Winning Your Right Job: Sure Guide to Getting the Job of Your Dreams

Copyright © 2010 by Mathew A. Oladimeji.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010912332

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4535-5235-3

Softcover 978-1-4535-5234-6

E-book 978-1-4535-5236-0

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CONTENTS

Appreciation

Introduction

Chapter Onet

Starting on a Positive Note

Chapter Two

Understanding Recruitment and Selection Process

Chapter Three

Moving Up and Moving On

Chapter Four

Your Job-Search Tools

Chapter Five

Asking For an Employment Relationship

Chapter Six

Personal (Oral) Job Interview

Chapter Seven

The Interview Session

Chapter Eight

Handling the Employment

Change Process

Selected Bibliography

DEDICATION

This ‘how to’ career growth and development guide is dedicated

to God Almighty who says:

‘Let it be’ and it is

In whichever way he thinks, Mathew remains a brilliant management professional of this generation. I am not surprised he produced an essential, must-have information source of this quality

Professor Andrew Apter—

Director, James S. Coleman,

African Studies Centre,

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),

405 Hilgard Avenue, Box 951310

Los Angeles, CA 90095 - 1310

In this book, Mathew has proved that attitude is the singular most important ingredient of personal and professional success. If you desire to be upwardly mobile in your profession, and to achieve quantum leaps in your career progression, the book is meant for you

Gayle Skinns—

Recruitment Consultant, Adecco UK Limited

I have consulted books on the subject of having to change jobs. What stand ‘Winning Your Right Job’ out are its outcome-focused instructions on how to do things; the way it teaches how not to do things in the course of seeking to move up and move on in highly competitive environments; as well as the way it seeks to develop the supervisory, managerial and leadership know-how in the individual

Ibukun Oderinu—

Ex Human Resources Controller,

Oasis Group, Nigeria (Now Managing Director/

Chief Executive, Mario Consulting Limited, Nigeria

Rather than giving us fish, Mathew has given us an enduring training on how to fish in the oceanic waters of the labour market. Whosoever consults this book is bound to win not just jobs, but those high-profile ones that are rare to come by

Adeyinka A. Aladetoyinbo—

Release Officer, Small Business Releases,

Australia New Zealand Bank, Australia.

APPRECIATION

For the unconditional love and affection I have enjoyed from God, in addition to never-ending advice and training from the few individuals I’ll be mentioning here, my thanks go to:-

God Almighty

(Who gave me the confidence to start writing this

book all over at a time when my having being a

victim of crime, in my early days in London,

had resulted in the loss of the memory disk

containing the first draft)

Pastor (Mrs) Mercy Oluwakemi Oladimeji (Nee Akanle)

(The God-Sent, Principled Lawyer-Wife of My Destiny;

an Epitome of Ideal Motherhood)

Chief Samuel Igbayilola Adegbite, Chairman, Oasis Group, Nigeria

(A People-Centred Industrialist, a Value-Guided Banker,

Lawyer and a Philantropist)

Professor Andrew Apter

Director, James S. Coleman African Studies Centre,

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),

405 Hilgard Avenue, Box 951310 Los Angeles, CA 90095 - 1310

(A Friend Indeed; a Friend in a Million, a Friend I will never Forget)

Prince Adewale Adegbite, Chief Executive, Oasis Group, Nigeria

(My Mentor in the Management Profession)

Barrat Shah, Chief Executive,

Pelican Industries (Pvt) Limited, Rajkot, India

(An Invaluable source of Inspiration)

Mr. Alli Balogun, Managing Partner, Ally Boatman Collins, UK.

(A Chattered Accountant Who Cares and

Places Service Unto Humanity above Money)

INTRODUCTION

In the interest of career development, an individual may wish to embark on any one of the following three strategies:

* The individual can seek to move up an existing career ladder through promotion in a particular employment.

* The individual can seek to move on to another job for better prospects while in the same employment.

* The individual can seek to move on to another employment for quantum leap in earnings, either up along the same kind of job or along a different kind of job for which he/she has the requisite competencies.

