Hearing how a woman like ourselves succeeded at something helps us believe we can do it too!  Looking for a new job is probably right up there with public speaking as people's favorite thing to do.  This article de-mystifies the process for you in the form of a personal success story.

Jody Patterson, now into her 50s, conducted a very successful job hunt a few years ago that not only got her a good job, it got her a job she loved!  Here's how she did it!

As I read Allison’s blog on creating a personal brand, I was taken back to a time a couple of years ago when I faced the challenge of looking for a job.

The Leap To Looking

Over the years preceding this New Job Year, I had gradually drifted from one profession into another, a little more deliberate than accidental in my choices, but not much. I was in the second year of a job that had a lot of things to recommend it, but considering that it required me to spend most of my time in a city different from the one where my husband and friends lived, it had reached a point of diminishing returns. I needed a job where my home was.

That was not going to be an easy thing. On the long drives back and forth between the two cities, I mulled over the obstacles:

•    My home city had fewer professional opportunities than the city where I had been working. Not only was it a smaller city, but with only a couple of exceptions, the types of businesses who would see the need for someone in my profession were very rare.
•    I had just turned 50 a few months previously. No matter how many times I told myself that experience talks and that I was in pretty good shape for a 50-year-old, the fact was that my age was not in my favor.
•    I had a very small professional network in my home city. I had done most of my professional development in my current field somewhere else and so had very few people to reach out to locally – or so I thought.

So, perhaps stricken by “white line fever” during all of those drives, I decided to do something radical: I would hire a Career Consultant. Career Consultants are in the business of helping you realize your own abilities and how to “package” yourself in the most desirable way possible. Was it expensive? Yes. Was it hard? Yes! I hadn’t done so much introspection since the navel-gazing of the early 70’s! Was it worth it? Yes.

I was very lucky. I found a consultant who was professional, empathetic, and happened to have a degree in my same area. At our first meeting, I knew she could help me reach my goal of not only finding a job, but even more important, of finding a job that made me want to get up every day just to go there. And she did.

How To Package Yourself

But this article isn’t about working with a Career Consultant. If you can afford it, and after much investigation and interviewing of the particular consultant, you feel it’s the right thing for you, that’s great. The point is, I came away understanding that a lot of what she helped me to do I could have done for myself, if I had known where to start. So that’s what I want to share here: how to get started.

1.    Know what you really want to do. This seems easy, but sometimes we mix up what we can do with what we want to do, and they can be two very different things. My coach put me through an exercise of listing every job I ever had (from childhood on forward) and listing what I liked and did not like about each. She also had me describe my dream job, if money and any other pesky realistic considerations were not there.

Whew! I felt every one of my 50 years as I looked at the very long and very varied list of jobs, and my dream job of owning a gift shop seemed nowhere near my current professional area of Organizational Learning and Development, so where was its relevance? But you know what? It worked. What I had at the end was a statement of what I did want in a job, and as important, what I didn’t want. Then I was ready to update my resume.

2.    Actually I didn’t just update my resume, I started over.  At some point, the traditional recitation of where you’ve worked when becomes more of a liability than help. The length of the recitation can imply your age, and if you’re like me and have had more than one profession in your working life, the list of job titles will mean next to nothing in terms of communicating to a prospective employer what you can do.

So you do it for them: Figure out the skills you have that are transferable (that will come out of Step 1) and make the top three skills the lens through which you write your resume. For each skill, come up with a series of short stories in which you provide examples of a situation to which you had to apply this skill, what action you took, and what the result of your action was. Put just enough information in your resume to get the employer interested, but keep the full story for the interview. Put 2-4 “short stories” per skill area in your resume, and you’ll have a resume that paints a much clearer picture of what you really can do.