Is fear holding you back from making a career change?

career change video - tips Feb 20, 2017
 

Video Transcript:

Hi, I'm Shannon Houde, founder and career coach for Walk of Life Consulting.

I try to get the right people into the right roles to create a more sustainable world for us all. And today's challenge is related to making a change in your career. It could be internally to the role you currently have or making big career change. So get out your pen and paper and I'm going to pose a question and then I want you to pause the video while you actually think through and write down the answer.

And then I'm going to help you diffuse and overcome some of the myths that I hear time and time again about why people are too afraid to make a career change. So the question I want you to answer is what is that number one fear that you have that's keeping you from making a change? So pause the video and then turn me back on.

Great. So there's lots of myths that are running around out there in the market around making a career change. And it is a scary process, it's a scary time of unknowns, but it's also exciting. So what I try to do is help my clients overcome some of those myths and break them down. One is that it's difficult to gain experience within my company.

So I need to change companies and actually within a lot of roles in sustainability especially, it's very linked to the core business or the core operations and it's strategic in nature in terms of the issues. So there's a lot of opportunity for you within an organization to either become a green champion or offer to do a benchmarking study or start networking with your internal or external stakeholders to position yourself and create a role for yourself or to at least be gaining some knowledge and expertise while you're in that role. The next myth is that recruiters are there to help me find a job and actually recruiters work for the companies that are hiring. So they're actually like an external hiring manager and they really are looking for those candidates that are going to fit exactly into the mold that the client is looking for. So they will not actually go out to the market and help you find a job, but if you're the exact right candidate, they will select you and put you forward for those roles that are already existing and open in their portfolio.

Another myth is that once we've written our CV or resume and put up our LinkedIn profile, we don't really need to change the terminology or the semantics or the acronyms, because everybody will kind of be able to understand. And translate well because of keyword searching tools both with LinkedIn and a lot of the jobs boards, you need to make sure that you're using most of the semantics and acronyms that you know are out there and also be able to map them and customize them for CVS and cover letters. So if the company is calling it corporate citizenship, don't call it corporate responsibility. Change your semantics to match those specific applications and include all those keywords that you can out there. When you have your CV or resume posted on the Internet, best of luck.

Overcoming your Fear if you'd like to write to me about your fears, I'd be happy to help you overcome them specifically. So leave a comment on the website or feel free to email me.

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