The strategy which I seek to recommend in this book is a combination of moving up and moving on—getting prepared enough to earn promotion in a particular employment, but moving on to another employment for quantum leap in terms of earnings. Is it not simple enough? I believe it is. All you need to do is to follow the rules of the game. Knowing what these rules are and getting advised on how best to put the rules into practice are what this book is all about. But before you commence your reading, I crave your indulgence to express an opinion. Now, and in the ages to come, the indispensable value keys that will consistently produce success in human undertakings, and greatness in all focused human beings, are the following: a convincingly positive attitude towards life and humanity, a genuine belief in the superiority of virtues over circumstances, principled self-appraisal laced with developmental self-renewal, irreversible determination to succeed, and a reputation for not giving up—all crowned with undisguised trust in the Most High God. This is the belief I hold because I am convinced that irrespective of the circumstances of our birth, the nature of our profession, our job competence level, or the totality of our life experiences, absence in our lives of any one of the value keys noted above—no matter how seemingly unavoidable—is bound to make us encounter discontinuities in the way we live our lives and pursue life objectives.

Same applies to our efforts at winning the job of our dreams. At the starting point of my career, I had thought that for a CV to command the respect of a reviewer, it has to be made up of many pages of grammatical semantics. By then, I had little or no experience in my chosen field, and so, I thought that this particular approach to CV writing could compensate for my deficiencies in terms of knowledge of how to do the job, in terms of skills, and in terms of experience. Worse still, my cover letter was always the same, regardless of the nature of the hiring organisation, its business lines, its vision, and its peculiar problems. In fact, the truth is that I never bothered to know that the problems of one organisation could be substantially different from those faced by any other, even when they both operate within the same industry. Worst of all, I missed so many opportunities at gaining competitive edge through the way I filled in application forms. In filling in forms, I took things for granted and threw diligence into the winds. These caused my disguised failures in the labour market at the earliest stages of my career growth. But I am sure I couldn’t have been alone as far as such mistakes and misconceptions are concerned. Definitely, there must be so many others out there having the same mentality. This is the reason why this book has to be written for the purpose of sharing my labour market experiences and as a guide.

The book is made up of eight chapters, the first being on the need to manage your career in the most meticulous manner and the need to make yourself able to apply for only those jobs for which you have the requisite competencies, but which are most likely to fulfil your aspirations. In the second and third chapters, you will be made to understand what a typical recruitment and selection process is all about, especially as it relates to what endowments a hiring organisation wants a candidate to have, as well as how it goes about finding out whether a particular candidate is so endowed. In other words, we have explained the various candidate-screening options, any of which could be adopted in assessing candidates’ fitness for purpose, the chemistry, the likelihood of manageability, and other potentialities. Both the fourth and the fifth chapters are devoted to the daunting, but undoubtedly interesting, task of asking for a relationship with an organisation and how best to go about it.

It is quite regrettable that most labour market players do not prepare well for job interviews, and the few that do channel their energy into mastering sample answers to sample interview questions, thereby neglecting other equally crucial stages along the self-selling pipeline. In other words, rather than striving to gain useful information from which a comprehensive decision could be made about whether to join an organisation and learning how best to go about it, attention is mistakenly directed at knowing the ‘right answers’ to sample interview questions without more. This, to say the least, is unacceptably one-sided, suboptimal, and an avoidable reason for persistent failure in the employment market. To assist in reversing this trend, attempt will be made in both chapters six and seven to incorporate the missing link between the desire to have your right job and your sense of responsibility in getting yourself personally presented for an interview with the required degree of tact and diplomacy. In the words of a respected industry player of no mean personality:

The job interview is a measured and ritualistic mating dance in which the best partners whirl away with the glittering prizes. The steps of this dance are the thrust and parry, give-and-take, question-and-response that make meaningful business conversation . . . Your partner in the dance is the interviewer who will lead with tough questions that carry subtleties hidden from the untrained ear. (Martin John Yate)

To dismantle upfront any hurdles that are capable of having destabilising effects on your self-selling ‘dancing’ steps, you will learn from both chapters the requirements of looking the part and being at your talking best in the course of a two-way interaction between you and representatives of the hiring organisation. A few number of sample questions will also be included for your reading pleasure with suggested approach in each case. In a particular section, some suggestions have been offered to assist you in ensuring that you do not price yourself out of the market. And as it is with all contractual issues, offer of the job and its acceptance will be accorded due explanation with an advice on how best you can go about accepting a job offer that has been made on a win-win platform, or rejecting the offer in case you are likely to be worse off.

