Julie Farthing's Career Report

Julie Farthing Enters the Career Planning Debate

2012-01-20T18:52:00.000-08:00

Having spent over a year treading a new, more elevated career path, as I revitalise this blog, I think it is timely that I enter the great debate that has raged over the past twelve months or so about career planning.

Planning now appears to be the dirty word in career development. I am not sure whether Jim Bright started the debate, however he has certainly been creating a strong argument in support of the idea career planning is a worthless activity. The cynic in me says this has more than a little to do with putting a bigger stamp on his own work and his recently co-authored book on chaos career theory. I do have a lot of respect for Jim, mind you, and he raises some good points, but I think maybe the time has come for a more balanced view on the topic.

Planning is not everything; making inflexible plans is downright stupid. So much of what happens in the world is unpredictable, and we need to be able to change our minds as often as is sensible to do so, as new information comes in.

However, strategic planning has its place, especially in significant and long-term career management, as do a whole raft of other strategies. In this post I would like to raise some pertinent points about career planning that seem to have got lost in the great debate. My own career story is a case in point. For many years I worked at the pointy end of careers, assisting people who were long-term unemployed, or who had significant barriers that prevented them from pursuing the career of their choice, or, often, any career at all. I was highly successful at this: doctors from the Middle East became well-paid factory workers, young people with missing limbs found work in retail and office environments, older workers were provided basic business training - I could go on forever, the outcomes were as varied as the people themselves. Usually, my clients were grateful and happy to be working and thanked me for my help; if they didn't particularly like the first job they got, they came back and I helped them to plan steps that would move them closer to their dream job.I was a natural, I had no formal training but found I was very good at what I did and was rewarded by it on a daily basis.

Around the turn of the century all this changed - the government no longer cared whether people were happy in their work, or how we helped them; it was all about the numbers. At the same time I started to wonder if there wasn't more to this career business. What could we could do to assist our clients to have more meaningful lives? After all, there are so many opportunities, why shouldn't people have the opportunity to pursue their ideal career? External change creates exciting opportunities, but internal change - that gets us ready to respond to new opportunities - requires planning! After all, we can't become a doctor without doing the required training, we can't work overseas without the right permits, and we can't become rich without saving. Some things just don't happen on their own, and often we drown in all the necessary steps, not to mention other's negativity ('You can't do that!' 'There are no jobs in x!'), so we give up before we have really begun.Career planning is an important step in confirming a career direction, or indeed, in determining that a career direction is not realistic or likely to be achieved.

Around a decade ago I set about finding out how I could do more meaningful work with clients in a range of ways (all planned), by doing some post graduate courses (5 to date), by joining professional associations and having conversations with other career people who were thinking similarly, and by learning about a range of career tools, including getting accredited to use the MBTI (R), Strong II (R), and DiSC instruments. These days I use these sparingly but strategically, as part of my work with clients, but these are never 'all' I do.

Along the way, I began developing my own 'theory' about careers - it is not new (nothing is!), but it is about story, and how this can be used to assist people to see a shape to their lives and to reshape, further shape them. More about this is available at www.storypractitioner.blogspot.com and will be further expanded in a book that I PLAN will be completed this year (if I didn't plan it definitely won't happen!). In short, developing a sense of their life's narrative can empower people to see that things have happened for a reason, and that, whether this is conscious or not, often a result of some planning (especially the good bits).

Narrative works in many ways: linear, thematically, in uncovering patterns - we can use story to help us plan more appropriately, by highlighting ways we have sabotaged our own efforts in the past. Understanding our own career narrative helps us understand the past, identify with the present, and make plans for the future.

One of the mistakes Jim and the other proponents of 'no planning' make is spreading the idea that plans are concrete and that they are relatively static. Plans are a way of laying a foundation, of taking a look at life, of weighing up options. A good plan will create a more heightened awareness of opportunities (or Happenstance, as John Krumboltz calls it)and enables us to take advantage of them. For instance, around mid-2010 I noticed a sense of dissatisfaction with my own career, and started to explore this. I realised I needed a project of some kind, something with a bit of meat that I could get my teeth into.This was something new to me, an exciting new venture to contemplate. In August-September 2010 I started planning. I established the ingredients: something fresh, that would last at least 6 months, preferably a year, that I could put my mark on and see some real outcomes. It would be a career-related project, one that involved a team, not just myself. I waited patiently, talked to people, received encouragement from some and some weird looks from others.

Guess what! In November 2010, when the opportunity arose, I grabbed it with both hands. It was, literally, the job of a lifetime, everything I could have wanted, and more. Never before in my life have I been so specific about what I wanted - I was planning in full flight for something that had not even appeared by then, but planning enabled me to see it clearly in my heart and in my mind.

It is really hard to beat the experience I had in 2011, but I have every confidence I can do the same again. If I didn't believe this, I wouldn't be able to help others do the same.Assisting people individually to plan effectively, especially for long term, significant career change, is a hallmark of our profession, as is using the tools strategically and wisely. Along with this goes the ability to tap into their passions, to empower them with an attitude for success, and the confidence to take the appropriate steps, such as a course of study, new connections, taking new risks and trying things that take them out of their comfort zones. These are the core elements that work in combination to create career success.

More to come.

When Change Is Hard

2011-04-27T01:11:00.000-07:00

As a career coach I often wonder why people get into a rut in their life and work, still managing to exist from day to day but making little headway because they are clearly unhappy. I really want to motivate people in this position to take a risk, to dive into something new - after all, what is there to lose?

So what is my obligation when advising people who appear relatively happy with their current lives? They might still crave some excitement, but there is obviously a much bigger risk at stake, as there is so much more to lose.

I myself have been victim to rationalising that what I have is not that bad compared to other people, so why should I complain? Surely wanting more is just hedonistic, after all, we can't all have perfect lives. (Or can we? Is this even something to which we should aspire?)

The older I get the more time I spend contemplating these questions. Can we possibly aspire to have it all - the perfect partner, the perfect job, the perfect lifestyle?

In order to be my own coach first, today I am contemplating stretching my boundaries, but I am worried where it all might lead. I am reminded of a French film I saw not long ago called 'Leaving', in which an English woman married to a French doctor is desparate to find herself again, and in the end we are fairly sure she is going to go to prison for a long time.

How do we do something wild and different, that makes us feel alive again, while at the same time cutting down on the huge risk factor that might end up making our lives a misery? For most of us, taking the plunge into something new is so debilitating that we end up remaining in jobs, relationships and lives long past their use by date.

We do need to identify the need to make changes in our lives, but most of us don't travel far past this step. I am not suggesting we all fall headlong in love with something or someone new in the disaster movie kind of way; rather that we move forward with the help of a program that might be labelled 'planned sponteneity'. This method involves changing our lives one step at a time, by identifying the risks, reflecting and learning and building in new strategies as we go. It might not sound quite so sexy or romantic as our favourite movie, but at least this way we can check out the new territory one step at a time and even retrace our steps if this becomes absolutely necessary (it most probably won't, and soon you will be wondering what took you so long).

So what is your first or next step in your transformation? It probably relates to your biggest fear. I think I already know what mine is.

The Trouble With Careers

2011-04-25T16:01:00.000-07:00

Careers are curious beasts, they can spin off in weird directions without much warning. For example, you might come into work one morning to find someone has cleared out your desk for you, which probably means you have been made redundant (unless you have been found out for doing something illegal, in which case I have no sympathy). Or you might find out, as a colleage of mine did a few years back, that your body has said 'enough is enough', and announced through a stroke or heart attack that it is no longer willing to do what you have been asking it to do.

Sometimes, the change is positive, but the ramifications can be just as derailing. Take me, for example. You may have noticed that it has been around six months since I posted my last blog. This is because last November I had a career change - a big, unplanned, unexpected and unprepared-for career change that sent me spinning off in a new direction.

This new opportunity is something I have been calling 'the job of my dreams' since I first saw it posted. I simply had to have it. I went all out for it, even though I was not technically even allowed to apply for it - fortunately I was the only applicant! Maybe I scared everyone else off, or maybe this was a true moment of happenstance in my life.

The job itself - well if I told you the actual responsibilities you might wonder what all the fuss is about. And to tell the truth I would not probably be wanting to do this job for the next ten years - but it is what it represents that is so mindblowing. It is a culmination of everything I have been working through in my life, drawing on all my skills and interests, and challenging enough to maintain my interest. It is a brand new role, fresh and alive for me to put my mark on it, to show how I can create something and make it work.

Suffice to say that I have loved every minute of the past six months, I have not had one single day of not wanting to go to work, which is in itself a first. The best thing about my job is my team of 8 staff; the next is the management team that I form a part of, which is highly supportive and innovtive as well as providing me the time I need get on with my own job. The third thing is that there is a large a variety of components, and fourthly I guess that I am never bored - a big plus for me, as boredom is my enemy.

