Being grown up and having the freedom to ‘decide’ is a goal that most of us have. However, once we have reached our early twenties, and we realize that we are actually getting a little freedom, it is not such an exciting prospect. Why? Because along with the freedom comes the need to make responsible decisions, ones that are likely to dictate the course that our lives will take.Getting Closer To Graduation Day
As we get closer to graduation day, whether it is for our first or second degree, or continuing education courses, most people are faced with a bewildering question – “What do I want to do?” It is now time to be proactive and take life by the horns. The course of your life has already been decided by the courses you took and your experience – for better or for worse, they have narrowed down your choices.
The key to figuring out where you fit in professionally is to put your academic or previous working life on paper and send your resume to prospective employers. It is then that you will see how it measures up in the real world. When it comes to your employment-related skills, ask yourself – how do they compare with the jobs available on the market? Do I have what employers are looking for? If your answer is ‘no’, ‘maybe’, or if you answer your own question by the fact that you are not getting any calls for interviews – then it’s time to do some reassessment – and decide if you need to bolster your skills with additional training, courses or meaningful work experience.
Once your skills are solid, you should compile a list of employers that you could approach. Why? Because jobs don’t grow on trees – you have to go after them! ‘Proving your worth’ is the name of the game. Once you get a few interview calls, (and with any luck, a subsequent job offer), you need to decide if you are going to take the job or not. At this stage, it is imperative to make the right decision – weighing salary, potential for advancement and the type of company – to be sure that it is the right job for you. If you have to wait a while longer for a suitable job to come along, then do it – it will be better for your career progression in the long run.It Is Wise To Seek Wise Counsel
Whatever stage of your career you are in, a sound piece of advice is to seek counsel from the ‘experts’, such as a career coach. Run your ideas and career options by them. A good career coach is likely to be well-informed about the current trends in the job market and is also likely to be able to tell you how a particular job choice will (or won’t) help you. A career coach works for you, so you will receive sound advice.
Whether you are changing careers or just starting out, this phase of your life is likely to be scary – but it needn’t be traumatic. By taking advantage of additional training, education and the right career guidance, you should be just fine.

You and I are lucky. We live in a world rich in possibilities. We are able to select from an unlimited variety of occupations, and have the right to find happiness and personal fulfillment in our daily work.
The fact that you live in a free society gives you the privilege to decide your own fate. You have as much power in determining where you work as you do in selecting a spouse, a home, a car, or a pet. Your choice of jobs really depends on how much you want to shape your career, and how much effort you’re willing to spend to make the necessary improvements in your life.
If you’re considering a job change, it’s likely related to three reasons :
1 – Personal – You want to change your relationships with others.
For example, you may have discovered that you’re incompatible with the people in your company. Perhaps they have different interests than you; or they communicate differently or have different educational backgrounds.
2 – Professional – You’ve determined the need to advance your career
For example, you have found that you won’t reach your professional or technical goals at your present company; or that your advancement is being blocked by someone who’s more senior or more politically oriented; or that you are not getting the recognition you deserve; or that you and your company are growing in different directions; or that you are not being challenged technically; or you are not being given the skills you need to compete for employment in the future. Or you have simply lost interest in your assigned tasks.
3 – Situational – You are motivated by other circumstances that all contribute to your satisfaction in the workplace. Maybe you are commuting too far from home each day, you are too compartmentalized in your duties, you are forced to travel too much, you are working too many hours, or you are under too much stress. Maybe you want to relocate to another city, or stay where you are rather than be transferred?
Whatever your personal, professional, or situational reasons may be, you’re motivated by the desire to improve your level of job satisfaction and make a positive change. You’d be surprised how many people are unclear about what they actually do for a living, and the way their jobs make them feel. In order to translate your wishes and needs into results, let’s begin by evaluating your present position it’s the first step to any job change.
For example, whenever I interview a candidate, the first thing I ask for is a complete narrative job description:
“So tell me, Bonnie”, I begin, “What is it that you do at your present company?”
“Gee Dave, I thought I told you already. I’m a systems analyst.”
“All right”, I reply. “But would you please describe to me in detail the following two things:
1- What are your daily activities? That is, how do you spend your time during a typical day
2- What are the measurable results your company expects from these activities? In other words, how does your supervisor know when you’re doing a good job?”
Often, I discover that people are hard pressed to come up with solid answers about the specific nature of their work. They’re not exactly sure about their job responsibilities, and their lack of focus results in stress or counter-productivity. Many employers expect you know what they want and how that should be done, often without giving you feedback till after you were passed over for that promotion you felt was deserved. It is your job and part of being fulfilled in it for you and your employer is to be on the same page and meet or exceed expectations and goals you both set.