The subjects addressed in chapter eight are particularly delicate issues regarding which most employees fail to exercise due degree of care. These are about leaving an existing employment for a new one without having to burn the bridge which you may have to cross at any other time in future. In the same (last) chapter, you will be advised to take care of your health and not to give up until you have succeeded in getting your right job.

At the end of your reading, you will have appreciated the need to have a record of your past accomplishments (if any), and to identify your personal endowments, the most important of which is your attitude—an indispensable personal growth and development tool which will always aid the acquisition and effective utilisation of your knowledge, skills, and value keys. In addition to these, you will have achieved a tremendous paradigm shift towards cultivating the attitude of searching for job openings and writing up your CV; towards researching a hiring organisation and writing up your covering letter early enough; towards choosing your referees meticulously and filling in forms diligently; towards writing, and replying to, all essential letters; towards preparing for assessments; towards being tactful enough to do well in an oral job interview; towards undertaking a rehash or ‘post-mortem’ examination of your performance in an entire recruitment and selection process; and towards being persistent enough to succeed in the labour market.

Specifically, the book has been written with the following aims and objectives in mind:

* To prove that the processes of job searching and employment gaining are skills that must be learnt and applied with due degree of diligence.

* To point out those attitudinal traits or aspects of emotional intelligence which potential employers habitually look for in potential employees of their preference.

* To portray the job interview process as a critical communication process involving written, verbal, and non-verbal interchange of ideas, as well as positive emotional signals.

* To prove to individuals, the world over, that rather than the most brilliant candidate with the best education, skills and experience, it is often the most prepared (though qualified) candidate who sounds positive (by describing a bowl of opportunities as half-full, rather than half-empty) that wins in a typical employment-seeking competition.

* To instil in the working class and in those yearning to become renowned professionals, a sense of self-renewal through a conscious effort at complementing their career planning and career development efforts.

A book of this nature could not have been written without some basic assumptions at the back of the writer’s mind. In writing the book, therefore, I have assumed

• that all employers are equal-opportunity employers; that each labour market player is proud of whatever he/she does for a living; and that the starting point of success for most, if not all, successful people is being employees in the service of organisations—private or public

• that all human beings are naturally ambitious, and so, will not only be willing to invest in consistent learning, but also feel naturally compelled to actualise whatever they have learnt by effecting paradigm shifts in the way they see things, in the way they hear and seek to understand, in the way they talk and seek to be understood, in the way they do things generally, and of course, in the way they perceive

• that the ultimate goals of any organisation remain paramount in the minds of those who direct the affairs of the organisation, and so the quality of people hired to assist in achieving the goals cannot be compromised

• that prior to applying for a job, a candidate will endeavour to match his/her qualifications to the requirements of the job, and will, as soon as he/she is invited for the next stage of the recruitment process, start being truthful to him/herself about any negative aspects of his/her attitude and behaviour towards others

• that in the interest of humanity, whoever has got a copy of this book or learnt of its existence will inform other job applicants of the existence of the book.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his/her ambition, he/she will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. This therefore is a convenient place to leave you to your studies, but before I do so, I’ll like to refer you to a poem written by A. J. Cronin with which Dr Spencer Johnson opened our minds in his change management classic titled, Who Moved My Cheese.

Life is no straight and easy corridor

along which we travel free and unhampered,

but a maze of passages,

through which we must seek our way,

lost and confused, now and again,

checked in a blind alley,

but always, if we have faith,

God will open a door for us,

not perhaps one that we ourselves

would ever have thought of,

but one that will ultimately

prove good for us (A.J.Cronin)

I have no doubt in my mind that by the time you have finished going through this book, you’ll wish that all your competitors in the job market be denied access to the book, while I am bound to disagree, unavoidably though. You laugh? Enjoy your reading, then.

