It is our pleasure to speak with hundreds of prospective career changers every month. Through them we gain a direct understanding of what is going on in the market place. These calls run the emotional gamut from desperate to philosophical, depending on the candidate’s situation. Through this blog, I want to share some of these stories to help you understand that you as a would-be career changer are not alone. Many people share your concerns and challenges, and may be able to offer solutions. Discover the new you.
Whether they are executives, lawyers, people transitioning out of the military, or other professionals seeking support, our Clarity Program© uniquely facilitates this process, because we look at the whole person, not just the targeted title, compensation, and geography.
Let me tell you about Alex, who recently went through our Clarity Program©.
Alex has a successful career in business development for a data center SAAS company. This company required a fair amount of travel and glad-handing. He has been through a divorce. Has two children now more or less out on their own. And he thinks a lot about the future.
When he came to us he was unsure about his career direction. At 55, he was certainly afraid of ageism and that his career had plateaued. However, what he got through our Clarity Program© was a completely new understanding of what makes him tick and where he is going in life.
During the psychographic profile debrief, for example, he realized that he is a profound extrovert. He gains energy from interacting with people. He also realized that he needs support from others who are more attentive to details or better at following procedures. This might sound trivial, but for Alex it was a life-changing set of insights. He embraced this better understanding of his own persona wholeheartedly and was suddenly happier and more fulfilled.
We went on from there to explore his current constraints and discovered that these were largely in the Financial Independence and Business Success areas. We picked these apart and identified short-term measures he could adopt to improve on both of these key challenges.
Lastly, we worked on his personal strategic plan. We usually start with the Vision five years out, in other words, “where is this journey going?”, and once that Vision is fully rounded and clear, we then work backwards from there to see what the career changer needs to accomplish to realize the Vision.
In Alex’s case, he had a really big Vision to become a C-Level executive based in Switzerland earning $500,000 per year with a distributed world-wide team, etc.
Alex did a good job of rounding out his Vision to the social and personal side as well. We both felt surprisingly comfortable with his audacious target.
We realized many sub-steps along the way, for example, that Alex needs to actually spend time with C-Level executives if he ever hopes to be accepted as one. More specifically, he does not now have the financial management experience to succeed at that strategic level, so we concluded that he would need to get a “stepping-stone” job first to help him gain key skills and thus qualify for the big job he envisions.
All in all, Alex came out of the whole exercise energized and excited. He’s pursuing information interviews with executives who can help him build his network and, well, in his own words…
“Had I known ahead of time how powerful this is, I would have been jumping all over it much earlier. What I think might benefit you when you speak with potential clients who, like I, don’t know what they don’t know, is to offer to speak firsthand with someone who went through it.
I volunteer to be one you can call upon to be a ‘live’ reference.
Thank you for helping tremendously in changing my life!”
That’s the hidden benefit of being in the career management field: the warm appreciation we get when our clients succeed. Fortunately, we at the Barrett Group get a lot of this feedback, for which we are very grateful.
Peter Irish
CEO
The Barrett Group
