Don’t feel bad about keeping your day job. The best time to look for a job is when you have one. A new career entails greater upheaval than a new job, so you should budget more time for a career transition. Keeping your day job gives you that extra time. While you have a job and don’t have to worry about your next paycheck, use the hours outside of work to conduct research, network, and search for the next opportunity.
Don’t feel bad about keeping your day job. The best time to look for a job is when you have one. A new career entails greater upheaval than a new job, so you should budget more time for a career transition. Keeping your day job gives you that extra time. While you have a job and don’t have to worry about your next paycheck, use the hours outside of work to conduct research, network, and search for the next opportunity.
Read biographies. If you have no idea what your new career should be, reading biographies will give you ideas, inspiration, and at least one route to try.
Conduct informational interviews. If you have ideas for a new career, talk to people currently in that field. People who are actually doing the job will have more insights than even the most exhaustive career research. Find out what to expect in compensation, work environment, and job growth. Find out what skills and personality are required.
Start your new career before your new job. If you’re in accounting, but you want to be in advertising, don’t wait until your first advertising job before you consider yourself in the advertising field. Read Ad Age and other advertising trade journals. Join advertising professional groups. Learn the lingo. Dress the part. If you can walk the walk and talk the talk of your new career, it will help you during the actual job search and for now it will reinforce in yourself the confidence that you are ready to make this transition.
Is Your Job Search Flexible or Just Unfocused?
As a recruiter, I’ve seen lack of flexibility on the recruiting side with employers clinging to every last detail in their ideal spec while perfectly good candidates get overlooked. As a career coach, I see jobseekers prematurely dismissing possible targets waiting for that perfect job. It’s true that you want to be focused in your job search (otherwise you dilute your efforts and come across as scattered and possibly desperate).
5 Questions to Test If Your Resume Is Recruiter-Proof
After recruiting in search and in-house for over ten years, I have read thousands of resumes. Due to sheer volume of resumes received and all the other things that vie for the recruiter’s attention in the hiring process – scheduling, interviewing, networking, reference checks, client debriefs, and more – the resume review process is ruthlessly quick.
Why Conventional Wisdom On Work Flexibility Is Always Wrong
In a previous post, I wrote about why employment statistics are always wrong. In a similar way, conventional wisdom on work flexibility is always wrong. It is impossible to generalize something that is inherently case-by-individual case. Therefore, any boilerplate advice or conventional wisdom is bound to omit a key consideration, underweight or overemphasize other considerations, or take too long-term or short-term of a view.
