Building Your Career During Challenging Times

Job search can be a very discouraging process, especially in a tough economic market. Career decision making and career planning is important, both for the short term and the long term.

In creating a career plan, people can focus on which survival or bridging jobs are best. They can create more targeted resumes, be more enthusiastic in job interviews and be more likely to get the job. They will have a focus for the future and know what skills they need to work on to get to where they want to go in the world of work. This keeps people positive and feeling like they have some locus of control over their own lives.

There are many career-related activities people can engage in to help build their careers during challenging times so that when the economy does turn around, they are ready to move forward quickly and make up for lost time.

This session focuses on:

·       Building Success: By first reflecting on what you really want to do long term, creating a career plan and identifying what success means to you

·       Building Your Training and Education: By gaining skills that support your career plan even when you have little or no money

·       Building Your LinkedIn page: By adding to your network, your brand and career plan

Career decision making and career planning are very complex processes that take a lot of time, research, analysis and evaluation During the pandemic and periods of unemployment, we have this time.

The very first decisions we need to make relate to Nancy Schlossberg’s work around life events and transition, especially during these tough times. These are the 4 S’s of her model and what we need to assess in our lives:

·       What is going on in our Situation?

·       What do we know about our own Self?

·       What Supports do we have in place?

·       What Strategies do each of us have so can we move forward?

Before you jump into career decision making and career planning, think about which of these 4 S’s you need help and support with.

A question I have been asking my clients since the pandemic is, how long can you last if you do not find work?

Do you:

·       Need a job, any job, today? Do you have very few resources left and are homeless or close to homelessness?

·       Need a job soon, within the next 3 to 6 months? Will you be using up most of your remaining financial resources?

·       Need a job and are unemployed but have enough resources that you could last more than 6 months rather comfortably if you dip into your savings?

We need to answer these questions to know how much time we have for career decision making and career planning work, but we also need to know if the priority is a survival job right now, with long-term career planning taking place in and around the job search work for a survival job.

If you are in the first group, or possibly even the second group, it is imperative that you get as much help and support from agencies or from those around you. If you are feeling like you are drowning, don’t wait until it is too late to rework your credit lines or your mortgage. Get daycare subsidies for your kids, ask for food support, and most important right now, get mental health support. At the end of the pandemic, the most important part of your life is not career success, it is being alive and mentally healthy.

Prospect Human Services Society had a webinar session on many of these types of resources last Friday. Check with Mercedes for this information if you need help with any of these services. The first step in career planning is fully understanding your situation and getting help if you need it. Once we have addressed immediate concerns and issues, we can then look at ways to job search and build our careers.

William Bridges has a transition model that will be helpful to understand the pandemic and our careers. I find it helpful to think of the pandemic as one very big detour on the road of life. With all detours, we sometimes take longer to get to our destination, but what is most important is getting there safely.

Bridges talked about our old lives, that would-be pre-pandemic when we were working and oblivious to the pandemic heading our way. When we are in the neutral zone, we may be feeling anxious, depressed or excited about new opportunities. Imagine we have packed up our entire lives into our car and we are headed out to our new home. Along the way we hit a detour, driving winding roads for miles in the middle of nowhere. That is the neutral zone—which is where we are right now—and that is how it feels: like we are a little or very lost. What we have to look forward to is our new life and taking steps to navigate and steer our lives towards where we ultimately want to end up long term. Our career life is so much bigger than our pandemic detour.  

While we are in the neutral zone, we can work on our career plans to guide our survival job decisions so that we can be ready for our new lives when the pandemic is over or under control.

Building Success: Reflecting on what you really want to do long term, creating a career plan and identifying what success means to you

We create our career plan by doing a lot of analysis: examining what we like and dislike about our current or past work, and identifying what work we want to do more of and what work we want to do less of.

Maybe you are an engineer and you really don’t like working with people but prefer the technical aspect of your job. Maybe you are a medical office assistant and you like working with children. Or you work in the hotel industry and you really like managing people. The first step in creating a career plan is to identify the work you love to do, figure out how to do more of it, and move away from the work you don’t like—work that stresses or de-energizes you.

This is a complex process, and it does take a lot of time to do all of the exploring, analysis and evaluation but we can start the process here simply by thinking about what we like and don’t like about the work we do.

I work with clients until they have a clear career plan in place. How do I know if they have a well-thought-out career plan? I ask them what their career plans are for the next:

·       1 to 3 years, which is the work they are currently doing, but also building to make a move by year 3

·       3 to 5 years, which is the work they want to move to next

·       5 to 10 years, which is the work they envision they would like to aim for longer term

Sometimes, I even ask about the next 10 to 15 years, and what real success in their careers will look like. It’s important to keep in mind that these career plans are organic in that they can change or will change along with industry trend information.

At this point most people are thinking, if you can’t see where you will be in 5 years how can you create a career plan for the next 10 to 15 years? One question that can help us with this 10- to 15-year plan is: What does success mean to you?

For many of us, we think that that success means climbing the corporate ladder. This was never my aspiration, and so I think I short-changed myself in the area of career success. I didn’t want to be the CEO of a large corporation, so I settled with just doing my job and working on my academic career.

Are you like me, where climbing the corporate ladder has no appeal? What now?

