What do you do best? What are your strongest transferable skills? Think broadly in terms of managerial and technical/ functional strengths involved in what you have to offer. Discovering your “pattern of success and satisfaction” is your goal, here.
Your ability to express the collection of your functional strengths will measure your marketability. This collection of keywords and their supportive evidence creates your communication strategy, the basis of your value proposition.
The old “round peg in a round role” theory of career planning is dysfunctional. In the typical professional environment today, job descriptions are changing faster than ever before to keep up with the challenges of an economy in transition. In the traditional job market, job seekers are the sellers and their potential employers are the buyers. The commodity is JOBs and the competition is fierce.
Thursday, August 25th... Achieving CareerFIT, facilitated by Brian Allen
In The OTHER Job Market, buyers and sellers hold equal responsibility for the recruitment process. The commodity is available, productive WORK… When employers have a need for someone to fulfill a specific role, often the most desired candidates are employed individuals with the credentials they seek. Thus the employer must sell their Company to potential employees in the marketplace in order to attract the best of the lot. Once identified, they simply select their choice and buy their services.
Understand the nature of FIT… and let that be your GOAL!
OFFER CRITERIA
Write out the factors that are important to you in a job…actually write out your list. During your career transition, you learn the value of setting your offer criteria.
1. Creates an objective target for your efforts ahead;
2. Gives you a meaningful set of questions to ask during research and networking;
3. Provides an objective way to analyze and react to offers as they occur.
To manage your career wisely has you extending the same concept.
- Keep your “offer criteria” in that dynamic state of change that allows you to adapt to market conditions.
- If your current goal is to find a new position, then you should prepare your search as a “business model”, manage it accordingly, be flexible, and be ready for the unexpected.
You understand that managing your own career involves three key ingredients:
- Confidence in knowing that your career is on the right path;
- Continuous research and networking leading to awareness of potential “next steps…” to keep your career moving forward;
- Competency with job-changing skills.