CHAPTER ONE

Starting on a Positive Note

Taking Charge of Your Career

The Need to Manage Your Career

In the beginning, career management did not mean much to professionals. This was at a time when employees were appointed for life, and the only form of career progression was promotion, based on lifetime loyalty and commitment to the ideals of the organisation. On their own part, too, employees were confident that as long as they were seen to be committed, their respective employers would reward them with upward boost of their career, and their tenure would remain protected. As these mutual expectations were fulfilled, organisations filled vacancies in the upper cadres from within, and by implication, members of their management team were made up of those professionals who have been trained by the organisation. In case there was no professional on ground that had been trained enough to man the vacant position, college classmates or social clubs were usually resorted to.

Later, organisations became bigger, both in terms of turnover and stock, as well as territorial networks. Consequently, the ease with which vacancies up the hierarchy were filled, either by promotion from within or through the medium of informal networks, could not be sustained. Organisations were therefore compelled by circumstances of their growth to snatch professionals from one another. As the snatching strategy progressed, organisations thought less and less of training their own professionals for succession purpose, but relied more and more on the labour market for human talents.

For individuals, the implication is that each person now has to develop and keep developing him/herself with a view to remaining competitive in the open labour market. As an ambitious individual or an aspiring professional, you now have to, more than ever before, work real hard (at an average of forty hours per week), get used to working under the pressure of time and targets, explore the job market more actively for new positions or possible job opportunities, and be more aggressive about managing your career by staying aware of alternative job prospects even when you have no intention of changing your position. And in your relationship with the labour market, you now have to keep yourself aware of recruitment and selection practices and procedure; of what recruiters and their client organisations look for; of the bases upon which a candidate is assessed; and of how to convince your assessors of the indispensability of your knowledge, your official and personal experiences, your skills and value keys, as well as the appropriateness of your emotional intelligence.

There are employees who find nothing wrong with being on a particular grade within an organisation for longer than the minimum period stipulated by the organisation’s policy. Such employees feel so much at ease with remaining so stagnant that they rationalise this unwholesome attitude with the thinking that their elevation will eventually come on the basis of length of stay on their current position. They therefore do nothing to develop their skills or change those aspects of their attitude that need to be changed. Such individuals do match on, marking time with all motion, and no movement.

In the case of an individual who has just got a job, the usual thinking is that there is little more to be done since the human resources management function of the organisation should surely have built-in mechanisms for managing the career of employees. Such mechanisms are often expected to include performance and reward management systems, training and development, mentoring, guidance and counselling, etc. In most cases, prior acquisition of the knowledge of the supposed existence of these mechanisms make such individuals feel that naturally, theirs is to get the job done and all other things, including their moving up the hierarchy, shall follow. This thinking pattern is typical of those who are about getting jobs in blue-chip companies. How wrong they are! Undoubtedly, there is more to career management than just getting the job done. If, for instance, you do the same set of jobs for a period longer than necessary, the followings are bound to be the consequence:

* You are likely to get stale. Instead of approaching each new task with fresh and better ideas, you merely function on autopilot.

* The job becomes boring, and the degree of your enthusiasm decreases. Your interest in the job wanes, and if care is not taken, the resulting overfamiliarity will stifle your creative process.

* Complacency sets in. The need to develop yourself further will not be realised since there is temptation of feeling that you already ‘know it all’. The tendency here is to feel, erroneously though, that you are indispensable.

* Your current employer may start taking you for granted in relation to how you are personally treated, and in relation to the kinds of jobs you may be given to do some of the time. This is likely to happen, owing to the thinking that after all, there is no likelihood of you moving up within the organisation or moving on to other employments.

* Your personal life suffers either economically or socially. Meeting those commitments which, under normal circumstances you should be meeting, will become extremely difficult, if not impossible. After all, your personal responsibilities will keep growing while your income remains stagnant within a particular income bracket.

* You’ll be completely ‘cut-off’ from the knowledge of what currently obtains in the labour market in terms of compensation structure, degree of saturation, opportunities and options open to your profession, as well as latest developments generally.

Conventionally, there are two main channels through which you can seek to advance your career. These are promotion and a change of employment. Let us consider each channel in turn.

