The global economic crisis has hurt all of us in various ways. If you've been laid off in recent months, you're feeling its effects very directly. It's discouraging to try to get a job while the news reports continue to announce massive new layoffs, and the resumes you send out lie buried in stacks on hiring managers' desks.
However, your job loss can be an opportunity to reassess your career, figure out what you want to do next, and take more control of your future. This was the message of an excellent workshop led by Jim Dodgen and Noelle Demas, called "Marketing Your Career in a Shifting Marketplace." The workshop was held at last month's Northern California regional AMWA conference in Asilomar. Jim is a career coach who mostly works with those who are recently laid off. Noelle is a medical writer who lost her "ideal job" 3 years ago due to layoffs; with coaching from Jim, she turned her situation around and, after a period of successful freelancing, is happily employed again.
Clearly, the days are gone when one company took care of you from graduation through retirement. While you may still meet people who've worked for one company for 30 or 40 years, their situation has little in common with ours. In fact, today's average worker changes jobs every 3 years. Furthermore, hiring managers now prefer the worker who has changed jobs every 3 years. In the manager's eyes, that's the worker with broad experience. The worker who's stayed with one company for 30 years is now a questionable bet, unless he or she moved around within the company, continuing to learn and grow.
Since you can't rely on a company to manage your career, you have to manage it yourself. As Noelle puts it, "If you don't have a plan, someone else will make your plan." And forming that plan for your career is a critical first step in creating the future you want. You need a strategy for the short term and the long term.
Jim pigeonholes jobs into three categories--the ideal job, the transitional job, and the survival job. Here's how he describes them:
Ideal Job: This is what you really want to be doing--"right livelihood," in Buddhist terms. The job that grabs your heart, where your needs and abilities align with those of your company. However, be warned that, at best, your ideal job will last for roughly 7 years. At some point, your soul-mate boss will leave, or your great company will be acquired and then probably messed up. Thus, the ideal job is not a single destination, but one of several destinations in a long journey.
Transitional Job: The transitional job is an OK place to be for 1 to 3 years. It serves a purpose, but should be intentionally temporary. It may be a stepping-stone job in a company or career that you want to break into, or a job that gives you a good shot at the job you want later. Just don't get too comfortable in a transition job and stay there--keep your focus on your longer-term goals.
Survival Job: Waiting tables, or temping in offices--these are often the stop-gap jobs. The reasons to take one of them are to keep you employed for sanity's sake, and to have some semblance of an income. However, you can try to align even survival work with your career strategy. For instance, don't wash dishes in the back of Denny's. Instead, take a job that is in the public eye, one that lets you meet people and build your network (more about that in a minute). And while you're in your survival job, develop or keep a positive, friendly attitude. This affects how people perceive you and how you perceive yourself and your worth, which is important as you continue your ideal job search.
In essence, you need to figure out what you want to become, and develop a plan that will get you there. Your plan may change, but you do need one. That's strategy.
Now what about tactics? What do you do to get the job you really want? The answer? Marketing.
Every job counselor says the same thing: firing off resumes at every job opening that passes by is an ineffective way to get a job, especially a job that fits your long-term plan. We could call this passive-reactive job searching. You wait passively for a job opening, then reach out and try to grab it as it goes by, much like a sea creature attached to a rock grabs lunch. True, many of us have gotten jobs this way. But the passive approach doesn't work very well in hard times, because the competition for available jobs is fierce. Passive job seekers are often left waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
Marketing yourself, or proactive job searching, starts with identifying (1) what you can offer, (2) what distinguishes you from your competition, and (3) who your target market is. Marketing yourself is no different than marketing a product, but the product is you.
To effectively market yourself, you must develop a good understanding of your assets--your skills and personal traits. To do this, you may want help from a career coach, a mentor, or a workshop at a local job seekers' support agency (available in most US cities and counties). If you know your strengths, you can market yourself more effectively, and with greater confidence, making your strengths available to companies that are looking for them.
You also need to understand the marketplace for people with your skills. This requires research. You may find that you need to go back to school, or that people with your skills are employed in industries you hadn't thought of.
When you know your skill set and your market, your job search should rely on two important techniques: informational interviewing and networking.
In the informational interview, you contact people who work in a field or company that interests you, and ask them questions to increase your knowledge and understanding. The interview can be done on the phone or in person. You can take this approach: "I'm exploring the kind of work I want to do, and I'd like to learn more about you and your work."
The informational interview is an extension of the research you've already done. These interviews should help you learn more about your field of interest and intelligently craft your career plan. You might make a connection through interviewing that leads to a job, but don't expect it, and don't approach it that way. Instead, be a researcher. Always thank your interviewees for taking time to help you. And if they're interested, keep them updated on how things work out.
Another key tactic used by the proactive job searcher is
networking. Networking is about meeting lots of people and staying in touch. You should focus your networking on people who work in your field of interest. A good way to do this is to attend professional association meetings in your target field. As a medical writer, you should belong to the
American Medical Writers Association. And there are many other organizations whose members work in the regulated life sciences, such as the
Drug Information Association, or DIA. Attend the meetings of these and similar organizations. Use the meetings to develop relationships with the members, and you will gradually build a powerful professional network.
I can suggest a short, but very helpful, book that explains the reasons for and practicalities of informational interviewing and networking. It's "A Foot in the Door: Networking your Way into the Hidden Job Market," by Katherine Hansen, and you can buy it for about $10 at
Amazon.com.
Why do you need a professional network? Because the people in your network care about your success, just as you hopefully care about theirs. Many of them also recognize that helping each other is far more fruitful than treating others as hostile competitors. And, at some point, someone in your network will need a writer. Given a choice between a stack of anonymous resumes and that smart, pleasant writer they've gotten to know at meetings--you--the choice is easy.
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Mitch Gordon has been a professional technical writer in the software and other industries for 16 years, and is now a freelance medical writer. He is working on his Masters degree in Regulatory Affairs, to be completed in early 2010. His specialties are regulatory and clinical documentation, medical device and diagnostics manuals, training materials, journal articles, slide shows, and posters.
