My passion is guiding people through career searches.  I have been through personal career transitions myself, and on more than one occasion.  They were difficult journeys complete with their share of pain, fear, and uncertainty. Yet through the support of friends, family, and the kindness of strangers, I successfully completed each journey.  

Later in my life, my staff and mentors at The Voyager Group, which provides nationwide career transition services for individuals and companies, taught me much that could have made my earlier journeys considerable easier.

My goal is to help ease the journey for others in transition.  I don’t possess a magic wand or a silver bullet.  I’m all out of pixie dust.  However, I have been on this journey many times and I know what works. I have been successful and I have helped many others succeed.  It comes down to personal commitment and working smart. The personal commitment is the true key.  I can teach working smart, I can’t teach commitment. Somehow, someway, we all must develop a strong and unwavering commitment to our  own personal success. This will help us survive the many difficult moments on the career journey, and force us to master new skills and to do things that we are not naturally comfortable doing. Ultimately we will master life skills.  One of my old mentors call career transition, the opportunity to participate in a life transforming event.

In future blogs we will explore the career transition process. I use the word process carefully.  I teach our clients that career transition is not a random act.  If it is approached in a careful, well thought out, professional manner, the odds of success improve dramatically. Unfortunately, too often transition is approached piecemeal. We focus on resumes, clever interview responses,, or whatever.  We lose focus and direction. We miss the big picture.

OK, so what is the big picture?  The big picture is that the career transition is a marketing endeavor.  We are not marketing pens, computers, cars, etc,  we are marketing you.  Like any other product we need to start with your features and benefits.  What do you bring to the party? Why should anyone hire you?  Unless you can present a clear, concise, and compelling value proposition, you have a major problem.  You have to be able to separate yourself from the rest of the herd.

Essentially, we can separate the process into three primary phases.

1. What problems do you solve for employers?  Why should they hire you?  The answer is that you can solve an important problem or problems for them.

2. Who has the problems that you can solve?  If you are a really good plumber, we need to find people with leaky basements.  Understanding this helps to narrow the search into much more productive areas.

3. How do we develop a clear, concise, and compelling value proposition?  It is not enough that an employer has a problem and you have the skills and experience to solve that problem.  We have do develop the skills and materials to show the employer that you are the solution.

Stay turned. In future blogs, we will tackle separate pieces of this process.  We will keep returning to the big picture, but gradually add more detail to help develop the process. 

There is an old joke about how do you eat an elephant?  The tag line is, a bite at a time.  We are going to eat the career search elephant one bite at a time.