Career Transitions: Going for "Next" With Gusto

Nine rays of hope when looking for our next opportunity

It could have come about suddenly, or perhaps with some warning, but it’s happened: You need to complete your next career move. The good news is that you have the power of choice. It’s an opportunity for you to change or adjust your direction, to assess how you’ve evolved as a person since your last career move, and to choose a path that matches who you are today.

And change can be hard, especially if you’re suddenly forced to leave a stable, positive situation. In that case, career change can seem like trying to uproot and re-plant a fully grown tree. It may involve the disruption or end of years-long professional relationships. Not to mention familiar daily patterns of work, commute and productivity, and long-standing pride in your organization’s mission and accomplishments.

Grief is a healthy reaction when you are the tree that is being forced to uproot itself.

And then what? For most of us, soon enough our life situations and obligations will call us forth from grief into action.

I’ve been honored to help people find their next professional role throughout my career, including during my current tenure as a coach. And I’ve needed to navigate through several transitions of my own. As a member or leader of hiring teams, I have conducted countless interviews and was the primary decision maker on as many as one third of these efforts. I’ve reviewed thousands of resumes through the years. So, it seems right to add my voice to the many other worthy voices that are giving career transition advice.

Nine Keys to Taking Control of Your Career Transition

I’ve seen how these keys build durable hope and positivity in people throughout their job transition process. Not much of what follows is new, but my spin on it, or maybe just the timing of when someone reads through it, may ignite a welcome spark in those of us who are seeking their next opportunity. I hope so!

1.      Know that The Glass Really IS Half Full. By definition, every career transition provides some powerful stuff: the power to slow down to re-examine and recalibrate our career and life goals, to envision a new version of our professional future that aligns with who we truly are NOW, and to reconnect with good people that we haven’t spoken with in a while.

2.      Don’t Go It Alone. As we search for what’s next, the people we know can be a huge asset. Did you know that according to some expert job search consultants, at least 70% of all job openings are never published? And a 2021 study found that interviewees who came to the hiring official’s attention through a personal referral were 40% more likely to be hired than those who did not come via personal referral. So why not reach out to trusted and caring allies right from the start who will keep us motivated, encouraged, and supply precious leads and introductions to that hidden job market?

3.      What’s Your “Ikigai?” It’s the intersection of what you’re passionate about, what you’re good at, what the world wants or needs, and what the world will pay you (enough) for. When your work aligns with all four of these, success comes most naturally. My coaching helps people to discover this sweet spot. It's an important step to work through because it creates genuine excitement for what awaits you next. The emotional energy for everything that follows comes most easily when you've identified the kinds of career options that deeply resonate with who you are.

4.      The Power of Story: This means to identify the real things we’ve accomplished that illustrate our value – behavioral interviewing using the STAR/PAR outline. Great interview stories are those that can be told within 2 to 2 1/2 minutes and include three parts: the PROBLEM you were presented with, the ACTION you took to deal with it, and the RESULT you acheived. If you can state the result in terms of a metric, so much the better. Explaining that "As a result quarterly sales rose 50% from $2 million to $3 million" and "over the next 12 months employee turnover dropped from 33% to less than 5%"is much more impactful than saying "so after that, sales went up" or "people stopped leaving us." Sometimes we don’t even realize the powerful and relevant stories we can tell during interviews until a skillful coach or other third party helps us to remember and re-appreciate our accomplishments.

5.      Fluency: Once we’ve determined a person’s “ikigai” and crafted stories that would persuade organizations whose needs match our professional sweet spot, we practice, practice, practice until the stories flow naturally. This takes discipline – and accountability is often a big ingredient. I serve as my clients’ accountability partner. When the stories are burned into our neural pathways so deeply they just naturally flow from us – not merely memorized but really a part of who we are –the stage is set for powerful interviewing.

6.      The resume: Mistake-free, visually attractive, and full of concise action/result bullets that serve as natural lead-ins to the stories we’ve practiced and gained fluency with. And – a resume that is applicant tracking system (ATS)-savvy. Nowadays almost every Fortune 500 company initially screens resumes using an ATS that is looking for keywords. That’s right, a machine rejects more than half of all resumes submitted before a single person looks at them! But which keywords is it looking for? Your best clue is in the language that’s included in each job position description you’re responding to.

7.      Confidence: If we have truly worked through all of the above, we have no reason to doubt our ability to succeed. But if there are still barriers to confidence, a coach can help to identify and work through these. And here’s a helpful thought: if we’ve slowed down to identify our Ikigai (back to Key #3 above) and have built our interviewing stories and resume around it, we are not “begging for work.” Someone needs us a whole lot! That’s because we have the right combination of skills, experience and personal attributes that will make us extremely valuable to our next employer, and fully worth whatever salary and benefits we can negotiate.

8.      Search with “Directed Diligence:” You may have heard people admonish that if you’re between jobs “Your full-time job is to find your next position.” It’s a healthy appeal to our work ethic, but there’s another important piece that I often see people struggle with: Staying focused on the kinds of work that our resumes and our stories speak to. Not that our search needs to be rigid. In fact, sometimes my clients have discovered something new during this process - either about themselves or about opportunities they weren't aware of before - that truly warrants re-focusing on a new career target. The problem is only when we want to return to something “familiar” despite knowing that what's familiar won’t satisfy us because we’ve outgrown it.

9.      Persistence: If we’ve done everything up to this point, we must still realize that there’s a certain “numbers game” aspect to landing our next great opportunity. The key is to not interpret silence or "we're moving ahead with others" as rejection – hiring managers are simply too busy to look at every resume. A Glassdoor study found that on average a job posting that draws 250 resumes results in only 4 to 6 interview requests. So, we train our emotional muscles to push through silence or non-selection, knowing that someone will soon discover that they NEED us, and we will make a compeling case that we are precisely the answer they're looking for.

Keeping Stress and Discouragement at Bay 

The nine areas of focus I’ve listed is the framework for a process that can be tailored for anyone who is making their next career move, whether still employed or in between jobs. Within these nine keys there are best practices, yet as many flavors as there are job seekers. 

For instance, family and life circumstances shouldn’t be ignored in determining what the nine keys I’ve mentioned above will look like for each person. As stated earlier, change can be hard, and additional stress is never a desired outcome of the action steps to finding our next position.

In all likelihood, any person in the midst of professional transition will find that focusing on the nine keys I’ve outlined here will find that following them actually reduces stress. Both inaction and unproductive effort can prolong time out of work (or staying in a less-than ideal situation), damaging morale and potentially leading to mental health challenges. The nine keys I’ve listed are designed to help us, as we look for our next career stop, to reconnect with our passion and energy, to build a solid basis for confidence and hope, and to enlist the support of others who care for us as we work toward securing a future that can be even better than the rewards and happiness reaped from our previous roles.