Time for a change. Maybe you’re forced by a layoff or industry shift. Or you’re just reaching your own personal end of the line.
The most common ways I’ve seen clients sabotage their moves are slow planning, fast action and taking the middle too seriously.
Slow planning: These days career planning (which includes decisions about leaving the corporate world for a business, sabbatical or school) is year-round and never-ending. How can you become more marketable? What options will be open if you move to a new city or retire? How can you create a Plan B in case your comfortable life gets interrupted?
Some clients call me when they hear an early whisper of change. We begin to plan early and usually they find a new job faster than they anticipated. But others wait till they’ve been laid off and they’ve used up a good chunk of severance and savings. Now they’re under pressure. So they often end up sabotaging themselves with ...
Fast action: When you’re feeling scared or pressured, it’s easy to grab the nearest opportunity that appears to be a life raft. Sometimes that’s a good idea: a hastily-accepted job often becomes a doorway to your dream. But a hastily-chosen option usually creates new challenges. You move to a new city because “living costs will be lower” or “there are more jobs,” and now you’re stranded. You hire a service that promises fast results or sign up for a training program that costs a lot and delivers little; now you’re exhausted and depleted your reserves.
Taking the middle too seriously: Between your current life and your Dream Career lies a territory called The Middle. I distinguish two kinds of Middle Jobs: a perch job and a bridge job.
You take a perch job because you need money. Like birds resting on the high wires during migration season, you need a place to land until you can get moving in the direction you want to go. So you might serve cappuccino at Starbucks, clerk in a retail store, or teach a class here and there. You might even opt for self-employment as a cat sitter or get a real estate license.
A bridge job gives you skills and contacts to move to your dream. You want to move from engineering to marketing. Your engineering job disappeared so you grab a marketing or sales job. Maybe the pay is lower or the conditions less than ideal, but after a year or two you get to write “Marketing” on your resume and go for the gold.
Sometimes a perch job becomes a bridge job, or vice versa. Sometimes a Middle Job morphs into your ideal and you realize you’ve reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, even while you thought you were caught in a thunderstorm.
But don’t take Middle Jobs too seriously. I’ve watched career changers detour to company politics and special projects on jobs that should have been treated lightly. Or they turn down a Middle Job because “it’s not exactly what I want.”
Ninety percent of the time, you’re better off with a job than without one. Just do enough to get by, get a reputation for being nice and friendly, and stay focused on your goal.
No goal? You’re more likely to stumble across one while you’re doing something – anything – rather than sitting on the couch, introspecting and filling out “who am I” forms. Serendipity has become an accepted term in mainstream career management articles. And that calls for more action than assessment.
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Cathy Goodwin, Ph.D., is a published author, speaker, and career/business consultant. She coaches
midlife professinals who want to win the First Inning of their Second Career.
Download a Fr*e Report: Why most career change fails (and how you can write your own success story).
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