It’s Autumn, 3 months till Christmas and a good time to take stock and make some choices to improve your satisfaction with your career or wider life. Is this the time for a Career Review?
Time passes on, we know we would like to make a change: to lose some weight, get a new job, deal better with an overly assertive work colleague etc. Are you going to set a goal and a deadline to make this change?
So how are things going for you?
We could talk about your wider life, but let’s focus on your career. After all, we spend more time at work than with our loved ones. Some of us see it as a means to an end, and have a good personal life. But others, who are in a job for the money, feel so exhausted by the end of the day that they ‘self-medicate’ with a large glass of wine each evening.
It’s always worth giving a number to how happy you are in your job. 7 or 8 and it’s going quite well, 3 or below and how has it got so bad?
Can you improve your job?
A career review is not only about making a radical change and to move to something new. A career review could be to take time to think about your work and identify what you like and dislike. People are different and it may be that something you dislike doing would be a great opportunity for a colleague, or you could learn a technique to work smarter. And my favourite … stop producing the monthly report and see if anyone notices!
Looking for ways to improve your job is a great first step.
Can you change your attitude to your job?
If you spend too much time wishing you were doing something different and telling everyone you hate your job, you will find lots of examples to support this.
This is similar to when people want to lose weight and keep saying to themselves that you can’t lose weight, and guess what – that’s what happens. But if you tell yourself “I’m going to enjoy the process of eating healthy and moving more” you will lose weight.
So with the job.
As part of a career review process tell yourself each day that you are going to make a difference/ you will work effectively / focus on the top needs for your boss and you will set out to achieve this. Remind yourself of what has gone well, the effective ways you tackled a problem/ how you dealt effectively with a difficult customer.
Don’t just tell yourself but also write it down so that you can look at this again. The examples could be useful for your CV and at interview too.
Is it a mini niggle … are you just not sure?
When we go to the dentist for our check-up or take the car in for an MOT we might not realise that there is anything wrong, but the dentist can remind us to floss more and the garage can tell us that our brake pads will need changing in a few thousand miles. The same with a career review. And this is when a career review can help. By taking time each year to check how things are going you can identify feelings of dissatisfaction and make smaller adjustments on a more regular basis rather than waiting for things to get to a more extreme point. It’s good to know so that we can change a habit or diary when to get something changed or to create a plan for changes in our job.
So with a career review …
It can be helpful to take some time to talk about how things are going in your job, and to see if you want to make plans. The areas covered in my career review service could be wide ranging but generally include asking a client to consider:
- How happy am I in my current job?
- Am I making the progress I want?
- Would it help to look for ways to adapt my job?
- How can I regain the enthusiasm for my job?
- Should I be making the move elsewhere?
This helps you to:
- Understand yourself better
- Deal with every demanding work challenges (you don’t always have to say yes. Sometimes the right thing is to say no or to discuss with your boss).
- Focus on your next job or career
- Adjust to a new direction in your life
- Maximise your present opportunities
- Make the necessary changes and adjustments in your life
Practical Tips:
Here are some ways you can undertake your own career review
1. What is bringing you down
We tend to focus on what we don’t like about our jobs so let’s focus on this. It could be the content of the work (too easy; too much) or relationships with others (bosses/ colleagues/ customers). It could be the commute or the long hours.
Get everything written down.
But we don’t dislike everything.
2. What’s going well?
Take some time to think about what is going well in your current job. You may say that it is well within your comfort zone, you have great friends as colleagues, it’s a comfortable journey to and from work.
Again, write down what is going well.
3. Are there changes you could make to your job that would improve things for you?
Maybe you need to get help from someone to create or simplify processes? Or perhaps you need to be firmer on your going home time and to say no to your boss more. Or you could ask for some development – go on a course, get involved in a project, mentor a more junior member of staff.
Identify at least 3 changes you could make, and write them down.
4. If not this job, what?
This is often a hard one. What else could you do? This is when external support can help; to help you to consider what is important to you regarding your values, ideal work environment, skills you want to use, and skills to avoid. What you are prepared to sacrifice – money? time?
5. Make a note of mini successes each day
I like to get clients to do this.
You can ask yourself what has gone well today and why. This can include dealing with challenging people, solving problems, completing tasks and much more.
Again, write the detail down.
Next steps
So you have done a mini-review. What do you want to do next? Your options are
- Stay and look to make some small changes and focus more on your personal interests
- Talk with your boss about your career development and where he or she sees your career heading, find out what development they can offer you
- Take action yourself to develop yourself ready for a move elsewhere
- Consider alternative options – what other jobs/ career paths interest you?
If you are interested in learning more about my career review service do get in touch. This is what I include in a Career Review programme:
- Exercises to get you to review your current job and also to consider your career drivers and interests.
- Joint creation of a plan on what to do next. This would list actions to support your career and life over the next 6 months. I’ll summarise this and send to you.
- A monthly follow up message for the next 3 months to help keep you focused.
- Recording of the call so you can listen to it again.
The fee for this service which includes all my preparation time alongside our 1-hour session.
- £150 by Skype
- £175 if we meet in person
Include a values review and get a pack of values cards and exercise to complete at home (Sold at £14 you can add on at the reduced price of £10 to include P&P).
Do you want to look at your wider life too?
We could also look at your broader life using the full Loving My Life eProgramme (sent to you in PDF format) and identify any changes that would be helpful. For this we would need to extend the session by 30 minutes. Usually this would be £60 but I’d reduce this by £11 so the fees would be
- £199 by Skype
- £224 if we meet in person
I’d love to schedule a time in our diaries to help you to move forward in your career; and I hope you like the sound of this. If you have any questions, please get in touch.