I do truly feel blessed to have had the opportunity at least once in my life to absolutely love everything about my job, and to get paid for it s well! Needless to say, with a more-than-fulltime job my work with private clients, along with my writing plans, have been temporarily shelved. I say temporarily because I know that one day I will go back to these, they are part of me now, even when I am not doing them.

So you might be wondering why have I called this post 'The Trouble with Careers'? I suppose I have been thinking about why careers are problematic for so many of us. When we have a great job, we worry about losing it. When we are unhappy with our job, we might fail to see and make the most of opportunities. We might even worry that we don't deserve a great career, or what we think is going to be a great career turns out all wrong.

Sorry if this all sounds a bit weird and complex, but what I really mean is that true careers are transformational - they change us, help us grow and become better people, and we make them happen by our attitude. This has reinforced what I call my life's work, which is summarised in another blog storypractitioner.blogspot.com - check it out if you want to see what I mean.

If I can backtrack a little to September last year - despite all the successes I had experienced in my career and life to that point, I was not a happy chicken. I was bored, restless, wondering if there was anything left in the world to excite me. I knew I needed a new challenge, some kind of project, but I had no idea what this looked like. I talked to everyone who would listen about this and got a lot of advice, all of which I ignored, and some job offers, which I rejected - I knew that I had to wait for the right thing to come along. And it did.

Was getting this job an act of desperation, and I am making more of it than I really should? (after all at the moment I am only on a contract for another three months). Was it just a lucky break, or true happenstance? Does it have something to do with being incredibly focussed? Or can we base this success on some strategic planning, networking and clarifying my career direction?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but I am loving my job, loving life, and loving me for probably the first time in my life. Am I fooling myself? Let me know, honestly, what you think?

If any of what I have said is meaningful to you, I want to know. For example if you have ever had (or currently have) your dream job - even if it was not a forever job, you know like that short term relationship that was a mindblowing experience while it lasted. Or is this something you likewise crave, so much that you are no longer counting down the days till your next holiday? And have you felt transformed in any way by your career? I'd love to hear from you.

Resume or CV - What's the difference and who cares?

2010-10-27T20:24:00.000-07:00

Do you want to be successful, or is failure your preferred option? If you prefer the former, whether you call yours a resume (which means 'summary') or CV (which roughly translates to 'my life story'), this personal marketing tool is an essential item in your jobsearch toolkit - but preparing it is fraught with a range of potential disasters.

Don't worry, there is plenty of helpful information at hand. A google search today revealed that 'writing a resume' provides over 21 million results, and 'writing a CV' over 17 million. Simply google 'resume' and you can choose from almost 1 BILLION results.Yet, despite the plethora of data and advice available, it is amazing to find so many poorly written resumes/cv's around the place. It can only be assumed from this that information does not necessarily lead to knowledge or ability.

I can't tell you how many articles and books I have written myself that provide truly outstanding information which, if followed, would lead to the production of amazing resumes. Sadly, none of this seems to have lifted the quality of resumes that are sent out in the hope of getting a job interview. (For those of you who do not know about my sense of humour, please take this last paragraph with a grain of salt.)

I guess it is like anything really. If your car develops a strange sound whenever you turn a corner, you have a number of options. One, you can ignore it and hope it will go away. Two, you can take a look, perhaps undo a few nuts and bolts and see if your untrained eye can detect the source. Three, you can ask a non-mechanic-but-more-mechanically-minded-than-you friend to take a look. Four, you can read the manual or google the problem and hope to get some kind of relevant answer. Five, you can book it into the mechanic and get them to fix it, for a price.

Resumes are a bit the same. Just like a car needs to take you from one place to another, your resume needs to take you to your next job. If it doesn't get you interviews, you can simply stop applying, or just keep sending it out in the vain hope that someone will eventually like it. You might decide to do some self-analysis, and check it over and see if there is anything your untrained eye can see that is glaringly wrong with it. You might show a friend or family member, but their love for you may blind them to glaringly obvious omissions or mistakes. You might turn to one of billion websites in the hope that you will find a diagnosis there for why your resume is not working. Or, you could get a professional to take a look at it, for a fee. I know which one I recommend, but maybe as I am a professional resume writer I am a bit biased.

But let's look at it a different way: your resume is a tool, it's only purpose is to get you noticed. If you are not being noticed, or are being noticed in the wrong way, you are closing doors to many (possibly great) careers. If your resume needs work, do you procrastinate for days, weeks, months or even years? Or, do you spend hours browsing the web, or spend inordinate amounts of time drafting and redrafting your resume? Or, do you see it simply as a task to be done and forgotten.

If you want to get a great resume, think about this - what is more valuable to you - your precious time, or a few dollars?

Sorry if this sounds like a thinly disguised ad for my services. Yes of course I would love to take a look at your resume and tell you what is wrong with it, and help make it really great if you are willing to trust me to do so (thousands have, so you are not taking too great a risk here).

Whether or not you use my services, or those of another professional writer, my main message is twofold:
1) We are all good at different things, and
2) No one can be good at everything.

People often ask me if getting help from a professional will guarantee that they will get an interview. Of course it can't, but which risk are you more willing to take? To me, it's a no-brainer.

(That reminds me, I must take my car in for a service, that knock in the engine is a bit of a worry...)

I hope your resume or cv is doing its job and opening the door to your next career. Which brings us back to the beginning ... if you really want to know what the difference is between a resume and CV, I'll answer that one in my next post.

Being part of the In-Crowd - whoever that is for you

2010-09-06T18:39:00.000-07:00

Who we hang out with says a lot about ourselves and what we value. Of course, sometimes we don't have too much of a say in this; the circumstances we find ourselves in are not always chosen by us, for one reason or another.

To relate this to working life, people who are unhappy at work are often not so much focused on the kind of work they are doing, but where they are doing it and who they are doing it with. Conversely, sometimes a job we would love to do is made less attractive by the kind of people who are already there.

Confused? I'll use myself as an example.

My work provides opportunities to engage with widely varying communities. Talking to a group of professional writing students last week about career planning really energised me, while talking to a group of sales managers a while back made me feel like slashing my wrists. This had nothing to do with the content of what I was presenting, but everything to do with the community I was delivering to. The students loved me, I loved them - I definitely felt like part of the in-crowd. The managers? Well I might have been from Venus, as any connection I felt was slim indeed.

Further on the matter of in-crowds, I have often fantasised about the idea of being a real estate agent. I have had a passion for this industry since I was about 9 years old when I visited my first display home. I was so excited that I immediately starting saving my pocket money (five shillings a week) with the hope of buying that house (cape cod, three gables, green-shuttered french doors, double lock-up garage) myself one day. The saving didn't last, unfortunately, as I soon developed a passion for vinyl (both records and clothes - it was the sixties!) which provided more instant gratification.

What stops me being a real estate agent? Obviously, I don't fit in with the real estate community. I could do the work, if I could do it my way, and if I could change the culture of the industry, given that I share none of its values (such as making a profit at all costs) and it shares none of mine (everyone deserves a nice house to live in). House buying and selling being a highly commercial enterprise rather than one in which social justice ever has a chance, and knowing that it would take a lot more than me with a placard to turn the tide on this industry, I run a mile from it instead. I simply don't have any sense of connectedness with the real estate community.

What has kept me in the career industry for over thirty years, even when I am feeling overwhelmed and defeated, is the people that form my community. Here, I definitely feel part of the in-crowd. While there are some members who would make great real estate agents (if you get my drift), in general career people are more like me - and I call them my friends, my allies, my mentors and confidants.

It makes sense that, when planning a career change, or even when thinking about it for the first time, we should all give conscious attention to the kind of community we want to be part of. Who is our 'in-crowd'? Where is our ideal setting for work? Which communities do we want to serve, or service?

Obviously within industries there are a range of communities. For instance, a banker might want to deal with large accounts, perhaps in a global organisation, or they may prefer to be locally based, such as in a community bank or credit union. Adapting this to other settings, it is easy to see how the communities of each occupation and profession would vary widely.

Of course, our community does not only consist of those we work with, but the clients we work for and the kinds of needs they have. Compare the in-crowds of a doctor working in a large metropolitan hospital, one operating in a small country town and another in a third world country - each of their 'patient' communities, along with their wider 'in-crowds' will differ.

Investigating the communities one is part of, and would like to be part of, are important elements in career planning. Sometimes, the biggest and most troublesome component of career change is in penetrating a new community - in fact, most unsuccessful career changes relate to a lack of visibility and acceptance, rather than a lack of work skills, knowledge and expertise.

Like John Holland said way back in the sixties, perhaps we should start any career decision-making activities by focusing on who we like to be with rather than what we like to do. Conversely, if we really like the idea of doing a particular job, we should spend some time considering how to become known, accepted and respected by that community.

