Do You Really Want to Find a Job Like the One You Had Before?

There are so many people out of work these days. I see news reports showing job fairs swarming with people armed with their polished resumes all scrambling to quickly find their next job. Most people are dressed nicely, have professional looking resumes describing and documenting their past, and have practiced their interviewing skills to try to impress the recruiters to want to give them a job.
There are four things that strike me as being wrong with this picture:

1. There are huge changes going on in the global economy. For the first time in a very long time there might not be enough jobs out there for people to find. This job hunting strategy assumes there are enough jobs out there to find the one you want. What if there aren't?

2. A resume is a description of someone's past. With the magnitude of the changes happening all around us, how will describing your past help you find a job for your future?

3. With so many people out of work and following a similar strategy, how will you stand out from the crowd if you do the same things they are doing?

4. Considering that most of us have been spending the past several years learning how to do more and more with less and less in an increasingly tense, pressurized, and sometimes painful environment, do you really want to go back to a job like the one you left?

Is there an alternative? Yes there is. What can be done instead is using this time between jobs to drop more deeply within yourself to understand how you can serve to meet the new needs of others in this changing world. (For a good look at the process of transitions, take a look at the book, Transitions, by William Bridges) It involves defining your own goals, a plan for your future, and marketing your value to others as if you were your own business. It involves focusing on what you can give, not looking for what you need to get. With a shift like this, you become more powerful, less of a victim, and you will find the job you want so much faster than any way I have seen or experienced. You might just find yourself wanting a job unlike any you have had before.

Jeff Young
Coignite - The University of Adaptive Learning
http://www.coignite.com