Promotion

Promotion implies the elevation of an employee from one grade to another plus management-determined valuable consideration for the assignment of added responsibility. To get promoted as, and when due in an organisation, some of what you can put in place include, but are not limited to being helpful to your superiors, contemporaries, and subordinates in terms of workable suggestions, job execution, commitment and loyalty, mentoring and counselling, coaching and enabling, as well as making unique contributions by breaking new grounds; being disciplined and reliable, meeting your deadlines on target, looking for leadership opportunities, and assuming leadership roles, especially for new projects, as well as being honest and credible with consistent display of integrity at all time; consistently adding value by helping your employer to make more money through waste reduction, gross margin improvements, collection of receivables as and when due, helping your employing organisation to reduce cost and remain cost-effective at all time, doing more than you are paid for, seeking to initiate change at all time, as well as working smarter, harder, faster, and better.

However, as much as promotion could be considered good and heart-warming, the extent to which it guarantees the required advancement in career has unfortunately become limited. In many organisations, performance appraisal process which yields the rating upon which promotion is based is often not objective. In most cases, rating is based on extraneous personal considerations that are glaringly unrelated to job performance. In cases where performance management system seems to be foolproof, the reward awarded falls far short of standards attained. And in case performance is so spectacular as to warrant promotion, the percentage increment on the basic salary that goes with promotion is disappointingly too low to compensate for the energy-sapping, brain-tasking efforts usually expended toward the performance results which have been so great as to warrant the promotion.

Promotion has an in-built risk of giving false hope. For instance, a policy on consistent promotional possibilities presupposes that an employee can rise to become the chief executive. But while it is undeniable that not all employees will get to the chief executive position, no matter how hard working, intelligent, and business minded they all are, the situation prevailing today is that most entrepreneurs groom their children to succeed them, not only as chief executives, but also as chairmen.

In today’s management thinking, it has been discovered that promoting people from within is not always in the best interest of the organisation—one reason being that in a hierarchy, it is almost certain that every employee will rise to his/her level of incompetence. In other words, it is generally believed that people are promoted from jobs which they do well until they reach a position where they are incapable of carrying out the work satisfactorily, and there they remain stuck. This is another way of saying that in the same way as there is diminishing marginal utility arising from further consumption of the same product beyond the point of satisfaction, successive additions to output decreases with continuing utilisation of labour from the same source beyond the highest point of productivity.

On the global plain, the tendency now is towards making a job vacancy open to interested, but suitably qualified existing employees. And in case a suitable existing employee could not be found, the job is advertised for public attention. This tendency is partly due to cost considerations. After all, it is possible and more cost-effective to hire afresh, and start the new hire on a compensation package that is far below the highest attained by the person who last held the position. Besides, promotion is now being considered as capable of making a work environment competitive, rather than cooperative, and hence incompatible with team spirit and team cohesion. Also, the ideals of global best practice suggest fatter organisational structures with not more than three levels. This implies that promotion in every few years is no longer attainable, regardless of desire.

Based on these and other reasons which may not have been identified here, it is not in doubt that it is more advisable to opt for a change in employment (rather than having to ‘crawl’ along a particular management-designed career path) with a view to achieving quantum leap in earnings, as well as getting other aspirations fulfilled early enough.

A Change of Employment

Moving on to work for another organisation may sound a drastic step, but it is becoming the accepted norm these days, particularly for high fliers. Such a move often leads to a higher salary, more responsibility, greater visibility, wider experience and enhanced prospects. Rather than lying submerged in one company waiting for promotion, you are taking your career into your own hands and moving up in the world. (Roger Jones)

In all sincerity, it is advised that Roger Jones’s statement be considered and adopted by those who desire to rise fast along their career ladder. In other words, an individual who aims at making it to the top in this highly competitive world of ours should ensure that he/she is good at moving from one employment to another. However, a change of employment could take one of two ways: (i) A change of your employer (ii) A change of your career.

A CHANGE OF YOUR EMPLOYER

Just as an employer can dispense of your services, you too can leave the employ of one particular employer and move into the service of another. All you have to do in the circumstance is to comply with the terms and conditions of your contract of employment. But in your own best interest, the following steps must be taken in the course of moving on:

* As a first step in the right direction, you have to identify the positive reasons for desiring to join the services of any other employer by making a list of those things you want from a typical employment, and by being guided by this list in making up your mind about the kind of employer you’ll like to work for. Such things could be in terms of the compensation package, the working conditions, the working hours, the possibility and frequency of progress up the career ladder, seeking to match the fortunes of your colleague (which happens mostly among fresh graduates), or the discovery of a better way of achieving your career vision.