So if you are considering a career change, or are finding work less than enjoyable, who is your in-crowd and why? I'd love to know.

Stop Working So Hard - Before it is TOO LATE!

2010-08-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

Synchronicity plays a large role in my life. I was thinking about this blog post when I woke up this morning and decided that it was going to be about the myth that we have all bought into about the need to be 'on the job' 24/7 and how we will all come to regret this in our later years.

Then, before I get a chance to start, my inbox pops up with the latest news from BNET with two articles on exactly this topic. Synchronicity at work? I like to think so.

The first article talks about how, like machines, the human brain needs time off work to rejuvinate. If we spend more than 35 hours a week working we will just start making mistakes that we then have to spend more time fixing. It also demonishes us for multitasking - no, it says, you cannot do five things at the one time, at least not to any reasonable level. We should go for a walk instead, which promotes our cognitive abilities. Ever hear or the term 'work smarter, not harder'? Well now there is evidence.

The next article I read encourages us to send us a message from our 100 year-old selves on our deathbeds, admonishing us at whatever age we are now for our lack of gratitude. I use this tool in career coaching, but with limited success - I say limited, because people find it revelatory at the time of doing it, but rarely change their patterns of behaviour.

Maybe we are meant to be miserable workaholics who are so wracked with guilt that we cannot begin to imagine just sitting back and enjoying the fruits of our labours. I despair when I work with a corporate slave who wants to change her life but then looks me in the eye and tells me point blank that there is NO WAY she can leave the office at 7pm - she would feel so bad leaving others behind to keep working while she went off to have a nice meal and a bath, maybe even watch a bit of telly, and then there would be the cold shoulder treatment for the next two days from her boss that would make life positively unbearable.

Those that know me will say this is definitely a case of pot and kettle. I have been known to send emails at midnight and/or at 5am. I have been called the multitasking queen, able to focus on three projects simultaneously. Perhaps this is all a ruse, and I am fooling myself and everyone. Perhaps I am really superwoman (... really, I am kidding). But perhaps I suffer less from overload, burnout, ill health and apathy because I am doing what I love just about all the time. Perhaps I am happy to work long hours because I feel I am doing some good for the world, or am at least trying to. Perhaps I am 'in the flow', living each day with meaning, passion and purpose. Perhaps there is some sense that what I am doing is a little bit important and that I can make a difference.

So the message for this month, my lovelies, is do a lot of what you love doing and try to avoid the things you really hate most of the time. It really is as simple as that. The trick is in recognising the difference, which takes self-examination, reflection, planning and persistence, which in turn might mean downing tools for a while to give yourself the time and space to do that. There you have it - the real secret to career success!

Asking a Monkey for Career Help - Why Not?

2010-07-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

A much-needed five week European vacation provided the distance from my work that I needed to regain perspective. It reminded me just how important taking time out is for body, mind and soul.

Unfortunately, taking a few weeks off from the daily grind is something most people believe is impossible these days. We have been conned into feeling that if we are away from our workplaces for more than a week, our jobs, livelihoods and lifestyles are jeopardised. In fact, the opposite is true - without taking time out to recharge we become stale, less competent and likely to make mistakes. Worse still, we become anxious and fretful, but don't see any of this until we gain some distance. Without gaining new perspective, ironically, many of us find our careers pulled from under us (if you don't know what I mean, ask Kevin Rudd - or you may already be saying, 'Kevin who?').

So if you are thinking you can't afford to take time off to get away from your normal surroundings and routine, I challenge you to rethink this now. How much money and time are you spending just propping up your current existence: eating out because you are too tired to shop or cook, gym fees that are hardly ever used, retail therapy or doctor's visits and pills?

Besides taking time off for some R and R, another way to revitalise is to review your career at regular intervals - once or twice a year, if you are not making significant changes. Obviously, if you are contemplating or going through a career change, then there are other things you will need to do as well.

One thing you can do is attend a careers expo. During the last weekend in Melbourne (that's Melbourne, Australia for international readers), I coordinated a stand at the Reinvent Your Career Expo, which is now in its third year. A group of career development practitioners volunteered their time to provide career check-ups and resume reviews, as well as conducting seminars and workshops on a range of issues. We know we were appreciated by those we helped, but we couldn't help everyone, and it was quite obvious to us that a lot of people are lost and confused about their career paths,and about how to get the right kind of assistance.

Our own little poll of people in a workshop we held in the final hour of the expo indicated that expecting to get actual career help from most standholders is, apparently, a waste of time. You might as well go to the zoo and ask the resident babboon. These people had come to the expo because they wanted or needed to do something different with their lives; they wanted something to excite them, to transform their careers - but had found little that was helpful.

They told us there were a lot of course providers wanting to engender interest in the programs they had on offer, others were selling resume or coaching services, some government departments were advertising themselves.

Tragically, no one (besides us) seemed interested in helping these people to actually reinvent their careers. All the other stallholders, apparantly, were self-interested and not concerned at all about the individuals who approached them. This is probably why our stand was always the busiest. Those of us who volunteered our time felt the real pain of those we talked with, and it was good to send quite a few people away with some concrete ideas and follow-up actions.

During and immediately following the expo, I have been wondering why people come to careers expos believing that they will get the answers to their career dilemmas. Most often, they don't and can't. Is it something to do with the way these events are advertised? Perhaps. Here are two reasons why I think careers expos fail to deliver on expectations.

1. Careers expos, like all expos, are essentially large marketing exercises. Instead of a 2 by 2 column in a newspaper, a billboard, or a radio or TV spot, expo organisers sell space for a limited period so that organisations and their potential clients can come together to achieve a common purpose. The reason this fails is because visitors expect something more, a community service perhaps - people to hold their hands and walk them into their new careers. Thus, they do no preparation, and wander from stand to stand hoping that someone will appear, god-like, with a job that is tailor made for them. Reinventing one's career is something that must start and end with the individual. Most of the work that needs to be done happens before and after the expo.

2. The second reason careers expos fail to meet expectations is that people who are wanting to change, improve, or just manage their careers, tend to seek help from all the wrong places. Unfortunately the career development industry - my industry, that requires post-graduate qualifications and experience - is still not understood at all well. This is compounded by the fact that many other industries use the word 'career' in their own titles and advertising, which misleads people into believing that they are career professionals.

For example, recruiters are not terribly interested in a candidate's career, other than whether it is a match for the positions they have to fill; nor do they usually know how to help them with a career change. (I say 'on the whole' because I have friends who are both recruiters and career counsellors/coaches, but these are exceptions to the rule). But people still complain about the recruiter who did not show much interest in them or empathy about their situation. Recruiters are not in the empathy business, they are in the business or getting candidates to pass on to their employer clients.

A course provider is not interested in a person's career development either, they really only want to fill their courses, so a person visiting their stand is a 'potential student',and if that person is uncertain or presents a difficult career dilemma, they will soon be relegated to the 'too hard' basket. This makes good sense; getting people into classes ensures their institution remains viable and they get to keep their jobs.

Do go to careers expos, they can be really good if you go prepared and if you know how to use them well. Go with the idea of 1) getting ideas that you can follow up on, 2) finding specific information on a career or job that you find interesting or 3) asking some direct questions that are targetted to the professionals you will be talking to. Don't go to an expo thinking you will be handed a job - you will most probably be disappointed. When it comes to managing your career or landing that job, hard work on your part is required.

There are no shortcuts, but getting the right kind of help can really provide a boost. Qualified and experienced career development practitioners are available - they may be a bit hard to find, but if you contact us at Career Dimensions we will do our best to make that part a whole lot easier.

Career tests - do they work?

2010-05-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

The Career Development Association of Australia's national conference was held in Adelaide a few weeks ago; one of the sessions I attended was a research paper delivered by a colleague who I admire greatly, Dr James Athanasou. The paper was, in many ways, a culmination of a lifetime of work, and the conclusion was that career assessments are incredibly unreliable - so unreliable, in fact, that Jim actually proposes that these should not be used until we ensure we have industry-wide agreement on terminology, criteria and metrics. The other message I got was that we should not be inflicting these inventories on the general public until testing of such instruments is much further advanced.

If anyone is qualified to make such bold statements about how the industry operates, Jim would have to be a top-ranker. Recently retired from his post at UTS; Jim was a pioneer in the career industry in Australia, and has had the opportunity to witness the development of career and vocational assessment instruments over the years. He himself developed one of these, the Vocational Interest Survey, over twenty years ago.

