resume and portfolio.

Need any other ideas for managing your own career? Check out this Third Age article!

Tips for changing careers

Hopefully, if you read this blog for any period of time, you know one of my interests is helping people make smooth transitions between careers. I know I’ve gone on (at great lengths sometimes) about ways to help yourself move to a new field, but Monster has been kind enough to create this concise guide that includes not only the topics I normally talk about, but also asks you to consider the company environment you would feel most productive on.

I don’t think I’ve really addressed this one, but the company itself should be an important consideration in your move. If you know you prefer smaller or larger businesses, then look at how you can best prepare yourself to meet their needs. Knowing what type of company culture you flourish in can go a long way to making your career transition feel simpler.

Finding your career direction

This is a topic near and dear to my heart. In college, the counselors in the career office knew me by first name. I navigated the office like it was my own home. Just the idea of exploring potential future careers excited me! I knew what I wanted to do, but I was open to alternate plans. I was slowly becoming great at helping others find what they wanted to do. I’ve actually considered more than once becoming a career or life coach just so I can help more people.

I find myself now in a position where I’m trying to find what makes me feel fulfilled. That’s a big part of being happy in a job. You have to want to get up in the morning. You have to be excited when you tell people what you want to do. You have to feel fulfilled. Many people don’t understand that. The problem to being fulfilled, for me at least, is that I need a career that draws on my varied skills and interests. This is what makes coaching a great idea for me.

It’s also why I’m exploring instructional design. I’m currently talking to an instructional designer about the ins and outs of the profession and I’m working on graduate school applications.

If you’re feeling a bit lost and overwhelmed by the vast sea of career opportunities, you might start by reading through these articles:

• Full-scale evaluation
• Changing careers- the skills list
• Career testing can help direct the directionless
• Questions to get your career started
• Interested in everything? You can still pick a career.
• The ABCs of a Kaleidoscope Career

Transferable skills and changing careers

In this time where it’s not uncommon to have a career that spans different industries as well as different jobs, you may think you can only package your skills for the industry you came from, or that the skills you learned in one industry won’t matter in another.Believe me, I’ve talked with a number of people who believe this, and they all honestly look at me baffled when I start demonstrating that they have skills that are marketable in other fields.

it’s important to remember that there are many skills you may pick up in one industry that will aid in your success in another. When I started considering other fields, I found it useful to make a list of every single skill I have and consider how it applied to the new field. It helped me reshape my resume when I was ready to start pursuing jobs.

Monster also offers this helpful article on determining your transferable skills.

Questions you should ask yourself while writing your resume

I have a number of posts on resume writing, but I want to add these questions from Monster’s Career Advice column. It’s a great, simple FAQ on writing a resume for today’s job market.

For more advice on resume writing, feel free to browse my collection of resume-building links.

Consider seriously any career change

I’ve posted in the past about analyzing your job skills and  preferred job characteristics when thinking about potentially changing your job or career.

I thought it might be nice to augment those posts with a post from Monster on contemplating these changes. Changing jobs is a process that requires some deliberation. You have to consider what’s important to you in terms of values and workspace. Changing careers is a much more serious deliberation. It asks you to consider not only values and workspace, but also your skills and plans for growth.

For some people, a career change can be the healthiest decision, but it is one that never should be taken lightly.

Need a career facelift? Consider reevaluating your skills!

This article targets those over forty, but I think this is valuable information for those of us who’ve just barely made it to thirty and are facing that quarter-life crisis.

Just as it’s not a bad idea to re-invent yourself if you find yourself in a rut, it’s not a bad idea to reinvent your career as well.

The great thing about re-inventing your career, though, is that you have more than likely gained a number of skills that will serve you not only in your chosen industry, but also in others both similar and vastly different form your chosen path. You just have to be brave enough to explore!

Interviews are two-sided

Over the past week, I’ve seen a couple of posts advising job seekers to pay attention during the interview for warning signs. Both are great posts. Good information.

It just frightens me to think there are still people out there thinking they are passive participants in a job interview. Interviews are not only about the company trying to find the right person to fit in their position. It’s also about the job seeker trying to find a culture they can excel in.

I’m guilty of this myself. I can’t tell you how many interviews I’ve sat through thinking, “It’s only until I find something better. Who cares if the interviewer just told me point blank that they don’t keep employees more than three weeks/they have no idea what the position is or how it’s supposed to fit within the company/called me a liar to my face because I’m not stereotypical of my region?”

They all turned out to be very unhappy working situations, but I thought at the time I needed to have the income to survive rather than try to find some place where I knew I’d fit in better.

Long story short: if you feel yourself stifling a flinch, or walking out of an interview to call your best friend and tell them how frightening the company/interviewer is…don’t take the job! You won’t be happy. It’s worth it to hold out for the company that fits you.

I feel completely silly. I can’t find the other post, and it was really good. It’s not where I thought it was, and I managed not to save the link. Grr…