Build Your Job House

When the phone isn’t ringing, your email response to job inquiries falls silent and you can’t seem to get anyone to pay attention to you, it’s time to start some serious construction and pull out the tools to build your job house.  I don’t mean career tools, like resumes, cv, references and updating your LinkedIn profile.  I mean some serious, Extreme Makeover stuff that will make you visible in a crowd of hundreds of thousands of job seekers vying for your position in the recruitment line up.

It’s not enough that you are taking all the necessary steps to ensure you are up-to-date, well informed and frankly “networking” your butt off to look for a job.  This time is unlike any other so you need to adopt an approach that is a little more like you are a contractor.  You need to blueprint your career path.  Like a builder laying the foundation for a house, you need to be very strategic about your approach when looking for a job.  Hanging out in coffee houses, meeting up with similarly unemployed friends and calling it “networking” is not going to help you no matter how many lattes you drink to convince yourself otherwise.  Mapping out your plan of action like an architect would in building a house, including where you would ideally work, what your office or work environment would look like, how you would dress, who your co-workers would be, if you would supervise anyone, what projects you would likely work on, etc. are some of the ways you can begin to pull the pieces together and create your ideal dream job house.

Creating your vision of what you want your house to be is as important if not more than going through meaningless actions we take to busy ourselves with the job process only to wonder why we are not getting any further along or getting stuck in jobs we really don’t want. If  you have a job, you worry about whether you are going to keep it and if you can hold onto it long enough to pay off your bills. Or, if you are looking for a job your are worried that you’ll never find one and you may be forced to take any job just to pay the bills.  We are all in the same boat no matter which side of it you happen to be sitting.  Worry is a part of the process but if you have an outline, a blueprint or a plan, you are less likely to get caught up in the worry and more likely to stay focused on the mission.

Building a job house is constructing and in some cases, deconstructing what you have or don’t have from what you really want.  Designing your career is about who you want to be and what you really want in life and then finding those opportunities and people that will help you get there.  Like constructing the design of your house, how big your garden will be, what color your kitchen tiles would be, and how you would arrange your bedroom, you need to pay as careful attention to the details that make up your job house in much the same way.

Being particular is being wise. Being selective about your work relationships and situations is key. Not settling for those that don’t advance your career goals is ultimately a waste of time and will cost you in the long run. We all need to make a living but there are a lucky few who don’t.  Try to build on what you’ve created whether you are graduating school or are embarking on a career change or you are looking for ways to broaden your skills. Building your job house is like building your dream house, you need a solid plan, a good contractor, the right materials, a budget, timeline and mostly, a vision of what you want and the rest will fall into place.

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/lisakayeglj

Follow greenlightjobs on Twitter http://twitter.com/greenlightjobs

And, on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/pub/2/abb/508


Copyright © 2024 Lisa Kaye - HR & Business Consulting - The Career Rebel

Share This:

High Growth, High Tech, All We Want is High Touch…

The world is beckoning, “Come Tweet With Me!”  MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter have become household names in a span of a few years. The rate in which change happens used to be measured in decades, five year plans and terms of office. Now, we measure change in nano-seconds, or at least as fast as your last tweet. What is happening to the world of communication?  I don’t know if we should all be excited or mildly confused?   We know we have grown into a community that wants it quicker, faster, shorter, smarter, that we can boldly declare ourselves the “Now Generation!”

At no other time in our history, have we been a more global nation than we are today. Communication technology is a wonderful thing.  It will ultimately be responsible for creating some of the new wealth and booming economy and be responsible for an increase in jobs in the coming years like no other time before.  Rapid growth leads to rapid change.  Rapid change leads to more change, and that’s when we start to notice something has disappeared?   When high growth meets high tech we lose the one thing that really impacts us all, high touch.  In a world where picking up the phone is as novel a concept as flying to the moon on your lunch hour, we are in jeopardy of losing our ability to speak and to communicate on a unique and personal level.  

It’s great when we learn how Ashton Kutcher has just received 1 million  followers on Twitter, but what does that really mean to anyone? It’s not to say that the information technology era we are living in is completely void of “personality.”  But, we are missing the high touch that comes with personal contact.  Whether it’s working along side your co-worker or having dinner with your family, we all need, and on some level require, the presence of another living being. Virtual, does not need to imply “virtually no interaction.”  

The job market for example is changing with technology in a whole new way. Classified job advertisements in newspapers, circulars and trade magazines was for decades the standard way anyone ever used to really learn about jobs. Search firms, temporary agencies and your “personal network” provided other resources until the emergence of technology came to pass.  Today with the emergence of job boards, which have surprisingly only been around in the last 10 years, will soon be considered archaic, and will be replaced by new business practices such as “Twitter, SimplyHired, LinkedIn and other equally non-personal ways to seek out your next career.

Don’t get me wrong, running an online recruitment business for the past 8 years, I’m all for faster, better, smarter myself.  What I fear in all this is how far we are ultimately removing ourselves from personal interaction. The ability to converse with someone when we actually do get in front of an interviewer or more importantly, when we actually land the job is as important an aspect of communication that our last post on Facebook.

Is all this high growth, high tech without high touch the way the Now Generation prefers to communicate?  If so, it is a sad commentary on the evolution of media and communication in this generation no matter how remarkable our efforts to excel technologically have proven.  But, I am more hopeful than that.  In this world of faster, better, smarter we have ourselves to blame when we relay too heavily on technology to be the primary means by which we communicate.  The brilliance in this movement is the way in which we can reach the masses with our message so directly and so precisely hitting our exact target. What we need however, is to not lose sight of the one thing that matters, our ability to relate on a personal level to the people we physically come in contact with in all areas of our life.

The good news is that I know someone will create an APP that will turn the virtual into the personal, as we continue to enjoy our cyber-latte, reading our morning Kindle.

And here’s to embracing the “Now Generation!”

Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/lisakayeglj

Follow greenlightjobs on Twitter http://twitter.com/greenlightjobs

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/2/abb/508


Copyright © 2024 Lisa Kaye - HR & Business Consulting - The Career Rebel

Share This: