OWNing your career!

Mass Application Dash, MAD: I’ve applied for hundreds of jobs and had no replies! What’s the problem? In my professional diagnosis, there are a couple of directions we could go here. If you’re at all familiar with business process mapping, can’t stand it myself, it might look like this (minus the visuals):       A.       You – apply – no response (repeat cycle). What you want it to look like is:       B.       You – apply – interview request – job offer. How do you get from point A to point B? Start by analyzing what you’re doing and looking for opportunities for success. So, the problem is you have applied for hundreds of jobs. Stop there and ask yourself, has applying for hundreds of jobs helped me? Just because you don’t have a job or an interview doesn’t mean the answer is no. Big picture, perhaps now you realize that merely flooding the system with your resume is not sufficient and the ...

Managing for the first time By Daryl M Williams Beaded sweat on my forehead drips on the small of my back, sleep wracked by erratic motion and an inability to relax, doubt plagued thoughts imagining catastrophe and ruin. Not the beginning of a poem, if it were it wouldn’t be one of my better examples, but this is a slight exaggeration of how I felt the days and nights leading up to my first step into the managerial arena. Why was I so despondent when this is something I wanted, badly? I’ve always considered being in management the opportunity for ordinary people to have an EXTRAORDINARY responsibility. Now, I didn’t join the police or become a firefighter, I didn’t become a Ranger, Delta Force or the team lead on Seal Team Six but I realized I potentially had the opportunity to decide the following: 1.       Who was interviewed 2.       Who was hired – Are your kids eating today? 3.       Who w...

I’m a Career Changer and it wasn’t easy! By Daryl M Williams I work with people, some are career advancers, others are career launchers, but my goal today is to talk about the career changer. I am qualified in that I went through this process not that long ago. Won’t bore you with the specifics, but it required me to take some steps. Step 1: What’s my brand?  I’ve never really liked the term brand as it relates to us humans much like some of my students recoiled whenever I said ‘Sell yourself!’ I still needed to discover what my BRAND would be. I recognized I likely wasn’t going to be as familiar as the Target bulls-eye , Nike  or Apple but that was and is OK with me.  I decided that what I enjoyed doing was what I intended to do moving forward and that was helping and teaching others and specifically on career related topics . That discovered, I needed to figure out ways to communicate my worth and experience. Step 2: Developing my identity I worked on d...