* Next, you have to identify the negative reasons for desiring to leave the service of your current employer (if you are currently employed) by making a list of those things you do not like about the employment. Such things may include crisis resulting from factors beyond your control such as relocation of the organisation’s premises, outsourcing of personnel, fluctuating commercial fortunes or management restructures, working with teams that are dysfunctional, or with employers whom you later found to be not so good, going by non-fulfilment of your expectations or inadequate challenges, going by the level of experience already attained—a situation which may have been worsened by persistent stultification of practicable ideas.

* Next, you have to switch on your competitive spirit. This is often defined as relentless perfectionism in seeking to be the best. As a potential leader, the only choices open to you are to imbibe the spirit of self-development; to read for success and in pursuit of knowledge of those things which will make you stand out from the crowd of those others in your chosen profession; to shun the seemingly self-consolatory achievement of being second best; to combine constant and consistent small improvements in performance with periodic forward leaps through major changes; and to welcome competition as lack of it stultifies. If you do these, you’ll avoid being outrun by people whose skills are more up-to-date. In other words, you have to seize every opportunity that comes your way in continually learning and developing your skills and adding to your experience. Along this dimension, you should research any training required to obtain necessary qualifications and weigh the prospects. This is another way of advising you in favour of cultivating the attitude of changing yourself and your endowments in anticipation of inevitable change.

* Identify your assets in terms of your accomplishments and strength of personality, as well as your skills, knowledge, and experience which you have accumulated in order to provide a sturdy foundation on which to build not only your future career, but also your employer-switching plans. This you can do by asking friends, colleagues, and other network contacts for their perceptions of your character; by evaluating how others see you with a view to understanding the resources in you; and by analysing the low points in your career, the reasons for them, and how you felt personally. If there is an activity you love, you have to consider whether there is any way in which you can fit it into your working life. In short, you must be prepared to look back, look ahead, and look at how you can devote more time to doing what you can enjoy most while in the service of any employer.

* Balance your desire and enthusiasm for the kind of employer you prefer against the realities of the job market. In practice, you have to stay abreast of current market conditions and future forecasts that might affect job availability in your chosen career, and be prepared for any emotional discomforts along the line. Access web sites of organisations to see how they project themselves, and monitor job sites on the Internet to find out where the opportunities are. Read reference books, and surf the Internet to gain an insight into which organisations are the current key industry players. You should do this because having accurate information about organisations, employment opportunities, and the labour market is vital for working out your next move in the direction of a change of employer.

* Learn from job performance appraisals and make timely adjustments. In other words, you have to decide which tasks you were worst at, as well as identify causes of unsatisfactory performance. In addition, you also have to incorporate self-development into your career plan and enliven slow periods at work by reading self-help books.

* Decide on when to leave a current employment. Even though you must acknowledge that a crisis can represent a turning point, you nevertheless have to leave a job that would not fulfil your aspirations before your morale suffers. In other words, you have to convince yourself that the employment which you are currently into is one that entails doing what you love to do and being with the kind of people you’ll love to associate with. And in case you suddenly realise that the employment is a wrong one, going by the low degree of passion and love for that employment, it should be time to make a switch, but before you do, you have to ask yourself

• whether your current employment still fulfils your career objectives

• whether you are still on the right compensation, given the duties and responsibilities you currently perform, as well as the industry-regulated practice

• whether your knowledge, skills, and experience are still being enhanced

• whether you are still steadily moving up within the organisation or rather ‘trapped’ in your current position

• whether there are still prospects for advancement within the organisation, and if there are, at what compensation package, compared with what obtains in other organisations or other industries

• whether your job is enriched and therefore challenging and stimulating enough

• whether current work environment is friendly, helpful, and hence conducive enough in terms of care for the environment and provision of adequate staff support facilities such as counselling, mentoring, motivation, etc

• whether it is possible to have any regrets for moving out of your current employment

• whether the time is ripe to leave or there are possibilities of further acquisition of experience or further enhancement of your knowledge and skills (going by the possibilities of training and staff development options that exist) which may likely result into ‘landing’ a job in another organisation at a higher pay in future.

