Before embarking on a job hunt, ensure which “you” is doing the hunt.
“Who are you?”
You would think this is an obvious question, but who are you is a tough one to answer.
I've worked in several sectors for several employers and done many interesting jobs. But writing it all down makes me sound like I know a little about a lot but not much about anything. That's not true.
It's important to distil from your career the essence of who you are and what you can offer to a prospective employer. At best, this is an opportunity to reinvent yourself and reinvigorate your career, so grab it with both hands. At worst, this means throwing away much of what you've done because it's irrelevant to a future employer.
The reality is that who you are is complicated.
Choosing which 'you' to present
Secondhalfers have a lot of experience, often in a lot of settings. The upside to this is that you are adaptable, have lots of experience, and can turn your hand to anything. The downside is that it can sound like verbal garbage to others as you talk about your career randomly. You need to be highly selective in what to present to potential employers and compress decades of experience into two pages only.
What do you want to do?
What you want to do next in your career is one of the most important things to understand now, as it drives everything you do in Project Job, starting with how you craft your CV, stories and profile, approach your job hunt, and even settle into a new role.
When I had to find a new job, what I did first was to consider my main options. For me, they were:
Do what I do today but as an independent consultant, working for others
Do what I do today but build my own consultancy business, hiring others as I go
Do what I do today as an employed consultant for an established consultancy
Do what I do today but for a large competitor to my organization
Do what I do today but for a smaller competitor
Do what I do today for a supplier to my company (my company hires from an alumni network)
Do what I've done in the past for any of the above options
Retrain and do something different
Many experienced Secondhalfers will have the same options as me.
These options boil down to three fundamental decisions:
Do I continue with my professional life, or do I make a change?
Do I work for myself or as an employee?
Do I work for a competitor of my employer or not?
I chose to continue with my professional life as an employee, remaining in the same industry but for another large company. These choices made the transition easier, though they restricted my options.
Changing Direction
Retraining or pivoting to something else in your career is a major decision and perfectly possible to achieve, but it takes planning and patience. For example, I have coached a few people in my career who have become teachers or lecturers.
In one of my outplacement workshops, I chatted with someone who planned to use his redundancy money to open a street food stall in London. Wonderful!
An important lesson I learned quickly from discussing with prospective employers is that nobody cares much about what you did over five years ago. That hurt. It felt like employers saw my decades of experience as irrelevant, but that's not how it turned out. Your stories matter, and your ability to learn lessons from the past and see dangers in the present is highly valued.
However, be warned that ensuring your experience remains relevant to others takes practice. You can't rely on old, outdated management techniques or technology that hasn't been used in a decade in interviews.
Summary - the three Cs
Whichever "you" that you want to present must be curated, consistent and current.
The curated you: Make sure that you prepare your storied, CV, application forms, LinkedIn profile and other sources of information such that they tell a story independently and together.
The consistent you: Don't mix personas. For example, suppose your CV focuses on your programming experience, your LinkedIn profile focuses on your project management experience and your stories about your passion for art. How will you explain this contradiction to others, and will they be curious enough to listen?
The current you: Ensure that what you're presenting is what your next employer needs, not what your favourite manager ten years ago needed. Once you accept that we all move on, you can let go of previous, irrelevant experiences.
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