Bouncing back from Redundancy 2: Define your career objective

Article 2 in a series of 5 which offers a few simple hints and tips to help you cope with redundancy if it happens to you. Hopefully it won’t, but unfortunately it seems to happen rather indiscriminately, so better prepared than not. After all when is the best time to build an ark, before or after the flood?

Part two of our series on How To Bounce Back From Redundancy shows you what to think about when defining you new career objective if the unthinkable happens to you.

2.1: Make An Informed Career Decision

Making an informed and objective choice for your next career move is the first critical phase of any job search. It is well worth spending time and effort in making sure that the decision is right. We all know people who walk into a new job and find themselves desperately unhappy after a few months.

Approximately 90 per cent of the population in the Western World don’t look forward to Monday morning because they are either in the wrong job, the wrong organisation, the wrong working environment or the wrong culture.

Whether we are unemployed or simply in work and looking for change the question is how to ensure that the next job is the ‘right’ one.

Your abilities, experience and qualifications will determine whether you can do a job, but will not tell you whether you will enjoy doing it. Fulfilment in a job depends much more critically on your personality strengths, related weaknesses and transferable skills base.

A successful career planning exercise must begin with a careful analysis of these factors.

2.2: Examine Your Personality Style and Skills

To identify your personality strengths and transferable skills, ask yourself these questions and most importantly write down the answers:-

+ Which 10 work-related tasks do I do particularly well? + What are the personality strengths that make me good at them? + What do other people say I am good at and why? + What are my 10 most impressive achievements? + Which of my transferable skills were essential to each achievement?

If you study your answers you will see various common threads emerging which are related to your personality and working style.

Make the analysis as objective as possible by seeking feedback from other people. The more objective the assessment, the more useful it will be in identifying the functions, sectors and types of companies to which you are best suited.

Now repeat the exercise concentrating on what you are not good at. This will help to define areas to be avoided.

Remember, though, that with support and coaching some weaknesses can be turned into strengths in a different working environment or job function.

2.3: Stay Focused And Aim To Win

Through exercises like these you are more likely to make the right job move for the right reasons, because only people who have a clear idea of where they are going arrive at where they want to be. You should AIM TO WIN:

A Analyse yourself objectively

I Identify your strengths and skills

M Maintain a positive attitude

T Talk to other people for feedback

O Organize your time effectively

W Work towards defining what you want

I Initiate your job search

N Never give up

Watch this space for the next article on “Constructing An Effective CV”: and if you found this article useful, then save it against possible future need and please feel free to share it with your connections.