How can you find the right job?
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We often find that when people are starting out in their careers, they have a sense of uncertainty about which career direction, or even which job, is right for them. And it’s perfectly understandable, as you’re being presented with a huge range of possibilities at the time when you have the least work experience and are therefore least likely to have developed a strong sense of career direction.
And this leads to stress. Much in the same way as having too few choices can be stressful – you feel confined with no options to move forward – having too many choices is also stressful. It’s easy to choose between two options, but when you’re choosing between hundreds or thousands of job possibilities, the pressure to make the right choice can induce a sense of panic!
If you feel this way, the first thing to realise is that this is perfectly normal and not unusual. As you move from education into work, the choice becomes rapidly more overwhelming. At 14, you had a handful of options when choosing which subjects to study, by 16 this rises to dozens of choices, and when choosing a degree or a company to work for, to hundreds of choices. Yet you get very little support and guidance as to how to manage this increasing pressure to make the “right” decisions. So it’s fair that by the time you are looking internally with thousands of jobs available, it can be overwhelming!
So how do people typically approach this problem? If you’re like the people we work with you’ve probably heard of jobs other people have got and thought “I’d love to have known about that!”. And you throw yourself into reading the internal ads to learn about upcoming roles and career paths. But you find the internal ads very generic, and soon start to despair of making any sort of sense of the multiple options…
Happily there is a simple solution, but it means a paradigm shift in how you approach the task. The system of ‘review all the options and weigh them against each other’ can’t cope with the sheer number of possible choices.
Instead of starting with the thousands of possible jobs, start with yourself. Work out what it is that motivates you and what your best skills and abilities are, that let you succeed in the work that you love to do. By looking for patterns in the work you enjoy and the results you deliver, you can get a good understanding of the type of work you will enjoy doing in the future. Get really good at articulating the kind of tasks you’d love to do – ‘I like bringing order out of chaos’ or ‘I love bringing people from different areas together to work as a team on a project’ or ‘I love delving into data to crystallise the key facts and make it simple for people to take the right action’.
The next step is to then go out and educate your organisation and network about what you are looking for. Don’t start with job ads, start talking to people. Make a habit of educating the people that you meet on a daily basis, dripfeeding what your strengths are, what you love doing, and your best contribution to a team. Once you start doing this, you’ll find that people think of you when opportunities arise that you’d be interested in, and you start to attract a steady trickle of career opportunities.
And if you’re actively seeking a change in role, it’s easy to step up your marketing efforts to find your next opportunity. First activate your immediate network by telling people that you’re looking for a role, and what you love doing. Next, start setting up opportunities to visit people in areas of the business you don’t know much about. You can do this by looking for contacts at meetings or in your email inbox, and by initiating short chats about what you love doing and ask people to suggest roles you might be interested in investigating further. Talking to people is a great short cut to narrowing your job search, to be more focused!
There’s an additional benefit, too. This approach often allows you to identify emerging opportunities before they’ve been advertised, as people talk about possible upcoming opportunities. You can ask for introductions to the hiring manager, and get the chance to speak with them about a role before it’s been advertised. You can have informal conversations – which mean that you start to feature on the manager’s shortlist – and you find out what he or she wants before sending in an application. And I promise you, having roles you love brought to you by your network, and getting a foot in the door ahead of other applicants, is a lot less stressful!
TAKEAWAY
Stop trying to review all of the job opportunities out there. Instead, get clear on your strengths, and start to use people as your search engines!
And this leads to stress. Much in the same way as having too few choices can be stressful – you feel confined with no options to move forward – having too many choices is also stressful. It’s easy to choose between two options, but when you’re choosing between hundreds or thousands of job possibilities, the pressure to make the right choice can induce a sense of panic!
If you feel this way, the first thing to realise is that this is perfectly normal and not unusual. As you move from education into work, the choice becomes rapidly more overwhelming. At 14, you had a handful of options when choosing which subjects to study, by 16 this rises to dozens of choices, and when choosing a degree or a company to work for, to hundreds of choices. Yet you get very little support and guidance as to how to manage this increasing pressure to make the “right” decisions. So it’s fair that by the time you are looking internally with thousands of jobs available, it can be overwhelming!
So how do people typically approach this problem? If you’re like the people we work with you’ve probably heard of jobs other people have got and thought “I’d love to have known about that!”. And you throw yourself into reading the internal ads to learn about upcoming roles and career paths. But you find the internal ads very generic, and soon start to despair of making any sort of sense of the multiple options…
Happily there is a simple solution, but it means a paradigm shift in how you approach the task. The system of ‘review all the options and weigh them against each other’ can’t cope with the sheer number of possible choices.
Instead of starting with the thousands of possible jobs, start with yourself. Work out what it is that motivates you and what your best skills and abilities are, that let you succeed in the work that you love to do. By looking for patterns in the work you enjoy and the results you deliver, you can get a good understanding of the type of work you will enjoy doing in the future. Get really good at articulating the kind of tasks you’d love to do – ‘I like bringing order out of chaos’ or ‘I love bringing people from different areas together to work as a team on a project’ or ‘I love delving into data to crystallise the key facts and make it simple for people to take the right action’.
The next step is to then go out and educate your organisation and network about what you are looking for. Don’t start with job ads, start talking to people. Make a habit of educating the people that you meet on a daily basis, dripfeeding what your strengths are, what you love doing, and your best contribution to a team. Once you start doing this, you’ll find that people think of you when opportunities arise that you’d be interested in, and you start to attract a steady trickle of career opportunities.
And if you’re actively seeking a change in role, it’s easy to step up your marketing efforts to find your next opportunity. First activate your immediate network by telling people that you’re looking for a role, and what you love doing. Next, start setting up opportunities to visit people in areas of the business you don’t know much about. You can do this by looking for contacts at meetings or in your email inbox, and by initiating short chats about what you love doing and ask people to suggest roles you might be interested in investigating further. Talking to people is a great short cut to narrowing your job search, to be more focused!
There’s an additional benefit, too. This approach often allows you to identify emerging opportunities before they’ve been advertised, as people talk about possible upcoming opportunities. You can ask for introductions to the hiring manager, and get the chance to speak with them about a role before it’s been advertised. You can have informal conversations – which mean that you start to feature on the manager’s shortlist – and you find out what he or she wants before sending in an application. And I promise you, having roles you love brought to you by your network, and getting a foot in the door ahead of other applicants, is a lot less stressful!
TAKEAWAY
Stop trying to review all of the job opportunities out there. Instead, get clear on your strengths, and start to use people as your search engines!