While a little bit of stress may is natural in any job, a steady diet of it can destroy your incentive to work and dramatically effect happiness in all phases of your life. When you count your work week combined with your average commute, most people work more than they sleep (or do anything else), so minimizing any stress in your life contributes to life’s satisfaction. A recent study confirms this and indicates a direct correlation between a person’s lack of task clarity and their level of job dissatisfaction. Knowing what you want is the crucial first step for getting what is most appropriate for you. Every compromise you make undermines your goal of vocational satisfaction and personal achievement. Asking for what you want shows you are focused, thoughtful, and confident about your skills, goals, and abilities. Proactively approaching your work this way will more often than not impress the people you want to (if they are the right people), and will pave the way to you finding satisfaction and an optimal match in the workplace.
Try this exercise:
On a sheet of paper, write a complete, current job description in which you list your daily activities and their expected, measurable results. This exercise will not only help you clarify your own perception of your work, it’ll be useful later on when you begin to construct a resume and communicate to others exactly what you’ve done and what you are looking for.
Once you’ve described all the facets of your job, the next step is to understand the relationship between what you do and the way you feel. I use the term ‘values’ as a descriptor of personal priorities, as a yardstick to help you:
* Understand what types of work-related activities you really enjoy;
* Determine which goals or accomplishments are important to you and give you a feeling of satisfaction; and
* Evaluate whether your personal priorities are in balance, or in harmony with your job situation. new position.
Although it’s fairly simple to decipher which daily tasks you really enjoy, the task of scrutinizing your personal priorities can be tricky. That’s because there are often factors unrelated to your job that can come into play.
To demonstrate this importance of values in our decision-making process, consider the following:
* A job-seeker can turn down a position because he was an amateur athlete and he didn’t like the air quality where my client company was located.
* A candidate who was a long distance runner. He took a position largely because his new boss was also a runner, and would understand his need to take off work twice a year to run the New York City and Boston marathons.
* An engineer that took a job with a company that offered him a demotion, since being highly visible within his current employer’s department made him feel uncomfortable.
The theme here is, we all have highly personal motivations which guide our career choices. It is important to prioritize and make these known.
Now that you know how to clearly define your values, the next step is to describe the changes you’d like to make in your new job. To further illustrate, listen to the way Pat, Craig, and Neil talk about their respective situations, and how they take their values into consideration:
Pat:
“I want to have more autonomy where I work. That would mean having a flexible schedule, working different hours each day at my discretion, without having to ask permission. I’d be able to leave early on Thursdays to take my daughter to her acting class, and in return, I’d be willing to spend several hours working at home during the evening and on weekends. With my personal computer, I’d have access by modem to the database in my department, and I’d be able to make a significant contribution to the workload, any time, day or night. Most importantly, I’d be evaluated solely on my performance, not by the number of hours I’ve punched on a clock.”
Craig:
“I’d prefer to work closer to my home. I didn’t think the amount of time I spent commuting was very important when I joined the company two years ago, but now it really wears on me to sit for an hour a day in traffic. It’s not only nerve-wracking to deal with all the crazy people on the freeway; I could be using the commuting time to be with my family. The reduction of stress would improve my attitude, and give me a higher quality of life. If I could find a job similar to what I have now within a few minutes of home, that would make me happy.”
Neil: “I’m interested in my own career advancement. If I stay at this company too much longer, I’ll work myself into a corner technically and never achieve my potential. The people here are nice, but I don’t share their ‘lifer’ mentality. Look at Ed, my boss. He’s been here 17 years, and although he’s a really solid engineer, he’s not familiar with any of the latest advancements in technology. He’d have a hard time finding another job in this market, and it makes me worried, knowing I might someday be in his situation. Besides, I won’t be promoted until Ed retires. So I’d better leave soon, while I’m still attractive to other companies. That would give me the salary increase I deserve and the opportunity to learn new skills with people who are upwardly mobile and aggressive like myself.”
Someone recently asked me whether I helped people get “better” jobs or jobs that made them happier. My answer was that the two were one in the same. As any advocate of goal-setting will tell you, the more specifically you’re able to communicate what you’re looking for, the faster and more efficiently you’ll be able to get what you want and need.
Another consideration is, if you were to look at your career from a purely strategic point of view, I could give you four poignant reasons why it makes sense to change jobs within the same or similar industry three times during your first ten years of employment:
1 – Changing jobs gives you a broader base of experience:
After about three years, you’ve learned most of what you’re going to know about how to do your job. Therefore, over a ten year period, you gain more experience from “three times 90 percent” than “one times 100 percent.”
2 – A more varied background creates a greater demand for your skills:
Depth of experience means you’re more valuable to a larger number of employers. You’re not only familiar with your current company’s product, service, procedures, quality programs, inventory system, and so forth; you bring with you the expertise you’ve gained from your prior employment with other companies.
3 – A job change results in an accelerated promotion cycle:
With a change you can jump, for example, from project engineer to senior project engineer; or national sales manager to vice president of sales and marketing.
