How Satisfied Are You with Your Title?

Where are you in your executive journey? Are you satisfied?

Have you ever paused to give this serious thought?

If you are just starting out, are you ambitious and driven? Or perhaps you are frustrated by a glass ceiling and eager to move up?

Are you mid-career, more interested in security, and improving your retirement assets? [See Are Your Career Assets Frozen? for more information on this subject.] 

Are you nearing the end of your career? Perhaps you are seeking that opportunity to perhaps give back. Are you ready to help others with what you’ve learned, and still earn a reasonable income?

Or has your career journey been unexpectedly interrupted by redundancy, illness, or other life events? Maybe you are ready to get back into the game?

Where you are in your career trajectory matters, of course. It also matters where you want to be. This and more need to be considered to ensure you are satisfied.

That is why our career change program begins with our Clarity Program. Through an assessment of each client’s particular journey, we examine where they are so far. We examine the current state of their career while we consider their aspirations for the future. We do all this because one size does not fit all. Each Barrett Group client receives support from a six-member team of career specialists. Our team helps our clients to lay out the plan. And then we help execute it. The end goal, of course, is to achieve the client’s particular career aspirations.

And achieve them we do!

During the first two weeks of July 2022 for example—in the middle of the summer—SIXTEEN clients landed their next roles. [See our Frontline Reports for details.]

What kinds of roles do our clients desire?

Here is an overview of the titles achieved by our clients in the first half of 2022.

We are pleased with the heavy senior executive tilt you see in the graphic above. It accurately reflects the kind of clients we have supported for more than three decades. It is also true that positions with the same title may be incomparable because the content may vary considerably. If you are interested in a better understanding of what executive titles actually denote, then the US Chamber of Commerce offers a useful overview (with somewhat of a US-bias). [See Source.]

And executive titles are in transition as well, of course, as new roles evolve and become more popular. Perhaps you have seen “Chief People Officer” supplanting “Chief Human Resources Officer,” for example. There may well be sound reasons for some of this evolution. Forbes investigated this trend some years ago in an interesting review called “Those goofy new executive titles…” (2019) [See Source.] Our clients benefit from our 31 years of experience, not only achieving the title they desire but the job content and compensation as well.

Are you satisfied in your role?

On the subject of content, imagine if you will, that you can define your own role. Consider if you could add the duties you enjoy and subtract those you feel less enthusiastic about. This is a benefit available to our clients because fully 75% of the executive roles we help clients land come through the unpublished market. This is often where fixed job descriptions and compensation guidelines do not exist. This allows the candidate to have a significant influence on all of these parameters. Why? Because he or she is being hired to address an issue or opportunity, not to fill a specific, pre-defined role. [See Why Are You Peering Through a Keyhole at the Market for Executives? for more information on the unpublished market.] 

How is your compensation?

The same is largely true for compensation, too. Indeed is an on-line job board and example of the published market. It is interesting to note that the average executive income noted by Indeed are considerably lower than what our clients typically achieve. [See Source]. This makes sense to us because a job board publishes pre-defined jobs with pre-defined compensation packages. This is in comparison to the unpublished market, where the focus is on solving an issue or addressing an opportunity. Compensation in the unpublished market is generally not pre-defined. [See Payback Time for more information on what our clients earn.] 

Besides, our clients again benefit from our negotiation support and can virtually always add tens of thousands of dollars (or euros) to any initial offer.

We encourage you to give your career the serious thought it deserves—after all, it is usually your largest pre-retirement asset by a long shot.

If you are finding it difficult to achieve your professional aspirations, give us a call. We believe our clients are entitled to be satisfied with their titles, job content, compensation and with their work/life balance… and we know how to make those dreams come true.

Peter Irish, CEO
The Barrett Group