10 Mistakes Most Professionals Make When Searching For Good Second Careers – And How To Avoid Them

Posted on July 14, 2011 by

Many people are dissatisfied with their current job or career. But as the global economy has stalled and the job market appears saturated with people who are out of work and looking for a job most people are giving up looking for good careers and are simply staying with a job they hate.

In a time like this, looking for good second careers can be challenging. Here are 10 mistakes that I see career changers make all too often:

  1. Not looking for a good second career because they believe the market is saturated. True, there are many people looking for a job. But this often makes it easier not harder for you to stand out from the crowd if you know how to differentiate yourself.
  2. Believing that a good new career search starts writing a resume. Most people believe that you start a new career search by writing a resume. Some even pay resume writers a lot of money to do it for them. But really, the first step should be to develop a strategic plan of this “business called you”. If you are not clear on what your objectives are how will you ever know if you hit the target?
  3. Mass mailing a resume to recruiters or companies without having a detailed plan or process for your direct marketing campaign and without understanding how hiring decisions will be made. Successful candidates first develop a clear understanding of the decision making process and hiring criteria that will be used — and they are hardly ever what most people think they are.
  4. Spending thousands on career advice without having a clear objective. Most people are daunted by the task of looking for a new career and seek out help of career advisors often at a steep price tag. While this is not a bad idea per se, career advisors don’t know you as well as you know yourself nor do they know the industry you are targeting. So first have a good idea what you want from a career advisor before you fork over a whole lot of cash.
  5. Becoming so disillusioned with your current job that it shows in your performance. Your current job may be a real drag but if you let it affect your performance it will be much more than a temporary inconvenience. Just treat your current employer like you would treat a bad customer. Provide the best service you can while looking for better customers.
  6. Believing that you cannot change industries or job titles because HR reps and hiring managers keep “putting you in a box.” You can get a successful job or career in an industry you have never worked in. Or get a job title that you have not held before. But you must understand how hiring decisions are made and how to market and sell the solutions you bring to the table. In the end every industry struggles with very similar problems.
  7. Ignoring basic marketing principles. Embrace the fact that you are a business. Peter Drucker said the two most important activities in any business are marketing and innovation. To conduct this “business of you” you must embrace basic marketing principles.
  8. Ignoring sales skills. No product can be sold successfully without basic sales skills. An interview is nothing more than a direct sales call where you sell the product you provide. But most career or job changers do not understand what that product is. If you do not have a sales background, educate yourself and learn the skills it takes to make a successful large sale.
  9. Getting stuck in “the system”. Many career changers believe that there is a “system” for finding a job that they have to stick to (e.g. write a resume, post it on hundreds of job boards, send it to recruiters, wait to be called for an interview). Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes — you need a system but it is a sales and marketing system that looks nothing like this.
  10. Not measuring progress. A sales and marketing system cannot be successful without the necessary feedback. You must test and measure your results. Develop metrics. Test different messages. Measure response rates. Again, let direct response marketing principles be your guide.
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How To Sell Your Expertise For A Good Second Career

Posted on June 28, 2011 by

It is no coincidence that successful sales people have fewer difficulties in starting a second career successfully. Most people agree that embarking on a second career and ultimately landing a new position that matches your capabilities, expertise and interests is primarily an exercise in marketing and sales of your ultimate product: you.

So shouldn’t we brush up on our marketing and sales skills if we want to land that prized goal of a good new position and second career?

But there is so much “successful sales” literature, and a lot of it is contradictory. So what types of sales and marketing techniques work well in the process of getting a new position and ultimately convincing a hiring manager that we are the right fit?

In the book “SPIN Selling” by Neil Rackham, the author has developed a process that is particularly suited for “large sales”. Rackham backs up his findings with a lot of data from over 35,000 sales calls that he analyzed.

Why would “large sales” success coincides with interview success, you may ask?

Well, let’s think about this for a second. Hiring can be a very risky, complicated endeavor.

Surveys of hiring managers time and again show that their biggest fear of hiring someone is to hire the wrong person.

If you make, say $100,000 a year, by the time you add benefits, and other expenses such as office space, telephone, and computer expenses, this number can easily be doubled to $200,000 a year or more.

If the candidate stays in this position for an average of five years, we are talking about a million dollar acquisition. Sounds to me that this is a big decision, and therefore the wisdom of “SPIN selling” may be useful when selling yourself, i.e. trying to get that next position.

According to Rackham, the “Investigating” stage of the sales call is the most important one — i.e. the stage where you try to find out something about your customer (that is, the prospective employer).

This goes somewhat contrary to a lot of the job interview advice, where the focus is on “you, you, you” — de-emphasizing or even skipping the essential investigation stage of an interview.

The SPIN selling technique is therefore focused on the investigational stage of a sales call (or interview) and can be explained by the SPIN acronym:

S = “Situation questions”. Successful candidates ask data gathering questions about the interviewer, the company, and the overall situation that led to the company wanting to hire. Don’t overuse situation questions, however.

P = “Problem questions”. This is where most job seekers go wrong. Once the basic facts are uncovered behind the present situation in the company, successful candidates move on to ask questions about problems. This is where exploratory questions like “Are you worried about product quality?” or “Is time to market acceptable to you?” or “Are you concerned with the company’s sales growth” may be appropriate if the candidate has experience in solving those problems.

I = “Implication questions”. Once problem scenarios have been uncovered, the successful candidates move on to uncovering the impact of these problems on the company, and in particular the interviewer. “How does a long time to market impact the product’s revenue?” or “What impact does product quality have on customer satisfaction?” could be typical questions asked in this phase of the interview.

