Career Start : Starting Over in a New Career : Employment: A jobs strategy takes patience, lots of letters and networking. Experts stress showcasing your skills--even hobbies--to attract offers.
It took Karen Peterson, a former Orange County school district food services manager, five months, more than 300 letters and nearly 800 phone calls to get the job, but today she is happily embarking on a new career as an account executive at Pizza Hut’s Western Division in Irvine.
For Linda Sauers of Pasadena, the evolution from account executive in a small public relations firm to technical writer with a major home mortgage lending company took several years and several layoffs. But she, too, is ecstatic about her new-found career.
Peterson and Sauers are proof that losing a job doesn’t have to mean the end of career. With a little help and the right attitude, it can mean the start of a better, more meaningful career the second time around.
The secret is in how you make your choices, say career counselors. Whether you’ve already gotten the dreaded pink slip or simply see the handwriting on the wall, now is the time to start plotting your new career strategy.
The best place to start looking for a new job is within yourself, said Nancy Estafen, a counselor with Goal Set Thru in Chatsworth. Ask yourself: “Where am I now, what are my strengths and weaknesses?” she said. What skills do you have that could translate into other settings? Don’t just rely on your own assessments. Interview people you’ve worked with to get their perceptions. “You must be really candid.” she said.
And optimistic.
“I paid absolutely no attention to the economy or what people said,” explained Sauers, who used the end of a job in a small public relations firm as a jumping-off point to re-evaluate what she wanted out of her career.
“All I knew was there was a job out there with my name on it and my job was to find it. I knew I had skills and talents to offer the marketplace.”
And keep in mind that you may have skills you don’t realize you have, said Shena Crane of Mentor Career Services in Irvine. “Often people have skills or knowledge they take for granted but that another industry would find very useful.”
In Peterson’s case, for example, she started out trying to parlay her experience managing food service operations into a job as a business consultant. It turned out, however, that her inside knowledge of school districts was a gold mine for Pizza Hut, which has been trying to expand its marketplace in non-traditional areas such as public schools, colleges and hospitals.
In analyzing your skills, think about what you do when you’re not at work as well, said Susan Linder of the Career Planning Center in Los Angeles. People often overlook their hobbies or avocations. A woman who joined Toastmasters for social reasons, for example, may have become a great presenter, a marketable skill she wasn’t using in her previous job.
The longer people have worked for a particular company, or in a particular industry, the harder it can be for them to think about their job skills in a more generic sense, Crane said. And those in highly specialized areas, such as aerospace, have the toughest time of all trying to imagine using their skills in other ways.
“Aerospace is its own world,” Crane said. The employees tend to identify with the project they worked on rather than the skills they used on the job. It takes time and emotional distance from their jobs to help them open their minds and see they do have transferable skills, she said.
If you’re getting stuck, there are various ways to assist in your search for self-knowledge, Linder said. Books, community college classes, computer programs, individual counseling through career-planning companies and aptitude tests can all help you get a handle on what you like and don’t like, what you’re good at and what you’re not. Linder, a former professional musician, would know. She employed them all when she decided to abandon her French horn and embark on a new career in counseling.
Some counselors even recommend old-fashioned soul searching. “Everybody needs to find their calling,” said Jon Snodgrass, a professor of human development and organizational behavior at Cal State Los Angeles, who also runs the Career Strategies Center in South Pasadena.
“Only about 20% of people are satisfied with the work they have,” he said. And the secret to improved satisfaction is for people to discover what kind of work holds meaning for them. The answer is not “outside of them in the economy,” he said. “It’s inside them in their hearts and minds.”
Armed with self-knowledge, the next step is to research possible new careers. Library research can give you ideas, said Linder. The Occupational Outlook Handbook, published every two years by the U.S. Department of Labor, for example, gives information about industry growth, types of skills required for particular jobs and related careers. California Occupational Guides, published by the Labor Market Information Division of the Employment Development Department, gives information specific to California, including lists of promising occupations.
Job areas that will continue to employ large numbers of people in California, for example, include retail sales, restaurant employees, office clerical work, nursing and accounting. The fastest-growing occupations in the state include paralegal work, tax preparation, data-processing equipment repair, systems analysis and home health care.
Although such lists can be helpful, job counselors caution against “list shopping” for new careers. “I encourage people to go into fields that are not necessarily fast-growing if they truly have a gift or a talent to use there,” Estafen said. It may take more work to get the job, but there’s a chance of greater job satisfaction.
Estafen herself once embarked on a job in court reporting solely because it was a fast-growing field with plentiful jobs. “It was a terrible mistake,” she said. “For me it was a bad fit.”
One of the best ways to find your fit is simply to talk to people--lots of people, Crane said. “It’s tedious, it’s not a lot of fun,” she said. But it produces job leads and it gets rid of many of the misconceptions people have about different fields.
“You can’t wait for people to come to you; you’ve got to go to them. You must follow through. They get a million letters, but you have to follow through with a phone call,” said Pizza Hut’s Peterson. “Everyone was wonderful. I got so many leads from people on the phone who would mention other jobs.”
Besides analyzing your skills, researching careers and getting out and talking to people, there are some other steps that people can take to rebuild their careers.
“Voluntary work is a terrific way to do resume-building,” Estafen said. Be selective about what you do when you volunteer. Tell the organization what you’re interested in. Most will do what they can to help you acquire the skills you want to learn.
Aptitude testing is another way to get a handle on what kind of work suits you. “Two-thirds of the people we test are adults who are unhappy in their jobs,” said David Lyon of Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation, a nonprofit testing center in Los Angeles. “Either the job calls for aptitudes they don’t have, or they have aptitudes the job doesn’t call for.”
Aptitude testing isn’t cheap. At Johnson O’Connor, the process costs $480. But it can save a person money and time if he is considering investing in a new career that requires extensive retraining.
And while aptitude testing may open your mind to new possibilities, and perhaps validate what you already know about yourself, it doesn’t always yield practical career directions.
“I love to talk, and the tests tell me I should be a broadcaster,” Crane said. “But that’s not a practical career goal--how many Connie Chungs are there? They also tell me I shouldn’t be a Marine, or a biochemist, which I already knew.”
In addition, the types of occupations such tests suggest may be very general and don’t keep pace with changing technologies. “We don’t know what 50% of the jobs will be in the year 2000,” Crane said. “Changing technology has given us whole categories or careers that didn’t exist five or 10 years ago.”
“We used to prepare people to choose a career once,” Linder said. ‘If you made an intelligent decision, you were set for life.” That’s no longer the case. With people having four or five careers in their lifetime, “more and more people need to learn the process of career planning.”