Jim's clear message at the conference - that career assessments do not work - was supported with several slides containing data to show how the various instruments currently and previously in use bear little resemblance to each other; also it was made evident that there is no identifiable correlation of career success, happiness,fulfilment, or even satisfaction (the hallmarks of our trade) with the completion of any one of these instruments. As a graphic image to reinforce his point, Jim revealed a picture of a young person walking along a road, being covered by a cloud of dust from a passing bus. The cloud of dust represented the career confusion created for the young person by the administration of an interest assessment. Add to this another paper by Dr Mary McMahon, another giant in the industry, who at the same conference argued that career instruments were created by middle aged, middle class white males (and which therefore have little relevance for a significant percentage of the population), and it seems like we are in dire straits.

Nonetheless Jim's talk included some hope that, one day, a career assessment tool may be developed that will be relevant and useful, however much needs to be done. Personally, I fear that this is a long shot, for many reasons, the main one being that careers, and life generally, are messy and unpredictable. Second, I doubt that any career instrument can actually cut throught the layers of a person's skin to get to the heart of the career interest gene, if in fact one truly exists. One further reason for my scepticism is that people on the whole still don't believe they can expect to have a job that is interesting, fulfilling or even just nice. Too often, this notion is consciously or unconsciously perpetuated by parents, teachers and other well-meaning adults who instill the importance of getting a 'real job' (whatever that means), rather than a job one really likes.

On the whole, by the way, parents tend to be appalling careers educators. As well as being to close to the game, for various reasons they have usually failed to manage their own careers effectively - a large percentage of Baby Boomers, having failed to have, or realise their own career dreams, don't know how to help their kids have them, while Gen X parents, whose start in working life was characterised by the boom and bust of the 80s and 90s, still live in fear of what might happen if one is not prepared financially, and in the process have made their children fearful of stepping off the corporate treadmill, even when this is shaky.It appears to be much easier for people of all ages to buy into a preconceived idea of how we should live and work, rather than to dare to be too radical and different.

Whatever the reasons behind most people's career choices, therefore, it seems that the least of these is to do with genuine interest in, or passion for, that work, therefor career interest assessments are never likely to have a great impact on people's futures, no matter how much time and effort is into building sophisticated tools.

So at this stage, it seems that all we can do is acknowledge the prevailing situation and continue to use these less than adequate tools in the absence of something really worthwhile, knowing that they are unlikely to enhance our clients' career decisions even if they take notice of the results.

Or, we can, on the other hand, encourage our clients to throw caution to the wind, to take risks with their careers and to become extraordinary, in one way or the other, with no safety net to provide a soft landing. As a professional, I have to ask myself which of these is the more ethical stance. Where does my responsibility lie? Others in my industry may disagree, but I am of the persuasion that people should feel empowered to follow their hearts, but what right do we have to tell them this? For example, what if following one's heart leads to financial risk, or a truckload of other risks for that matter? What if it causes arguments within one's household, or worse - disinheritance, expulsion, alienation? Are the costs of this method also too great, and if so, where does this leave the career development profession? I would be very interested to hear what other career development practitioners and our potential clients have to say on this very important issue, as the implications for our industry are huge.

What happens when you stop but the work doesn't?

2010-04-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I was doing some tidying in my office and I fell - one small error of judgement on my part and five subsequent seconds of chaos has led to three weeks of lost work hours.

Fortunately my injuries were neither sufficiently visible nor serious to put me out of action permanently, and to the world at large I was probably 'as normal', but every minute of my waking and sleeping hours since that time has been a reminder that my body is not functioning as it should. Pain also dulls the mind, so I have become haphazard and forgetful, which is perhaps more troubling than the physical issues of walking slowly and painfully, spending five minutes getting up from the couch, leaving something that has dropped on the floor rather than adding to my pain by picking it up.

Well I think I am finally 'on the mend', I have managed a couple of full nights' sleep and am thinking more clearly. I am sure my family is glad as well, I do not make a good patient! But all this strangeneness has caused me to wonder about people who have continual pain for long periods of time and permanent injuries to manage, not just for a few weeks but forever.

What does this mean to careers? I have helped many people with disabilities to find work and to adjust to newly developed restrictions, in a surface way. I have been aware that there is a huge emotional component to living with newly acquired disabilities as well, but I have never really thought of the myriad adjustments that must be made to tasks and in contemplating how to go about managing these when a person has real limitations to what he or she can do. Being a constant multitasker, for me doing many things simultaneously is important in getting through the day; doing them quickly is another way of ensuring life runs reasonably smoothly. A third element of this is that I have never before had to put off a task, simply because I can't physically do it at the time. Overthe past three weeks I have learned to put some things on hold, such as walking to the postbox, until the pain of walking is minimal. Having good and bad times in the day is not something that was part of my repetoire, in the past (and hopefully in the near future) I have wanted to do something, and gone off and done it.

All this has given me new respect for people who manage significant disabilities. I have been thinking a lot lately about what is really important, what activities must I continue to do to ensure I feel happy and fulfilled. If I had to limit myself, what would I drop out, what would I make sure I had the time, energy and ability to do, and how?

This brings me back to my work as a career coach; we all know that at the core of good career management is a sense that we are doing work that best fits with our personalities, values, interests. It might be a useful exercise for us all to reduce ourselves to thinking about just one thing we would need to do to make living worthwhile, and then add more things to the bucket in order - one would presume that the things added later would be less essential.

I'd like to hear if others try this exercise and what results they get from it. It would obviously relate to things other than work.

Impossible workloads - a career management issue

2010-03-03T17:51:00.000-08:00

This year, an increasing number of my existing and new clients have been asking me to help them address workload issues. They often introduce the subject as a need to manage their time better. The reasons for this vary. Typically, a staff member has resigned and not been replaced - so those who remain must share that person's workload. Another situation might be that a company diversifies, absorbs another company or adds new products or services. Unfortunately, the more competent negotiators or work avoiders (you know, those people who never seem to be around when volunteers are called for) are able to minimise the impact of this, forcing those with a greater conscience and/or work ethic to take a larger share.

Either way this invariably leads to:
1) A readjustment of an individual's role - this is usually done organically rather than by design and in cooperation with management, the person is simply expected to add new tasks or duties - it is rarely acknowledged as extra work though, and is usually shrugged off as 'we all have to pull our weight during this difficult period'. It remains hidden from the world until the position description needs to be rewritten, often because the person has resigned or become too incapacitated to do the job any longer. At which point management usually decides it is actually two (or three) people's work and the poor person who has left, miserable and disempowered, finds themselves replaced by an army or two.

2) The need to develop new skills and knowledge - from what people are telling me, this rarely involves being sent off for professional development, rather the person might be instructed to locate information internally, either by trying to establish methods from static data or out of date manuals. If they are lucky, there will be someone around who knows a little bit about the work who can be a sounding board (provided that the other person isn't also going through the same thing)

3) The requirement to work longer and longer hours. I am astounded at the hours being put in by blue and white collar workers - typical days for fleet controllers and fork lift drivers right through to accountants and recruiters are sometimes up to 16 or 17 hours! The saddest thing about this is that most of these people do not even like their jobs - the reason they chose them in the first place was so they could have a good life once the work day was over - now all they are doing is falling into bed between shifts.

As a career coach, this information is critical. For many years, I have been expounding the view of 'doing what you love' - I have said so on Channel 7 News and on Red Symons morning show. Now I have real ammunition with which to propel these words.

Those who know me well may be tempted to call me a hypocrite. After all, don't I typically work a 16 or 17 hour day? the answer is 'Yes, often I do.' But how many of those hours do I love my job? I think you know the answer to that one. Sure, at times I am grumpy, feel overloaded, and wonder how I am going to do everything. But I get them all done anyway (well the important things). Do I have good time management skills? I suppose I must, but I don't don't do the textbook time management stuff - I work with my strengths at the time, or else I manage myself in a way that gets me to the finish line on an essential task or project, and then reward myself with a task I enjoy.

The point of this post is not to discuss time management skills and how to develop them, it is to recognise that being overworked is systemic to the noughties, and that to cope with this we need to develop some survival strategies. So, here are the Top 10 survival strategies for working in demanding environments:

1. Do everything you can to work towards the goal of doing work you love – you will resent the work you are doing much less if it is a good fit with your passions, interests and challenge needs.

2. Learn to say 'No' or 'Not yet' when asked to do something outside your usual duties while you analyse how much work is involved, rather than saying ‘Yes’ and feeling it is your responsibility to make it work. At the very least, negotiate by requesting for some duties to be temporarily or permanently reallocated.

3. Ensure that 90% of the work you are doing is useful and essential to the core business – this is especially useful to remember when handling telephone and email communication, as so much time is wasted in these activities.

4. Set some milestones and announce your achievements regularly to show others you are doing important work that is vital to the organisation's success

5. Avoid any meetings that don't serve a strategic need for your work or your own career development

6. At the end of your (normal) shift, practice standing up and announcing that you are leaving, and do just that!

7. Keep important people in the loop as to what you have achieved, what is still outstanding and when this might be done if there are no significant interruptions. Once each week is good.