After all these have been taken into consideration, you have to wait for a written confirmation of a job offer before you resign from your current employment. This will enable you analyse subjectively and objectively the costs and the benefits of the new offer, as well as the costs and the benefits of remaining in your new employment.

A change of direction should not be a leap in the dark but a move that you set about in a methodical manner weighing up the pros and cons. (Moi Ali et al)

The point in the making here is that moving from one employment to the other is a faster and better way of ‘moving up’, but that in doing so, you have to look before you leap. If, for instance, your decision is to remain in the current employment for now, you can still have an up-to-date resume in place, while keeping in touch with your contacts. But whatever your decision is, your skills should be kept up to date, and you should be abreast of ‘global best practice’ at any point in time. You also have to keep reporting for work each day with the mind that that very day may be your last in the organisation, but in doing so, display of the positive aspects of your emotional intelligence must not be compromised. It is needless to advise that materials on how best to job search should always be consulted as a matter of fun.

A CHANGE OF YOUR CAREER

Just as you can change your employer at any time, you can also change your career if you so wish. To make a success of a change of career, however, there are rules that have to be complied with:

* First, you have to identify the reason(s) for desiring a change of your career altogether. Among the factors that could cause your wanting to change your career, the following are noteworthy:

• Diminishing prospects in your current profession or particular line of work. You may have reached career crossroads. In other words, the career path allotted to your profession by your current employer may be such that you’ve reached the peak already. It may also be that your profession is going into extinction. If you are in a career which you feel is going into extinction owing to technological and other changes going on in the modern global village, you’ll be doing yourself a lot of good by taking a pause to decide on a path which is dramatically different from the one you have been travelling.

Where have all the steel men gone, or the dockers or the miner? You have to accept the possibility that one day your job too will cease to exist, or else it will lose its appeal and become a chore. The goodness is that as some jobs disappear, new ones take their place. There is no sense in clinging to a sinking raft; you have to be prepared for the eventuality of a career change at some time in the future perhaps a drastic one. (Roger Jones)

• Continuing inability to perform the duties and responsibilities of your job satisfactorily—a situation which may have resulted from either a change in the nature of your job or a complete absence of job satisfaction.

• You may have discovered that the culture of the sector in which the job is located is at variance with your personal core values. This was a major reason why I had to change from a job in the security industry to social work in the early stages of my sojourn in the United Kingdom.

• There may have been a change in your career objective which has necessitated a change in your career direction and the targets achievable.

• You may have suddenly realised that you’ve been carrying on your life, being in a profession that entails doing what you do not love to do. The mistake could have been caused by peer pressure, parents’ love for such profession, reputation of, and public respect for such profession, lack of career guidance, the craze for certificate, community groupings, family orientation, etc. There are examples of lawyers who have suddenly realised that they would have done better as nurses or paramilitary professionals. If you mistakenly find yourself in this tango, and you suddenly become conscious, the solution is to come to your own rescue by making an instant paradigm shift. If you do not know how to go about this, you may wish to consult a career counsellor, as there is nothing bad in changing your employment or changing your career altogether.

Career progression can mean moving up the ranks of your organization or moving on to a similar though better position with another employer. But there is a further option: turning your back on one career path and embarking on another. A risky venture you might feel. Yet today, it is not uncommon to meet Engineers who have become management consultants, teachers who have become financial advisers, scientists who have moved into public relations, army officers who have become bankers. While changing careers is not the easiest of options, you should certainly not reject the idea if the opportunity arises or circumstances permit. (Roger Jones)

* Learn about yourself by evaluating your past experience. This will help you draw useful conclusions about your strengths and weaknesses with a view to deciding where you’ll fit in the best. You need to understand the type of person you are to envisage where you would best fit into the working world. You have to be fully aware of your aptitudes and abilities. If you are not, you may find it hard to convince a prospective employer that you are capable of making the switch to a different kind of job or a different kind of environment altogether. In other words, you should be able to determine

• who you are

• what you are good at doing

• what you have done in the past

• what you’ll like to do next, given your current knowledge and feelings about the outcome of whatever you have done in the past

• what you will like to avoid doing and

• how best you think you can help prospective employers, even in the face of limitation of resources.

