Asking a Monkey for Career Help - Why Not?

A much-needed five week European vacation provided the distance from my work that I needed to regain perspective. It reminded me just how important taking time out is for body, mind and soul.

Unfortunately, taking a few weeks off from the daily grind is something most people believe is impossible these days. We have been conned into feeling that if we are away from our workplaces for more than a week, our jobs, livelihoods and lifestyles are jeopardised. In fact, the opposite is true - without taking time out to recharge we become stale, less competent and likely to make mistakes. Worse still, we become anxious and fretful, but don't see any of this until we gain some distance. Without gaining new perspective, ironically, many of us find our careers pulled from under us (if you don't know what I mean, ask Kevin Rudd - or you may already be saying, 'Kevin who?').

So if you are thinking you can't afford to take time off to get away from your normal surroundings and routine, I challenge you to rethink this now. How much money and time are you spending just propping up your current existence: eating out because you are too tired to shop or cook, gym fees that are hardly ever used, retail therapy or doctor's visits and pills?

Besides taking time off for some R and R, another way to revitalise is to review your career at regular intervals - once or twice a year, if you are not making significant changes. Obviously, if you are contemplating or going through a career change, then there are other things you will need to do as well.

One thing you can do is attend a careers expo. During the last weekend in Melbourne (that's Melbourne, Australia for international readers), I coordinated a stand at the Reinvent Your Career Expo, which is now in its third year. A group of career development practitioners volunteered their time to provide career check-ups and resume reviews, as well as conducting seminars and workshops on a range of issues. We know we were appreciated by those we helped, but we couldn't help everyone, and it was quite obvious to us that a lot of people are lost and confused about their career paths,and about how to get the right kind of assistance.

Our own little poll of people in a workshop we held in the final hour of the expo indicated that expecting to get actual career help from most standholders is, apparently, a waste of time. You might as well go to the zoo and ask the resident babboon. These people had come to the expo because they wanted or needed to do something different with their lives; they wanted something to excite them, to transform their careers - but had found little that was helpful.

They told us there were a lot of course providers wanting to engender interest in the programs they had on offer, others were selling resume or coaching services, some government departments were advertising themselves.

Tragically, no one (besides us) seemed interested in helping these people to actually reinvent their careers. All the other stallholders, apparantly, were self-interested and not concerned at all about the individuals who approached them. This is probably why our stand was always the busiest. Those of us who volunteered our time felt the real pain of those we talked with, and it was good to send quite a few people away with some concrete ideas and follow-up actions.

During and immediately following the expo, I have been wondering why people come to careers expos believing that they will get the answers to their career dilemmas. Most often, they don't and can't. Is it something to do with the way these events are advertised? Perhaps. Here are two reasons why I think careers expos fail to deliver on expectations.

1. Careers expos, like all expos, are essentially large marketing exercises. Instead of a 2 by 2 column in a newspaper, a billboard, or a radio or TV spot, expo organisers sell space for a limited period so that organisations and their potential clients can come together to achieve a common purpose. The reason this fails is because visitors expect something more, a community service perhaps - people to hold their hands and walk them into their new careers. Thus, they do no preparation, and wander from stand to stand hoping that someone will appear, god-like, with a job that is tailor made for them. Reinventing one's career is something that must start and end with the individual. Most of the work that needs to be done happens before and after the expo.

2. The second reason careers expos fail to meet expectations is that people who are wanting to change, improve, or just manage their careers, tend to seek help from all the wrong places. Unfortunately the career development industry - my industry, that requires post-graduate qualifications and experience - is still not understood at all well. This is compounded by the fact that many other industries use the word 'career' in their own titles and advertising, which misleads people into believing that they are career professionals.

For example, recruiters are not terribly interested in a candidate's career, other than whether it is a match for the positions they have to fill; nor do they usually know how to help them with a career change. (I say 'on the whole' because I have friends who are both recruiters and career counsellors/coaches, but these are exceptions to the rule). But people still complain about the recruiter who did not show much interest in them or empathy about their situation. Recruiters are not in the empathy business, they are in the business or getting candidates to pass on to their employer clients.

A course provider is not interested in a person's career development either, they really only want to fill their courses, so a person visiting their stand is a 'potential student',and if that person is uncertain or presents a difficult career dilemma, they will soon be relegated to the 'too hard' basket. This makes good sense; getting people into classes ensures their institution remains viable and they get to keep their jobs.

Do go to careers expos, they can be really good if you go prepared and if you know how to use them well. Go with the idea of 1) getting ideas that you can follow up on, 2) finding specific information on a career or job that you find interesting or 3) asking some direct questions that are targetted to the professionals you will be talking to. Don't go to an expo thinking you will be handed a job - you will most probably be disappointed. When it comes to managing your career or landing that job, hard work on your part is required.

There are no shortcuts, but getting the right kind of help can really provide a boost. Qualified and experienced career development practitioners are available - they may be a bit hard to find, but if you contact us at Career Dimensions we will do our best to make that part a whole lot easier.

Job Career and google - gobbledegook or a whole new language

I am a career development practitioner. What does this mean to you? If you are like most of the world's population, probably not much.

This is a problem. It is a problem for you, because without knowing about me and my colleagues and what we can do, you might be missing out on something unbelievably good: a better time at work, personal fulfilment,a feeling that life makes sense, and yes - achieving your dream career.

This is also a problem for me, and for my fellow career development practitioners, because without you, we have no job, we can't earn a living, and we can't achieve our own career dreams. We feel unfulfilled and dissatisfied.