8. Do everything you can to cut down time spent on tasks by minimising mistakes and unnecessary duplications – taking a few minutes each day organising your workload may save you hours of work.

9. Spend at least ten minutes three times per working shift contemplating your job, what you are doing there and why, and how this is making your life more meaningful.

10. If none of the above steps works, actively seek out a new role with an employer who appreciates your unique attributes and who will see employing you as a great investment, on your terms.

Some thoughts on Career Punctuation and Life Planning

2010-02-04T22:53:00.000-08:00

Those who know a bit about me know I am also a professional writer. This has no doubt informed the title of this blog. I think it also provides a good analogy for my message this month.

Lately I have been pondering the credo of 'life is what happens while we are busy making other plans' and what this actually means. It seems that those of us who do plan (and I am definitely a planner and goal setter), tend to do this in a rather grandiose way. Well, why bother making plans if they are going to be about everyday things. We want some magic, something a bit edgy, don't we?

For instance,have you ever heard someone say, 'Oh yes, I have a plan - I want to have a really boring life with nothing much that happens, I hope to get married to someone I can only just tolerate, have one or two kids of average intelligence and looks, oh and I don't want to get promoted or have any kind of career satisfaction. Oh yes and I hope I don't get lots of money and free time to travel and do all the things I am interested in.' The sad thing is, all of these elements do characterise many of our lives. So much for planning!

Of course we should plan to have the superlative things in life, to have some great achievements, fantastic adventures, or to be seen as the best something-or-other or to win a great title such as President of the such-and-such club, or, in the spirit of that great pageant, to achieve something spectacular like 'world peace'.

But we also all know that, for the most part, our lives will in fact turn out to be quite ordinary. We will fail to achieve many or most of our grand plans, hopes and dreams. Most of us can easily identify with the words of Shirley Valentine: 'I have led such a little life. Why are we given all this life if we only ever use a little bit of it?'

Because we can always dream much larger than is realistically achievable, this does not mean we should not dream at all, it is just that we tend give them too much power.

I like dreaming, but I think this needs to be seen as an important activity that is intrinsically entwined with our humanity. When we realise that dreams can only inform our plans, we can start to make some headway towards living a great life.

Dreams don't care that we only exist for around 80 years or less, or that we only have human power not super powers. So, in acknowledgement that much of life is reasonably uneventful, how do we make it unique, satisfying and fulfilling? The answer may lie in the notion of 'career punctuation'.

Career punctuation is both an activity and a list of surprising results - these both relate to living an insightful and more satisfying life. No one person's life can be spectacular every day - even Ghandi and Lawrence of Arabia had lots of ordinary days in which little happened (just watch the movies if you don't know what I am talking about).

Regarding the activity part, what I am proposing is that each of us should factor in some 'exclamation days', some 'question mark days', some 'full stop days', even some 'quote days'. I won't go into what all these days mean here, as these form the chapter of a book I am writing, however what it means in effect is that we should actively program some days into our schedule that are extraordinary. For example, someone who dreams of climbing Mt Everest might plan on doing some mountain climbing activities for one weekend a month, or one month each year. The person who dreams of becoming a best-selling author might dedicate their time to writing a chapter of a novel each month. These smaller 'punctuation' events can be celebrated in their own right. Eventually, some of us will achieve the bigger dreams, but even if we don't, there is usually enough joy along the way to more than compensate.

Regarding the surprising results part - well, we all have achievements and interesting things happen when we least expect them. We need to acknowledge these points in our lives - for example, someone thanks us for a small favour, or we become the recipient of an unsolicited award. Perhaps we win a competition we never thought achievable - this happened to me in my twenties, when I won a work table tennis competition against all odds - this was such a surprise to everyone that the whole staff discounted it as a complete fluke - I still remember it with pride thirty years later. Giving ourselves credit for these results makes our lives that much less ordinary.

Perhaps thinking about career punctuation will make us all a bit more satisfied with ourselves, our lot in life, and our achievements, and make us realise we are just that little bit more remarkable than we might have led ourselves to believe. And, along with that, we have a new measure for career success - so that can't be too bad!

Where is a good Change Agent when you need her?

2010-01-15T10:29:00.000-08:00

A friend and colleague, assisting me through a crisis of sorts this week, reminded me that a personal strength of mine is that I am a change agent. Sometimes I don't feel this is a strength. Sometimes it is quite tiring, because I find it hard to just sit and accept things the way they are, even if they appear to be working OK. There is always the need to be revising procedures, searching for new projects, finding a place for a great idea to be introduced or implemented.

The world needs change agents, because we see better ways to do things, we invent new ways to get things done, we see outside the box of 'what is' and focus on what can be. We motivate people to change as well, which is usually a good thing.

Change seems to be an integral component of emerging industries. Environmentalists are change agents who want us to interact more kindly with our natural world. People in the IT industry are constantly inventing new systems, languages and applications to both drive and adapt to tne contemporary world.

Career development practitioners are change agents as well, because we want people to have better lives, more meaningful careers, to move on to something that is an improvement on their current situation.

Change is not always warranted, but, too often people fight change when it is useless to do so. There is an inbuilt survival urge to maintain the status quo (even when the status quo is less than desirable) - this is the law of equilibrium which has a strange power over us. The trouble is, it is an outdated response and one that is unsustainable in a constantly changing world. It also requires a great deal of effort - as soon as we get outside our comfort zones, whether or not we have instigated this ourselves, we subconsciously pull ourselves back a little.

It would be easy if we could go to sleep at night making a wish for how we wish we were, how we wish the world was, and wake up in the morning a new person with a new life, but this rarely happens outside of fairy tales. Real and lasting change is thus often neither fast or radical, but slow and steady, more often than not implemented as two steps forward, one step back.

On the surface, career change can sometimes happen quickly: we are made redundant, we acquire a disability, we find ourselves uprooted from our world due to a small or large scale tragedy as happened in Haiti this week.

In reality though, these changes are often pragmatic and practical. As a change agent involved in careers work, I have come to realise that my ways of working does not suit a lot of people. I can help people to prepare a fantastic resume, I can coach them through the interview process, but this is only fulfilling (for me, and, I would argue, for them) if these activities are related to real change.

What is real change? I describe this as transformational change, which involves examination of one's dreams, hopes, real strengths, areas of challenge, and aiming for a career-life that is wonderful rather than simply workable. We often use phrases like 'unlocking potential', 'finding a true vocation' etc. but these have sometimes unpleasant connotations, for example, that we need to be constant striving and/or giving up our human desires in order to have a 'proper' career or 'true' vocation.

Not so, in fact, career change using the transformation model means not struggling, and not giving up anything (well anything that is really important) except for belief systems that are past their use by date and habits that are less than useful. Unfortunately, in a consumption-driven society we have all been conditioned to see some things as essential - the big house, car, holidays, expensive clothes (or at least a constantly changing wardrobe). This thinking traps us, it locks us into dollar signs on employment contracts, into sacrificing more important things like spending time with friends and family, time in the garden or even just time sitting still and doing nothing.

It is the way of the world that some people will be rich and others poor, that some living environments will be friendly and others alien, that some people will live long and others will die young. But what if you spend thirty years building wealth, only to find it disappears in a blink because you placed too much faith in a particular investment? What if you work out at the gym seven days a week for twenty years, only to become a paraplegic slipping on a just-washed floor? It happens.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't save money or exercise sensibly, but it is all a matter of proportion. So much of what we do is unconscious, related to coping with life rather than living. Ask yourself, how much am I doing something because it is beneficial, and how much am I doing it through habit, stress, anxiety, compulsion? Above all, how much am I doing something to avoid doing something else?

As a career practitioner I ask myself, my clients and those around me the hard questions. I do not tend to be happy with superficial answers to these questions, especially when these are dismissive or an attempt to control what is really an uncontrollable environment. Real change begins within, and happens only alongside a healthy dose of self-belief. As we learn to appreciate the small improvements we are making each day, we see change as a positive thing, something to be treasured rather than feared.

So how do you identify a change agent? These people will become your best friends as the world becomes less stable; look for people who are tolerant, open-minded, non-judgmental, risk-takers, who make the most of opportunities, and who are not worried when things don't work out as planned. Change agents do not need to see others fail so they can be seen as winners, as only when everyone is winning does positive change actually take place.

The rise of the career futurist

2009-11-30T12:56:00.000-08:00

I have been reading a lot lately about futurists and wondering whether or not I can and should call myself one. As a career practitioner, it seems that I am, more than ever, focusing on the future and trying to keep ahead (as much as I can) of trends in order to best help my clients and to inform my writing. After all, most people realise they can't change the past, but they might have some control over what happens in the time that is yet to come.

