The Job Search Plan: Being Effective in Your Job Search January 30, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Career Development, Career Management, Education, Job Search Management, Job Search Strategies.add a comment
It’s been said that most people invest more time and energy planning their vacations than they do planning their job search. While this is true for some people, successful professionals set aside time each week to develop and execute a job plan that leads them to their next best job opportunity. Such professionals often measure their time between jobs in weeks rather than months (or years, in tough economic times such as we are experiencing these days).
Several years ago, I adopted the Highly Effective Job Search (HEJS) developed by
Orville Pierson, a career development expert and Senior Vice President of Lee Hecht Harrison, a global career services firm. The results I achieved by using the HEJS method were significant, as my next job opportunity was indeed measured in terms of weeks rather than months. The position I accepted met most of my needs and expectations. My job search required significantly less time and energy as compared to my former job search strategy. Since that time, I have continued to use Orville’s HEJS strategy with excellent results.
I spoke with Orville before the holidays about the possibility of creating a virtual collaboration site to support job seekers that wanted to collaborate with other professionals interested in developing a highly effective job search plan. We agreed that an Internet-based virtual collaboration resource would enable more job seekers to develop a HEJS plan, regardless of their geographic location or time schedule. As a result, I’m happy to announce the launch of the virtual Pierson Highly Effective Job Search Work Team resource for job-seekers.
The Job Search Work Team (JSWT) resource is designed to enable job-seekers to develop a highly effective job search plan using Orville’s job search strategy as described in his book “The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search“. Ed McEneney, Career Consultant with Lee Hecht Harrison, has agreed to moderate the new JSWT. I’ll be leading the first team with the goal of enabling each team member to develop and execute their Highly Effective Job Search Plan.
Job Search Work Teams are limited to six (6) people per team. We are now accepting requests from job seekers who would like to significantly improve the effectiveness of their job search by participating as a member of the first virtual HEJS work team.
If you are committed to significantly improving your job search strategy, send me an email by COB Friday,
February 13, 2009 (JimIntriglia@wispertel.net). In your email, tell me why you believe Orville’s HEJS virtual Job Search Work Team could benefit you in your job search.
Due to the success of the HEJS team approach, we expect to receive many requests to join the team, so send your email ASAP.
We will contact prospetive team members based on email submissions we receive by COB February 13th, so don’t delay with your email response. Submit your email today so you have an opportunity to take advantage of a great opportunity to enable you to land that next great job or career opportunity using a more efficient and effective approach.
Land that Dream Job: It’s a Matter of Time (Part 1) January 17, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Career Development, Career Management, Job Search Strategies.add a comment
One of the interesting statistics that makes headlines periodically is the high percentage of people that are unhappy with their job. I’ve read some sources that claim upwards of ninety percent of people dislike their job, the people that they work with, or both.
Over the course of my career, I’ve kept company with the ten percent who love what they do to earn a living. In a series of articles, I”d like to share an approach I and many others use to land that “dream job” that you may be seeking. Wouldn’t it be great to join the ten percent of us who love what they do and look forward to going to work each and every morning?
The secret to landing that dream job is to first invest some time in understanding who you are, what your needs are, and what basically makes you happy. There are excellent resources available to assist careerists and job seekers with the task of self-analysis. Many of these tools are free or low cost; I’ll highlight some of these resources in future posts.
The first step, however, is to free-up some of your available time to begin a self-assessment.
You say, however, that you have no free time? The key to solving the time challenge is to learn how you are choosing to spend what time you have available each day of the week. What you find respective of how you invest your time will likely surprise you.
When I returned to school full-time to complete my undergraduate degree, most of my classmates were very busy managing careers, jobs, families and the like. How would we all find the twenty or so hours per week that we would need over the next two years to complete our academic studies?
My first professor challenged that we could all free-up at least 20 hours per week if we considered what was important to us meeting our goals vs. activities that were trivial respective of our life pursuits. To prove his point, our first class assignment was to keep an hourly log of how we spent our time for the next seven days.
At the end of the week we reviewed our time logs. Most of us were amazed to find that we in fact were hardly making the best use of our available time. Many daily activities were outright wasteful, indulging in habits that provided little or no support to changing our life for the better. It was time for a change.
Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results. –Rita Mae Brown
So, rather than spend a Saturday afternoon watching a favorite sports team,
the sports fans in our class decided to dedicate that time to study. Some balked, to which my professor asked whether they were choosing to be spectators in life rather than be on the field as managers, coaches and players. Food for thought.
Other classmates decided to begin their workday at 5:30am rather than sleeping-in until 7:30am every morning. The extra awake time gained each week (2 hours per day x 5 days a work week = 10 hours per work week gained) would by itself contribute half to the total amount of time needed to complete our undergraduate course of study (2o hours per seven day calendar week).
Changing your habits to free-up additional time needed to make changes in your life is the first hurdle that many job-seekers have a tough time clearing.
Those who are truly serious about making significant changes in their life will find the time that they need to take the next step in the process. You can start now by keeping a log of how you spend your time during the course of the next seven days. Give it a shot– what do you have to lose (maybe that job that you hate)?
Challenge yourself to change self-indulging habits that may be satisfying in the short term and also stealing from you valuable time that you can use to make significant changes in your life.
Start an activity time log now and take the first step to joining the ranks of the ten percent that love their jobs and the people that they work with.
The Practice of Combining Job Roles in Tough Times January 11, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Career Management, Management Strategies.Tags: management employment job roles
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When I began my career as a business analyst, a mentor cautioned me to carefully consider the nature of my resources before making changes to a business process flow or the people that manage it.
Specifically, he was talking about the people behind the processes. Adding a resource like a color copier to a business process tends to have a linear impact on the workflow capacity. The same is not necessarily true of adding or subtracting people from a workflow.
“It takes a women nine months time to deliver a baby; two women assigned to the same task cannot have a baby in four and half months time. Remember that.”
I did.
Some things just take time. It doesn’t matter the number of resources that are assigned to some activities and tasks. A certain amount of time is required for successful completion.
While this concept may be obvious to most business owners and managers, tough economic times often give birth to staff reductions.
What sometimes follows on the heels of a staff reduction are Frankenstein-like redesigned job descriptions that combine multiple job roles. These job descriptions often defy common sense respective of the nature of professions and the actual time needed to fulfill multiple job duties.
Such job opportunities often go unfilled as professionals 1) cannot qualify in all of the knowledge and skill areas, or 2) realize there is not enough time in the day to accomplish all of the listed responsibilities.
So what’s an alternative to creating the unachievable and unfillable job description? I’ll post some alternatives strategies in a future update of this post. Stay tuned.
