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 developing my identity through my marketing materials from my resume to my cover letter to my CV to my portfolio to my LinkedIn profile. Communicating what I’ve done, how I’ve helped and why I should be valued. These needed to be on the same page but not the same thing. See, the goal isn’t for you to clone your documents and mass produce them but rather to create separate bodies of work that communicate the same vision, in my opinion. So instead of having five of the same blazers, I needed to create an ensemble that flowed well together and communicated what I was about, a burgeoning SME (subject matter expert) as it relates to career topics.

Step 3: Marketing

By this point, I know what my brand is as an educator and career coach focused on helping YOU OWN your career. My digital identity has been and continues to be developed. My documents are in sync and I’m adding increased detail and experience. Now I decided I needed to market me and some steps I took are below:

·         I joined specific LinkedIn groups

·         Took part in discussion boards – asking and answering questions

·         Gave presentations related to my area(s) of interest

·         Began teaching at the University level on career planning and management

This is an ongoing process just as learning should be and so I am continually working to improve. Asking questions, listening to the answers, reading books, researching topics and bringing an enthusiasm daily because I am OWNING my career just as I want you to OWN yours.

Daryl M Williams, MBA, MSHRD, is an adjunct professor, teaching Career Planning and Management as well as being a Career Coach. He is passionate about providing information to assist friends, family, students, alums, and even frenemies (really) in professional development and uses his management experience in Fortune 500, non-profit and private corporations to inform his decisions. Feel free to connect via LinkedIn.