Not wishing to sound pompous or to just be jumping onto the latest bandwagon, before deciding whether or not to add this to my already lengthy repetoire of job titles I thought it best to do some research. So I started by googling the word 'futurist' (and wondering at the same time if there is something more futuristic that I should be doing, but hey, google has been pretty good to me up till now!).

I found out some interesting stuff. This site came up number one in the search results: wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn. The first thing I learned was that a futurist is 'a theologian who believes that the Scripture prophecies of the Apocalypse (the Book of Revelation) will be fulfilled in the future' - hardly a 'new' label then, how disappointing!

The next definition was: someone who predicts the future. How eclectic? Smacks of crystall ball gazing and John Edwards. (Who hasn't got an opinion on 'Crossing Over'?).

And the next: futuristic - 'of or relating to futurism; "futurist art"'.
I also learned, thanks to Wikipedia, that 'Futurist is an album released in 2005 by Alec Empire'. In fact, many songs, works of art, plays and movies of late have included 'futurist' somewhere in their titles, themes or blurbs. But don't get too excited yet, this term was 'first used to describe an artistic movement in Italy around 1910 that tried to express the energy and values of the machine age'. Dig a little further and you will find out that 'Futurism was a 20th century movement in art which encompassed painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music, architecture and gastronomy. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti initiated the movement in his Manifesto of Futurism, published in February 1909'. So, paradoxically, something that is futuristic may well describe things from the past.

Next link: 'One who studies possible futures'. How universal and ubiquitous! This could be interpreted to mean that anyone thinking about the future can be a futurist. All you dreamers out there, listen up - you have a new jazzy title!

In mainstream society, however, the term 'Futurist' has become quite serious, as commercial, political and community organisations alike struggle to ensure their own futures as well as cope with ever-changing needs and demands. Most of us are probably most familiar with this term as it has come to be used in the business world. In this sense, a futurist is someone who has some claim to being able to accurately advise on trends (and/or about how trends operate) to help enterprises plan for the future. (Sadly, it is this notion on which the Futures Exchange is also based, and we all know how successful that has been!).

But futurism is not all smoke and mirrors. I am an advocate in that I believe focusing on the future provides us with ample scope to fix something that is not working, change our lives for the better, and work towards achieving something we feel it is important.

For a career practitioner, this is a much more interesting and challenging way to work with clients. It also keeps us on our toes, and focused while we find ways to encourage and motivate our clients to build happy futures for themselves, through a combination of envisioning and practical tasks, a positive attitude, and a dose of faith.

Those of us who would like to call ourselves career futurists have some excellent role models on which to base our work. Well-respected and credentialled members of society who call themselves futurists are growing in numbers each year. Organisations, some of which operate in virtual space, are being set up at an alarming rate, and they are attracting people from diverse fields including geneticists, environmentalists, climatologists, public benefactors, defence personnel, politicians and community group leaders.

Australians who call themselves futurists include Bernard Salt (KPMG Partner) and Dr Marcus Barber (www.lufg.com.au.) Maree Conway (www.thinkingfutures.net) comes close to calling herself a futurist; Maree 'works with people in organisations to enhance their long term thinking capacity and to use that thinking to build stronger strategy.'

I have heard these and other futurists speak and what they have to say is compelling.I can relate to a lot of what they say to my own work, and there is definitely a level of commonsense in approaching careers work from a futuristic perspective. I will stop short of stating that everyone in the career development industry is, or should be, a futurist, however in order to be the best at what we do I believe we should all be treating the future with respect.

In my 'working definition' of a futuristic career development practitioner, he or she would be, at least:
1. assisting clients to create their 'preferred' future, to examine trends in their present occupation and industry, or the one they wish to enter, in order to help them make adequate preparation, including ongoing learning and skill development,
2. working alongside clients while they elaborate their future vision while at the same time being aware of what may happen in the wider world context (in order to minimise and manage the risks involved while taking advantage of the new),
3. taking time regularly to update their own skills and practices in order to continue being innovative in the way they go about doing their own work so that they can meet present and future needs,
4. engaging in activities such as ongoing reading, attending seminars and webinars, listening to and watching relevant broadcasts and reflecting on how these can inform best practice, and
5. contributing to an ongoing futures conversation by providing up-to-the-minute expert information on the world of work of today and beyond to media representatives, politicians, business or community leaders, or members of the general public.

If the future doesn't inform our practice, then, I would argue, we cannot really call ourselves career development practitioners. While no one can actually predict the future, it would be irresponsible of people like me not to incorporate some well-researched speculation into our programs.

And if you are likely to be seeking the services of a career practitioner, either as an individual or as an organisation, perhaps you should be asking them whether they consider themselves a futurist as well.

What's the story?

2009-10-30T06:25:00.000-07:00

This week I have been preparing a workshop for the International Career Conference in Wellington, New Zealand on 20 November. The topic of this workshop is about using narrative, or story, to assist people to create career change.

I have always loved stories. An avid reader when I was young, I literally devoured books, continually exhausting my parents with requests for new paperbacks. At eleven, I started saving my pocket money to buy them myself: Anna Karenina and the two volumes of War and Peace were the first on my list(this was obviously my Russian phase). Before that it was the English classics, such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Shakespeare took hold of me at around 12, followed by sci-fi (everything John Wyndham wrote), detective stories (Agatha Christie - who else?) and the poets - Robert Frost, TS Eliot and Banjo Patterson etc. saw me through to fifteen or so. Flaubert (Madame Bovary), Albert Camus (L'Etranger) and other assorted French writers caught my attention a bit later (part of my appetite for anything French. I must have been an unusual child.

These days I rarely have time to scan a page or two of a feature in the weekend magazines (although today I managed to read a piece on James Packer's life from last week's paper from beginning to end, each paragraph increasing my belief that the world really has gone mad, one person with all that wealth to squander on not just one luxury cruiser, but two, and of course then there is the stable of jet planes, houses in all the right places, la-de-da!).

I digress. But, like most people I guess, with each year that passes I seem to be able to find less less time (and inclination) for reading huge tomes (except for the years spent as an undergraduate in my early thirties). The fact is, I have been provided with stories aplenty to maintain my interest, real life ones which are really so much more fascinating, and yes, stranger, than fiction.

The stories I am talking about are truly remarkable - stories of escape from war torn regions and senseless torture, of starting life all ovaer again in alien countries with absolutely nothing, often not even a photo of the loved ones they had left behind, or who had perished. I've heard people talk about how they have bounced back and reinvent themselves after injuries and illnesses, financial ruin, disgrace and shame (eat your heart out, James Packer), in ways that are more than a match for the fictional characters that pervaded my youth.

Many of these stories have been told by people who have come to me as career counselling and coaching clients, some as government employment services clients, so I can't relate any of these here. Others are private clients, whose confidentiality I must also respect. But they are stories of adventure, crime, passion, anguish, death and despair, and above all, victory.

I am sorry that I have missed so many marvellous opportunities to document at least some of the stories I have been so privileged to hear. Hopefully one day I will get to write a work that incorporates some elements from them. The world certainly could do with some real life role models - everyday people doing extraordinary things, to rekindle our faith in humanity if nothing else.

Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about the link between story, narrative and career. I have been thinking that, for each person, there is the story about their life and career, and there is another story that sits in the background, that actually drives us, tells us what is important, and guides us as we make important decisions. A lot of the time, when we make a choice about something, in the final countdown we say we decided on instinct. I am wondering whether this instinct is actually something that is primal, deeply rooted in our psyches.

Telling stories is part of who we are, our human-ness. Modern life has robbed us of the power of the story, through corporatisation, socialisation and taboos that tell us what we can and can't say, verbally and on the page or screen. To a large extent, we have lost our instinct, our roots, and we don't even realise it because in this high-paced world we do not allow ourselves the time to reflect and explore the inner recesses. Everything is show, our careers are all show. If you disagree, and think your career reflects the person you truly are, let me know!

Job Career and google - gobbledegook or a whole new language

2009-09-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

I am a career development practitioner. What does this mean to you? If you are like most of the world's population, probably not much.

This is a problem. It is a problem for you, because without knowing about me and my colleagues and what we can do, you might be missing out on something unbelievably good: a better time at work, personal fulfilment,a feeling that life makes sense, and yes - achieving your dream career.

This is also a problem for me, and for my fellow career development practitioners, because without you, we have no job, we can't earn a living, and we can't achieve our own career dreams. We feel unfulfilled and dissatisfied.

The career development industry itself is just a little over one hundred years old. A man called Frank Parsons is the 'father' of our profession, establishing the first career assessment in 1907. Mr Parsons was the first person to show people that they could choose their own career. This was radical - prior to this time young people were handed a career, either through inheritance of the family business or because this was the work available in their area, and this was pretty much it for the rest of their lives.