Answers to these questions will, no doubt, prepare you for job-search challenges and position you for ultimate attainment of your career goals. And to complement your thought process, you may wish to take advantage of self-assessment tests and apply the results in appropriate situations. Having assessed your current situation and discovered where the gaps are, you can now take steps to acquire the knowledge and the skills that are essential to getting it done effectively, make yourself consistently better at doing it on continual basis, and record landmark achievements in the course of other people’s patronage of your services. In other words, your making yourself aware of the need to change your career should start with an inventory of those skills and value keys which you’ll need to succeed, an assessment of your endowment level in each case, as well as an assessment of your current experience.

* Decide on what your career objectives are. This is to say that you have to decide on what you want from a particular job or your career as a whole: Is it achievement, in which case, you will love to face challenges and achieve unique results? Is it higher earnings, in which case, a higher quantum of salary and enhanced standard of living are what you cherish most, at least for now? Is it travelling education, in which case, a field job is what can satisfy you? Is it official status, in which case, you’ll like a high-profile position that gives you a great deal of prestige? Is it job security, at least, relatively? Is it autonomy, responsibility, and power, in which case, you’ll have to seek a job that will enable you exercise leadership? The list is endless, depending on what you desire at a particular period of your career life.

* Seek out the advice of people who are known to have moved successfully from one career path to another and benefit from their experience. In particular, ask such people the questions bothering on how they planned and implemented their plans, the strategy used, the problems they encountered, the financial implications, what assistance they managed to obtain and from what source(s), and how long it took them to get established in their new career. Rather than making assumptions, you have to check that the situation is really what you perceive it to be, bearing in mind that work alone will not fulfil all your needs. Meet and discuss with people, and ask questions with a view to clarifying the reasonableness or otherwise of wanting to change your job or the industry or your career as the case may be. Specifically, you may wish to ask questions regarding the career history of the person you are discussing with, as response to the questions will assist you in learning more about the industry, the profession, the kind of organisation that he/she works for, as well as the reasonableness and the implementability of your career-change strategy. In addition, your questions may lead to possibility of being referred to others with whom you may discuss similar issues and who may eventually become network contacts in your job-search endeavour. In other words, you should avoid rushing into job-search activities, even when you are currently out of job. And in case you are being offered a job by an organisation, perhaps on the goodwill of your contacts, the first thought should be on whether doing the job will involve doing those things for which you have flair. And in finding this out, you have to define your ideal next job and your work preferences in terms of the industry, the location, the preferred work environment, the travel requirements, the organisation’s profile, and the culture.

* Conduct field research with a view to learning about what is on offer in the employment market; about the reasonableness or otherwise of wanting to make a change and the ease or otherwise of implementation of your desire-achieving actions; about the industry generally; about the possibility of targeting particular organisations, given the nature of your profession and the prospects; and regarding the possibility of having willing referees and other network contacts. Field research could be conducted through the Internet, in reference books, annual reports, etc.

* Identify not one, but several different career paths which you might consider, and see what opportunities present themselves. But in doing this, you have to keep an open mind. By concentrating on career opportunities, people often discover what suits them over time after having learnt from their reactions to different positions, environments, roles and responsibilities.

* Consider your age. The younger you are, the better your chances of adaptability and career change, but the older you are, the greater the need for compromise.

If you are young and in a fairly junior post, changing direction can be relatively straight forward. For older people who have attained posts of responsibility in their original profession, it is much more difficult and may involve retraining and loss of salary. (Moi Ali et al)

* Consider if the change will be feasible, bearing in mind the effect that the change may have on your loved ones and on your finance. Also you must have to think of the sacrifices you have to make, especially in terms of possibly accepting a salary which is lower than what you have been receiving in your current job. In case you still have doubts, or you are faced with uncertainties, you have to check your ideas with contacts and qualified career counsellors and take note of any recommendations.

What all these boil down to is that along your way up and on, you have to keep embracing change. Change could come in any form. It may result from well-laid plan, such as a plan to move from one employment to another. In such a situation, the change will have been anticipated. It may also result from a sudden occurrence of an event such as loss of your current job. In such a situation, the change will be largely unanticipated. The change may be imposed on your