People often have a hard time envisioning what their careers will look like long term. The problem is that they don’t have a clear vision of what success means to them.  If you don’t know what you ultimately want to achieve, its pretty hard to put together a plan to get there.

Let’s talk about the number of different ways people can build success and which types of success they think fit best for them, because sometimes it is a combination of a couple of types. These are just a few of the types of success that exist; a higher purpose, supporting a cause and helping others are some of the other types. Think about which ones fit for you:  

Hierarchical Success

This is the traditional definition of success, climbing the corporate ladder. It means getting to the top: being the big boss or the Big Kahuna. These people value titles and prestige, titles such as CEO or Vice President. Your time is spent taking on higher level positions.

Financial Success

This type of success is often closely linked with hierarchical success but not always. Accumulating wealth is the main value. Having the mortgage paid off and a million dollars in the bank means success, no fancy titles necessary. Your time is spent building your bank account.

Quality Leadership and Team Building

While some people want to climb the corporate ladder, others are more interested in building a team and focusing on the overall quality of their leadership. They would rather be a division manager than a CEO. Your time is spent building bigger and bigger departments.

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs feel successful when they create a business from the ground up. Success for this type is measured by the overall success of running their own business. Your time is spent building your business.

Specialization

Another way to be successful is to become a technical expert or a specialist. Specialists become successful because others value their knowledge, expertise or unique creative style in a particular field. Your time is spent building your knowledge base over time.

Project Size

Lastly, another way to build success in our careers is to progressively take on larger and larger projects. Someone who works in construction may start out as a foreman on a $2 million project, then take on $5 to $10 million projects, and ultimately end up supervising $100 million projects. Your time is spent taking on bigger and bigger projects.

Let’s go back to our examples. If you are an engineer you may realize that you want to become a technical expert in your field and be an advisor on gradually bigger and bigger projects. Now you can start building your technical expertise. Our medical office assistant may realize they want to focus on working with children and decide to become an LPN, gaining more financial security and specializing in a particular area of medicine. Our hotel worker may want to become a hotel manager or an area manager, but not a higher-level executive.

By understanding our success type, we know what we need to work on to move forward in our careers and that will direct our choices in the next section: building our training and education.

Building Your Training and Education: Adding skills when you have little or no money

Once we have our career plan in place, it is going to be much easier to figure out what kind of education and training will help build our careers.

There are many options for training, at different price points, that we can take advantage of:

Free education and training

We can take all kinds of free on-line webinars, watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, or enjoy Ted Talks on a wide variety of topics. For example, our hotel worker who wants to be a manager down the road will want to study and learn anything and everything they can on management skills. We can see how this will support the greater long-term career plan.

As for other education options, in case you don’t already know, you are entitled to take two free on-line courses per year with the Calgary Public Library: Gale or Linda courses. If you do the Gale version, you will receive a certificate upon completion.

Lastly, consider doing volunteer work, it’s free, it connects you with others, and it helps build your network and your resume as well.

Low cost training and education options:

You can build your leadership or communication skills by joining a Toastmaster’s club, and work on any one of the specific paths that build skills through project work for less than $200 per year. There are 11 paths to choose from. A couple of examples are innovative planning and dynamic leadership. You can also get involved in a number of volunteer leadership positions: club officer, area director, or club coach.

More expensive but still a deal:

If you can afford it, less than $500 per year, I highly recommend attending a virtual conference, because most of us will never have the chance to attend some of these conferences otherwise.  There are many national and international conferences in your career area or industry that would have cost you hundreds, even thousands of dollars, to attend live, which you can now attend for a fraction of the cost. The US career development national conference I attended in June 2020, was under $300, and would have cost me $600 plus travel and hotel to attend live. In January, I will attend the Canadian national conference for under $250, a fraction of the cost, and I will have no hotel or airfare costs.

Building Your LinkedIn page: Adding to your network, your brand and career plan

Now that you have identified your career plan and you have been adding education and training to that plan, you can start building your brand using social media.

My LinkedIn and Facebook pages focus on career decision making and career planning—they do not focus on interview skills or expert resume writing. This is my specialization.

In our examples, our engineer could add their technical specialization and project management to their heading. Our medical office assistant could add pediatrics. Our hotel worker could add management skills to their heading as they build these skills.

To start highlighting your career plan using your LinkedIn page, start editing your work experience section by taking out the work you don’t like to do and start bringing into focus the work you do like to do. You want to be recognized by those checking out your sites. For example, our medical office assistant could highlight their pediatric work with kids versus the work they did with all their patients.

Also think about changing your top three skills to make sure they are the skills you want to be endorsed for. 

To add to your network, simply start following experts in your field—both the people who are doing similar work and companies who are doing the kind of work you are interested in.

Work on adding 5 to 10 people a week to your page. That’s adding 200 to 500 people to your network in a year, some who may even want to offer you work.

Lastly, think about sharing articles directly related to your field, your industry or career, and comment on them. Tag others to comment on your articles. If you are a good writer, consider blogging on your specialization or management topic. Always have someone else proofread your work before posting.

Now that we have walked you through the basics of creating your own career plan, hopefully you can start to find a place in the world of work that fits for you. By following these basic steps, you will be more prepared to take on work situations now and when the pandemic is over. It’s never too late to start implementing your new career plan.