Parsons' career planning tool was simple but effective, so effective in fact that career development practitioners still use a version of this today. Basically it involves establsihing career interests, working styles and personal preferences (or values) which become key career ingredients for that individual, then turning these into tangible career goals and developing a plan to make it happen.

Behind this simplicity, there is a lot of skill required. Unfortunatley, career development practitioners often do our jobs so well that we are almost invisible in the process. Let me explain.

If you are successful in your career and you have had the help of a career career adviser, counsellor, or coach, the success is all yours, and you will have put in some effort to make it happen. But perhaps a career counsellor was there at the start, helping you to sort through the haze of options, or to help you come up with ideas in the first place. Perhaps a course adviser was there to help you to make sense of the courses on offer to help you become accredited. Perhaps a career coach kept you motivated during times you thought it was all too hard.

These days, career development practitioners often take on all these roles to help you through each stage of transition. Obviously, to have all these skills requires a lot of training and ongoing skills development.

Even if you haven't ever actually seen a career person, our very existence has helped cause a mindshift. I am sure you would find it difficult to conceive of a time when you would have been stuck in a job for life, whether you loved, hated or loathed it. For this, you can thank the career professionals who have pioneered this way of thinking and working over the last hundred years.

If you have always thought that career people 'just work in schools', 'help with course selections', or 'are just for people who are not coping at work', it is time to think again.

You probably aren't aware that there are a lot of career development practitioners working from home offices or in co-located offices around the world. Alain de Botton's recent book called 'The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work' has a chapter on career counselling in which he describes the work of one rather quaint career development practitioner. Whether this is a good or bad advertisement remains to be seen; certainly people moving into this field come from a range of backgrounds and age groups, this is not addressed in de Botton's book.

OK, so what does all this have to do with google?

Given that the career development profession needs to be more widely marketed, and given that the Internet is arguably the best marketing tool in the world today, I am concerned that google may well dictate the future of our industry.

I have a website; it describes what we do accurately. Visitors often comment on how appealing it is, how easy it is to read, how professional it looks. They often decide to use our services. However, for every person who finds the site thousands of others do not. This is because the google search engine does not understand the words we use. Admittedly, it relies on input from searchers, who don't know what career development is - are you beginning to see the problem?

So, let's say you want to change jobs or figure out what you want to do with your life. What words do you enter into the search engine? Well, our recent research into google searches show that 'career advice' (which does not describe what we do at all well, nor does it sound attractive to most adults), 'resume help' and hardly sensible phrases like 'job career' and 'get help job' are popular. Should I change the words on my website from 'We are a group of career development practitioners' (which is the term we want you to know describes us and what we do) to 'We are job career people'?

Doctors, accountants and lawyers don't have these problems because their industry terminology was set well before the advent of internet search engines. But for the career development profession, we must now decide whether we should be led by the almighty cyberspace god Google, or to find some other way to get our message across.

I doubt that will happen, the Internet and google are far too entrenched. So just be aware that although we might just have to bow to public pressure and call ourselves 'career advisers', we don't actually give advice, but what we do give is so much more useful to you - we help you manage your working life in a way that reflects your individuality and prevailing needs at any one point in time.

How important is workplace fit?

2009-09-05T17:28:00.000-07:00

After they receive instruction on how to take details of a job vacancy, one of the first things new recruitment consultants are taught is how to find the ideal candidate. They are taught to shortlist based on these three criteria:

1. Can they do it? (i.e. the job, which means they have the skills, experience and other requirements outlined)

2. Will they do it? (i.e. do they appear highly motivated, will they be happy to do the tasks, work at that level etc.)

3. Will they fit in? (i.e. to the workplace, with the team, will they be accepted by others)

Of all of these, No. 3 is the most difficult for recruiters and employers to get right. I am sure we all agree that a person who is a good fit will be happier, work more productively and probably stay on longer than someone who is a square peg in a round hole.

Anecdotal evidence from colleagues in the recruitment industry indicates that the 'best fit' criteria is fraught with difficulties. I would be interested to receive some real data if anyone knows of any research into this area.

The issues created by 'bad fit' employees include: excessive days off, poor performance, poor output, teamwork hampered by delays, right through to conflict and outright sabotage, all of which have a devastating affect on the bottom line.

So why do hirers get this wrong so often? There are many reasons, and not all of these can be blamed on human error. For instance, a couple of years ago, before the GFC, there simply were not enough people applying for positions, let alone ideal ones.

Now, we seem to have the opposite problem. With excellent candidates coming up for a large number of jobs, it is often a matter of choosing between two or more who seem equally ideal. While a recruiter may tend to place too much emphasis on assessments and impersonal processes, they will generally have a greater ability to remain objective than their client, who is more inclined to
- recruit 'people like us'
- look at the past, trying to fill a former employee's shoes, rather than focusing on how the replacement can help the organisation move forward into the future
- spend time gaining 'intelligence' from people in their network rather than relying on their own gut instincts
- select the person who interviews best (i.e. who appeals to their ego), rather than the one who is more likely to work hardest and most productively

Compounding the 'fitness' issue is that ephemeral issue of blatent discrimination - yes, it still exists, just look around a range of workplaces with eyes open to find real evidence that we have not become any more tolerant of people who are different to us, or aware of the negative results of prejudice. This is now more heavily cloaked, because we are sufficiently savvy to avoid expressing openly discriminatory remarks. With Recruitment 101 firmly embedded in their brains, no real data to work with, and an unwillingness to harm their relationship with their client,recruiters are often left to second-guess the 'best fit' part, usually based on their own preconceptions, on a hunch of how their client thinks.

So what is the best way to determine 'best fit'? I believe this has less to do with the physical attributes of the candidate OR their cultural background than with the prejudices of the hirer. For example, do they avoid hiring someone from India or Venezuela because of a preconceived idea about the standard of work they can expect, or the time they might front up after lunch? Do they fail to see the possibilities in any female candidates because 'they have always had a male' in the past? Do they eliminate a person who worked in an organisation they don't respect, when the reason that person left that organisation was they didn't like the way it was being run?

What if 'best fit' was based on a whole different set of criteria, such as 'having a different viewpoint' to the interviewer, or that the person who interviewed least well was potentially the best person for the job? This can happen, because often the person who is most keen on a position is the one who is most nervous and who, as a result, performs less well than someone who really couldn't care less if they got the job or not.

Arguably, one of the biggest interferences in the selection process is superificial appearances. Few people will admit to rejecting a candidate because he or she was too short, too fat, too 'foreign' in appearance, but it still happens, and far too often. If job interviewers had to 'blind interview' each candidate, so that they were unable to make assumptions based on presentation, would they be more successful? Obviously, because then they would have to focus on skills, strengths and the best fit of worker to the job. Add a voice distorter to hide accents and we are beginning to develop a recipe for success. And building a culture that welcomes people who might not look, dress, act and speak exactly the same as everyone else in the workplace will ensure that they fit most comfortably into the team. In a golbal, dynamic and unpredictable climate, giving the 'best fit' criteria a complete makeover is one step in the right direction for the bottom line and the future of an organisation.

Climbing the ladder - a good career strategy?

2009-08-05T16:59:00.000-07:00

Traditionally, climbing the corporate ladder was the sole definition of career progression, especially for people working in medium to large organisations. This made sense - for much of the twentieth century the way to success, and bigger incomes, greater benefits, higher professional standing, was essentially via the incremental pathway.

Of course, the tendency to promote on the basis of seniority or 'runs on the board' meant that many people were made managers who should not have been. They didn't really care or weren't sufficiently invested in the work of the organisation; they had no people management skills; they were in the wrong place (or the wrong career); they were actually good at their job before their promotions but then became really bad at it once they stopped being operational. The 'climbing the ladder' rationale was reinforced by the idea perpetrated by society at large that promotion was good, staying in the same place (or worse still, being demoted) was bad, meaning there was a lot of pressure on people to work beyond their level of competence.

Since the 1980s, the ladder has become a strange beast. In many industries it became shorter, or a few rungs were pulled out, leaving a gaping hole between the workers and the top echelon. In others the bottom rungs started getting wider and wider.

Above all, long slim ladders were replaced by lots of short stocky ones. Many large organisations were cut up into little pieces, which by default led to flatter structures. Take for example the Commonwealth Employment Service where I used to work - there were 16,000 people and three levels of management within individual offices, let alone the regional offices, the zone offices, state and national offices. Come 1998 when the government of the day closed up most of the Department that provided the infrastructure for the CES, and farmed out the services it couldn't simply get rid of to the myriad Job Network agencies, anyone who wanted to stay in the industry found themselves back down the ladder by at least a rung or two.