4 – More responsibility leads to greater earning power :
A promotion is usually accompanied by a salary increase. And since you’re being promoted faster, your salary grows at a quicker pace, sort of like compounding the interest you’d earn on a certificate of deposit.
While there’s no denying the strategic virtues of selective job changing for the purpose of career leverage, you want to make sure the path you take will lead you where you really want to go. There is ultimately little reason to make a job change for more money if the resulting frustrations make you unhappy to the point of distraction. Not long ago, I placed a project engineer with a company that offered him a $47,000 a year job. He later confided to me that the same day he agreed to go to work for my client, he’d turned down an offer of $83,200 with rival company. The reason? The higher offer was a consulting position with an aerospace company in Detroit — a job that would have taken him down a road he felt was a dead end.
The “best” job is one in which your values are being satisfied most effectively. If career growth and advancement are your primary goals, and they’re represented by how much you earn, then the job that pays the most money is often the “better” job. Your responsibility when contemplating a change is to evaluate what’s most important to you. Whether you focus on a single aspect of your job (like Pat, Craig, and Neil did), or on the overall nature of the job you’d like to improve, the more clearly you connect your values with your work, the greater the potential for job satisfaction.

Career Geyser Secrets is advanced career training that is like no other job search tool you have every seen. It is down to earth practical step-by-step system that will get you the job interview you desire. Have you ever been caught in a career crisis, and you are suddenly without a job? Are you entering into the workforce for the first time or rejoining the workforce after an extensive absence? Do you want to change careers, seek a promotion or improve your current job skills? Are you an entrepreneur looking to approach joint venture partners or promote yourself to others?For our purposes, we will use the word “career” to encompass not only traditional employment, but also other avenues of income generation including entrepreneurship. Those needing income opportunities, regardless of the reason, all too often make decisions based on fear, expediency or ease rather than logic and a clear plan. Career management helps you plan your path in the working world. It helps identify your skills, talents and passion so you can be successful in all your endeavors. People who pursue career management come from all walksand stages of life.Here are just a few groups who can benefit from developing management skills:- Those looking to broaden their income streams- Those entering the work force for the first time- High school or college students- Home school or at-home moms- Downsized workers- Those wanting to make a career change- Those looking to advance/promote business opportunities in their careers- Those re-entering the work forceEveryone can benefit from career management. It is really life management and knowing yourself. Career management will allow you to showcase and promote who you are. This book is designed to give you the tools to manage your career campaign.It will also give you the knowledge and secrets that will set you apart from the rest of the pack, and it will virtually guarantee that you will get noticed by the decision makers. This is a key point as most people today will have more than one career and will desire multiple streams of income. Did you know that many of the top corporations receive thousands of applications and résumés every day? Yes, every day. Not only top corporations, but virtually all businesses receive hundreds of applications for each job opening. This book is designed to get you noticed in that sea of applicants or to get your business proposal in their focus.If you are serious about finding employment that you must obtain your copy of Career Geyser, Secrets that Propel you to Success. To order your copy, visit CareerGeyserSecrets.com .

Are you thinking about changing your career? Are you worried about how difficult the transition is going to be? Then you are not alone. Many people go through similar anticipation when thinking about attempting a career change. Your career is among the most important things in your life, and changing it is one of the most stressful decisions you will ever make. Be Passionate
The reason why you would even consider a career change in the first place is probably because you feel passionate about something and want to pursue it. There is no sense in making a change if you are not going to be any happier than you already are. You may be earning a five-figure salary, but if it is not making you happy and if you are not content with what you are doing, then it might be a good time to switch. Changing careers should be about passion and personal fulfillment. Do Your Research
Make sure that before you make the final decision you conduct a thorough research on available opportunities. You need to analyze what skills you have and what skills you may need to acquire for your new job. You should be confident about salary prospects and other relevant information. You may have lots of expectations about the career you want, but conducting the necessary research will help you look beyond this rosy picture. Work with a mentor, such as a career coach, before you make the final decision. Career Exploration
Changing your career can be overwhelming. Explore your options before you decide to make a commitment. Start by categorizing the careers you are interested in. This helps in narrowing down your options. Then pick only those that interest you the most, putting the others aside. Ask yourself questions such as:
• Why am I exploring this career?
• Will I need additional training or education?
• What are the opportunities and risks in pursuing this career?
These questions will help give you some very important and necessary answers. You can’t really begin on the path to career change until you know why you want to change and how you will go about it. The fact is that changing careers can be very time consuming and expensive, and you don’t want to start the process flying blind.
Once you have all the information you need, you can focus on one career option and work toward achieving it. Listen to your heart and head and then make a balanced decision. Whatever you do, remember you need to be flexible and devote a lot of time and energy to jump start your efforts.