The career development industry itself is just a little over one hundred years old. A man called Frank Parsons is the 'father' of our profession, establishing the first career assessment in 1907. Mr Parsons was the first person to show people that they could choose their own career. This was radical - prior to this time young people were handed a career, either through inheritance of the family business or because this was the work available in their area, and this was pretty much it for the rest of their lives.

Parsons' career planning tool was simple but effective, so effective in fact that career development practitioners still use a version of this today. Basically it involves establsihing career interests, working styles and personal preferences (or values) which become key career ingredients for that individual, then turning these into tangible career goals and developing a plan to make it happen.

Behind this simplicity, there is a lot of skill required. Unfortunatley, career development practitioners often do our jobs so well that we are almost invisible in the process. Let me explain.

If you are successful in your career and you have had the help of a career career adviser, counsellor, or coach, the success is all yours, and you will have put in some effort to make it happen. But perhaps a career counsellor was there at the start, helping you to sort through the haze of options, or to help you come up with ideas in the first place. Perhaps a course adviser was there to help you to make sense of the courses on offer to help you become accredited. Perhaps a career coach kept you motivated during times you thought it was all too hard.

These days, career development practitioners often take on all these roles to help you through each stage of transition. Obviously, to have all these skills requires a lot of training and ongoing skills development.

Even if you haven't ever actually seen a career person, our very existence has helped cause a mindshift. I am sure you would find it difficult to conceive of a time when you would have been stuck in a job for life, whether you loved, hated or loathed it. For this, you can thank the career professionals who have pioneered this way of thinking and working over the last hundred years.

If you have always thought that career people 'just work in schools', 'help with course selections', or 'are just for people who are not coping at work', it is time to think again.

You probably aren't aware that there are a lot of career development practitioners working from home offices or in co-located offices around the world. Alain de Botton's recent book called 'The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work' has a chapter on career counselling in which he describes the work of one rather quaint career development practitioner. Whether this is a good or bad advertisement remains to be seen; certainly people moving into this field come from a range of backgrounds and age groups, this is not addressed in de Botton's book.

OK, so what does all this have to do with google?

Given that the career development profession needs to be more widely marketed, and given that the Internet is arguably the best marketing tool in the world today, I am concerned that google may well dictate the future of our industry.

I have a website; it describes what we do accurately. Visitors often comment on how appealing it is, how easy it is to read, how professional it looks. They often decide to use our services. However, for every person who finds the site thousands of others do not. This is because the google search engine does not understand the words we use. Admittedly, it relies on input from searchers, who don't know what career development is - are you beginning to see the problem?

So, let's say you want to change jobs or figure out what you want to do with your life. What words do you enter into the search engine? Well, our recent research into google searches show that 'career advice' (which does not describe what we do at all well, nor does it sound attractive to most adults), 'resume help' and hardly sensible phrases like 'job career' and 'get help job' are popular. Should I change the words on my website from 'We are a group of career development practitioners' (which is the term we want you to know describes us and what we do) to 'We are job career people'?

Doctors, accountants and lawyers don't have these problems because their industry terminology was set well before the advent of internet search engines. But for the career development profession, we must now decide whether we should be led by the almighty cyberspace god Google, or to find some other way to get our message across.

I doubt that will happen, the Internet and google are far too entrenched. So just be aware that although we might just have to bow to public pressure and call ourselves 'career advisers', we don't actually give advice, but what we do give is so much more useful to you - we help you manage your working life in a way that reflects your individuality and prevailing needs at any one point in time.

Reinvent Your Career - For Adults Only

This month is a highlight in the career diary, the Reinvent Your Career Expo is on in Melbourne over the weekend of 11 and 12 July. My career practitioner colleagues and I will be providing free career health checks and resume checks. We will also be offering a smorgasbord of seminars on a range of career and job search issues. You can find out more about this on the Career Dimensions web page as well as at www.reinventyourcareer.com.au.

This expo is aimed at adult career changers and so I have been thinking about how adults manage the career change process. It is understandable that students often have trouble working out what to do with their lives; after all, everything is new to them and they don't have a lot of life experience to work with.

But an inability to make good career decisions, and to take appropriate actions, is not restricted to young people. From my experience working with people across the lifespan and in diverse industries, I think we have a long way to go before we can say we do this well. I count myself in this group, if I am being honest. I have often found career change to be a difficult process, fraught with complications and strong emotions.

I have had trouble leaving a job that I have been unhappy in. I have dithered and delayed moving on to something better due to what I have argued is loyalty when really it had more to do with fear of the unknown. I have cried myself to sleep at night wondering why I didn't seem to fit in, couldn't develop a particular skill or do a task as well as others around me, and have berated myself for being lazy and not putting in enough effort when really I was simply a square peg in a round hole.

Does this sound familiar? What is even stranger is that, despite my ability to help others dream about the perfect career and then take steps to make it happen, I still struggle with all these issues myself. So it appears that knowledge does not always equal power!

But there is good news. Career change can and should be a highly positive experience. If we can identify the real issues, rather than laying blame on a difficult boss or boring tasks, we can begin taking real steps to move on.

At each stage in life we have different needs, and recognising when our needs have changed, or when we are no longer challenged in a particular work environment, is the first step to reinventing our careers.

Why don't you give yourself the opportunity right now to work out what it is you need from your career, and then measure these against your current job role. Are you feeling stressed, unchallenged, or just plain bored? You probably need to move on. If this sounds like you, why not start with one small step? See a career counsellor! Reply now and find out how you can reinvent your career.

The poll we conducted in July 'Have you ever stayed in a job past its use by date' attracted 7 responses - 6 Yes and 1 No. On the basis of this poll (which admittedly isn't truly representative of the population at large), 85% of people have stayed too long in a job. Which is quite believable, based on my own anecdotal evidencesourced from direct contact with clients.