Strangely, the middle management rungs seem to be growing back. Maybe organisations have realised these people did something after all? Maybe with everyone under so much pressure, they have found that burnout is becoming a huge economic and social issue, and their answer to all of this is to give some people responsibility for other staff members.

The new management structure bears few similarities to those of eras past. While some of the old inappropriate beliefs about worthiness related to position have disappeared, there are plenty of new things to worry about. If you are one of the people who is working in a middle management role, you are probably wondering whether it is everything it is cracked up to be. You are probably finding that you are expected to be 'operational' as well as 'managerial'. You probably find it hard to delegate to those under you because they are already so busy that there are no more minutes to be squeezed out of them. You probably find that when one or more of your staff take a few days off without notice (commonly now accepted as legitimate 'mental health days') you can't get in replacements because the budget won't allow it, or because no-one else knows exactly what that person does. You possibly end up doing their work plus your work, or find yourself making a decision between the two.

As a middle manager in today's working environment, who do you go to when you are not coping? How do you manage competing priorities and crisis situations? Are there resources in your organisation, or even externally, to call on? Or are these simply non-existent. What does all this mean for your career satisfaction and personal success?

Cast your vote in this month's poll so we can start to build a clear picture of the issues middle managers face, and so that we can start addressing them.

Reinvent Your Career - For Adults Only

2009-07-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

This month is a highlight in the career diary, the Reinvent Your Career Expo is on in Melbourne over the weekend of 11 and 12 July. My career practitioner colleagues and I will be providing free career health checks and resume checks. We will also be offering a smorgasbord of seminars on a range of career and job search issues. You can find out more about this on the Career Dimensions web page as well as at www.reinventyourcareer.com.au.

This expo is aimed at adult career changers and so I have been thinking about how adults manage the career change process. It is understandable that students often have trouble working out what to do with their lives; after all, everything is new to them and they don't have a lot of life experience to work with.

But an inability to make good career decisions, and to take appropriate actions, is not restricted to young people. From my experience working with people across the lifespan and in diverse industries, I think we have a long way to go before we can say we do this well. I count myself in this group, if I am being honest. I have often found career change to be a difficult process, fraught with complications and strong emotions.

I have had trouble leaving a job that I have been unhappy in. I have dithered and delayed moving on to something better due to what I have argued is loyalty when really it had more to do with fear of the unknown. I have cried myself to sleep at night wondering why I didn't seem to fit in, couldn't develop a particular skill or do a task as well as others around me, and have berated myself for being lazy and not putting in enough effort when really I was simply a square peg in a round hole.

Does this sound familiar? What is even stranger is that, despite my ability to help others dream about the perfect career and then take steps to make it happen, I still struggle with all these issues myself. So it appears that knowledge does not always equal power!

But there is good news. Career change can and should be a highly positive experience. If we can identify the real issues, rather than laying blame on a difficult boss or boring tasks, we can begin taking real steps to move on.

At each stage in life we have different needs, and recognising when our needs have changed, or when we are no longer challenged in a particular work environment, is the first step to reinventing our careers.

Why don't you give yourself the opportunity right now to work out what it is you need from your career, and then measure these against your current job role. Are you feeling stressed, unchallenged, or just plain bored? You probably need to move on. If this sounds like you, why not start with one small step? See a career counsellor! Reply now and find out how you can reinvent your career.

The poll we conducted in July 'Have you ever stayed in a job past its use by date' attracted 7 responses - 6 Yes and 1 No. On the basis of this poll (which admittedly isn't truly representative of the population at large), 85% of people have stayed too long in a job. Which is quite believable, based on my own anecdotal evidencesourced from direct contact with clients.

How important is a university degree when competing for jobs?

2009-06-03T00:15:00.000-07:00

My career coaching work provides me with plenty of opportunities to meet highly talented people, across a wide range of industries and occupations. Most of the clients I see are dedicated and hard working with a fantastic array of skills that are in hot demand, demonstrated by their high incomes and excellent appraisals. Not one of the people I have seen over the past two years has taken their career for granted, using every opportunity to increase their employability along the way.

I can easily see that these people have been assets to their employers in the past, and are respected in their current workplace. They will have no trouble getting a new job when they are ready to move on in their career - or will they?

Well, they shouldn't. But something quite strange has happened over the past two to three years. Subtle developments in thinking have caused a mindshift about what makes a candidate worthwhile, with the result that a university qualification is now viewed as a baseline requirement. This phenomenon may have been instigated by recruiters, desperate to find a surefire shortlisting mechanism. It may well be driven by new leaders who have all emerged from tertiary studies and can't imagine why anyone would dare step out in the world of work without at least an honours degree. Perhaps companies are sensing that they need to gear up to meet global workforce expectations. Certainly the universities themselves, hungry to fill their places and obtain their government funding, are getting the message out that you are nobody without an alumni pin to call your own.

So where does this leave my wonderful clients, some of whom have TAFE diplomas, others have clocked up twenty or more years in the workplace, many of whom have mortgages, families and other general living expenses? They would love to be able to fit in time to study, but a university degree takes quite a lot of time and effort to achieve.

There have been moves to address this perceived inadequacy in our over-thirties workforce. Universities have begun offering postgraduate vocational qualifications to assist people with work experience to obtain higher degrees, and to eliminate the need to obtain a Bachelor's degree before doing so. However, those who have a Graduate Certificate in something wonderful are still being told that these qualifications don't count for an awful lot if there is no undergraduate degree behind it.

This worries me on a number of levels.The first relates to advising my clients. Do I tell them to drop their wage to that of a casual waitperson like those who are twenty years younger are doing? Is this even feasible? What may happen at the end of a three or four year degree? Will creeping credentialism attack again and place them in the position of needing a Masters qualification?

My second level of concern relates to the obvious repercussions on our society as a whole when we no longer value what people have to offer in the workplace. Apart from the obvious economic and social implications, and the demoralisation that goes with rejection upon rejection in the job application process, there is a lack of fundamental commonsense about what makes the world turn.

I have a number of university qualifications, including an arts degree, and I am happy to have these achievements behind me. But they don't make me better at what I do, they are just one form of learning that make up my work intelligence.

I wonder just how realistic it is to expect a person who works a 60 hour week to add a study program into the mix. What are the damaging effects of having overworked, overstressed, underconfident workers who feel that nothing they have done or can do will be good enough.

It is definitely time for a rethink. If society at large is going to insist that everyone needs a degree, then we need to make it possible for them to get one. If we decide it really isn't that important, we need to rethink the messages we are telling ourselves and others.

Do recruiters really do background searches on jobseekers?

2009-05-08T23:21:00.000-07:00

On speaking to a range of recruiters in the Melbourne area during the period March to May 2009 I found quite a mix of responses to this question. It is generally accepted in the industry that recruiters have, wherever possible, performed background searches. Let's face it, they can't rely on candidates to tell the whole truth about themselves. In a majority of cases this is not a problem, and who would want to know every little detail anyway? However, the cost of hiring an employee is significant and recruiters have their own reputation to uphold.

Traditionally, background checks have involved consulting referees prior to forwarding a shortlist of suitable candidates on to a client. In addition, more informal approaches have been adopted as well, such as speaking to someone who knows someone etc., which was always easier in smaller communities and niche areas than for general roles in large cities. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are all easy-to-access social networking sites which make background searching easier. Others come and go as well, but at the present time these are the sites accessed most often.

So, we know they do it, but just how widespread is the practice? Unsurprisingly, the responses I received fell into always, never, and sometimes categories. Those who fell into the 'always' category tended to be involved in recruiting for professional and executive roles where the stakes are high - large salary packages are involved, high levels of responsibility and security access. This was particularly widespread in niche areas such as finance, IT and HR.

Graduate recruiters would not admit to undertaking background searches across the board, but most agreed that they often perform background searches in the final stages, and especially when they are trying to separate two or more excellent candidates. On-hirer firms also fit into the ‘sometimes’ category. Recruiters who sometimes performed background checks using social networking sites were those sourcing candidates for retail, hospitality and administration roles, while those in the 'never' category included short term filling and blue collar roles. The reason cited most often was a lack of time, urgency of placement and the belief that it didn't really help with their decision making process.

Interestingly, of those who said they always performed background searches, around half said this did not make the selection process easier. It seems that if you dig deep enough you will find the dirt on anyone. Working out exactly which dirt relates to employment suicide is another big issue, with responses as varied as those undertaking the searches.

Generally it was accepted by all recruiters that jobseekers should be cautious about what they show the world. Examples abound describing how successful candidates have had offers withdrawn after an unfortunate activity was recorded and/or applauded on Facebook. The recommendation is that, if you must use the web to document everything you do and are, keep that one private, for viewing by your friends only. Have another that is available publicly to present you in the best possible light.