N = “Need-Payoff” questions. Need-payoff questions are designed to let the interviewer tell you (the candidate) what benefits your solution could have. For example “would it be useful to increase manufacturing yield to 99%?” or “would it make a big impact on sales if time to market was reduced by 25%?”.

Anyone looking for that next step in their career should seriously consider what makes sales calls (and hence interviews) successful. “SPIN selling” could well be the turning point between that great next position and being unemployed!

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How To Prepare For A Good Second Career With These Three Simple Steps

Posted on June 14, 2011 by

Most people find themselves looking for a good second career change at some point in today's corporate world. Some do so because they are unhappy in their current job. Others change out of necessity: perhaps they fear they will are lose their job or worse, they already have. Perhaps a merger has taken over the company they are working for. Or maybe business is bad, and the company needs to downsize. 

Whatever the case may be — a second career for most people means a great deal of change. And change is something most people don't deal with well. So what are some tactics that you can use to deal better with a career change?

(1) Be prepared: plan for your career change

First of all, always be prepared. Whether your career change is “forced” or voluntary, always be ready to transition. That means that you must always be clear on what your goals are — what is it that you are looking for in a career? What were some aspects of prior jobs that were a really good fit for you? What made your previous job extruciating? What are the types of people you really love to work with? Who would you rather avoid?

Take 15 minutes a day for the next two weeks to describe your ideal job. Be as detailed as possible. Describe what you are doing, what the environment is like, what the people are like. When you think you are running out of things to write down, continue and write down whatever comes to mind. That is when the most valuable details usually come up.

(2) Understand what you are selling: you?

Most career advisors will tell you that you are the product you are trying to sell when you are embarking on a job search for a second career. Are you?

Just like people don't buy hammers — they buy that picture of the kids they want to hang up before the kids are all grown up — hiring managers don't hire you for what you are. They don't hire you because of your skills. They don't hire you because you can speak french, know accounting, or understand how to design electronic circuitry.

No, they hire you because they have a pressing problem that needs to be solved now and they think you can help solve it. Perhaps they need to expand the company's sales in France. Or perhaps they have a financial audit coming up and they want to avoid any accounting errors surfacing in the audit. Maybe they have a new product development project that is late and they need to speed up the electronics design to make the deadline.

Make a list, an inventory, of the big problems that you have helped solve in your career. Be ready to communicate about those problems, and why you were instrumental in solving them or helping them be solved. Understand that the end result was not the electronic circuit that you helped design, but the new product that was a success for the company because it made it to market before all of the competition had anything remotely similar

(3) Find out who is or will be buying

Once you know what big problems you have helped solve, ask yourself: who is having these types of problems today?

Most people believe that finding a good next job is to write a resume, send it to a list of headhunters or executive recruiters, perhaps a few to companies that are advertising jobs, and then they will get invitations for interviews. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. Most hiring managers do NOT go to recruiters, headhunters,  ,job boards, or job postings as a first step when they want to hire someone. Where do they go first? To their rolodoex. Successful hiring managers know that the best candidates come through referrals. They will never even bother with recruiters or job ads.

So if the first visit a hiring manager makes is to the rolodex (or Outlook, or whatever the current version of contact manager is), what happens if you're not in this rolodex? You miss out, that's what. 

Investiogate who (what companies, what hiring managers, which executives,…) are having or likely wil have the problems you have helped solve so well. Then start a direct response campaign that will help you build a list of everyone who may be looking for you at some point in time. Build a circle of new best friends. Send them your best information as it relates to the problem at hand. Then, when they are ready to do something about that problem, you will be in their database and they will call you first. 

That way, you will build a steady stream of interviews so you get to choose who to work for in a good second career, as opposed to having hiring managers, recruiters or HR managers decide if you are a good fit.

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How To Change Careers Successfully Without Getting “Boxed-In” By Recruiters And Hiring Managers

Posted on June 8, 2011 by

Getting a good second career used to be the exception rather than the rule. But as the economy changes, so does the concept of the terms “career” and “job”. The length of time one stays with the same career is getting shorter and shorter, and statistics show that the average person will go through a career change and job change many times.

So you can either get good at changing careers, and continually do well, increase your income and your responsibility level. Or you can struggle with career changes, ending up with a sub-par job, stuck in a rut, and watching your career dwindle. Or worse, you could lose your current job, and simply not know how to get another one.

So what is so difficult about changing a career? Well, most people feel like they are “boxed in” by the system that everyone is using today to find and hire candidates for jobs. You know — you send out hundreds of resumes to headhunters or prospective employers or hiring managers and spend all of your spare time at networking meetings where everyone else is looking for a new job too. And if you're lucky, maybe you land an interview or two. 

But as soon as executive recruiters or hiring managers see that you have had a previous career, they put you in a box that is defined by the titles you have held in previous positions. And we both know, titles do not make a person. 

For instance, you may have held the title of “operations manager” in a previous position where you wore many hats. Perhaps you held responsibility for product development as well, but now nobody wants to even look at you for a R&D management position. And unless you know how to cut through the “system” and how to avoid getting boxed in by HR managers, hiring managers, recruiters or automated talent software, your chances of even presenting all of your qualifications are practically zero.

So how do you cut through this system and actually get hiring managers to see you for what you are truly worth? That is the topic of this blog. 

For instance, I will post different ideas from my own professional life. I have gone through a number of career changes myself. From academic positions to jobs with large companies. From jobs with large companies to jobs with small growth companies to jobs with startups. From working for companies to working for myself and starting my own businesses (still my favorite). And from aerospace and defense to semiconductors to industrial control and medical devices. 

If I can do it — so can you. So let me know in the comments below what your biggest fears and frustrations are about changing careers and/or jobs and I will do my best to answer any questions you have.

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