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I reconnected with a friend of mine who was on a career journey fork in the road for the past few months today, and I was thrilled to hear that she was on the verge of having herself a brand new job that she was super excited and passionate about. After congratulating her, I immediately needed to know–what made her successful in her journey, and what habits did she use to get to where she is now?
The first question I asked her was how many people she networked with or met before officially finding her job. She guessed about three hundred. She also went on about 10 interviews in about 6 months (but she was very judicious about where she went as her dream field was narrow). I asked her if she treated it like a full time job, to which she replied yes. And then, the infamous question I like to ask those who just completed any journey - if you had to do it all over again, would you have done anything differently?
She replied that if she was giving advice to anyone out there looking for new work, it was 1. don’t quit your current job, and 2. if you are forced into leaving (laid off, pink slipped–whatever you want to call it), take one week off before you start to look. Otherwise, you’ll panic and be frustrated and won’t approach the job search without a fresh, open mind. She also suggested that networking, no matter what your work status, was absolutely necessary in this day and age in order to find the right job.
I think the lesson for all of us here is to never stop expanding our personal/professional/insert-your-favorite-term-here networks. Keep meeting people. Keep broadening your horizons. And staying at home and pounding out electronic job submissions really aren’t going to cut it to find your ‘dream’ job anymore. Last but not least, we both chatted about how your ‘dayjob’ can no longer be everything to you - you’re not always going to have a mentor at work, nor super cool leadership opportunities, nor interesting work. That’s your job to go find all that, even if it means going beyond the 4 walls of your work. In fact, in most cases, it is better to polish your leadership and mentee skills OUTSIDE of your dayjob, because the opportunties can be endless and far more challenging.
To my friend, congratulations. To all of us, there’s lessons to be learned here. At least I learned them, and I certainly don’t hope that any of us has to learn them the hard way in the near future.
Posted on: Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 1:40 pm 
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July 21st, 2010 at 2:28 pm