Now, more than ever, job seekers are realizing they have the power to be truly happy in their careers.
As a job seeker, you can choose to align your career with the things that mean the most to you as a person. You can choose to be a career activist.
The term career activism, at least in terms of this blog, has a twofold meaning:
- Taking an active role in your career. Being a mindful activist for yourself, who makes decisions to affect the course of your career, instead of letting your career just happen to you.
- Using the choices you make in your career for the benefit of social activism and ideals that align with your personal beliefs.
In order to do either of those things, it takes some work. And it may even take a career change, shift, or transition.
But the payoff is well worth it.
So, if you’re serious about feeling empowered in your career decisions, making a big-picture impact with your career, and finding career happiness – I’m outlining for you some actionable steps to get you started.
- Take a Career Soul-Search Inventory
- Step into Your Career Power
- Control Your Career Narrative
- Spend Your Talent Wisely
The one thing I want you to remember, out of all of this, is that you – as a job seeker and as an employee – have much more power than many employers / companies would have you believe.
Through the 4 steps outlined here, you can find (and even create) career happiness through career change, career activism, and really leaning in to your empowerment as a job seeker.
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1. Take a Career Soul-Search Inventory
This is a step I recommend for anyone in the midst of or even considering a job search, career shift, or any major or minor change in you career situation.
The ultimate goal of this step is to set a clear target for your career and your job search.
And while that may seem like a pretty simple step to some, it can be quite a challenge for others.
This step takes a lot of self-discovery to best understand the underlying drivers of your happiness and satisfaction, both as a person and as a career professional.
In this step, you’ll want to identify your strengths, what you like and dislike, and the activities you want to be doing more of versus the ones you want to be doing less.
My colleague and friend, Nii Ato Bentsi-Enchill – a holistic career coach for professionals of color who was recently named by JobScan as the #1 Job Search Expert to Follow on LinkedIn – is a big proponent of job seekers performing these kinds of assessments and inventories.
“Job seekers forget to check in on themselves when it comes to launching a new job search. I want to make sure they are internally calibrated and aligned before launching themselves out there.
When it comes to values, [it’s important] to take a step back and figure out what [is] important to us—whether it’s having the flexibility to spend more time with our families, realizing we want work that’s more meaningful, perhaps that means being with a more mission-driven organization, or working for a product or service you really believe in…There are so many values out there, and they’re really important drivers in terms of how we orient ourselves to the world and what makes us feel fulfilled.”
For this inventory, it can be helpful to mentally go through each role you’ve held, starting with your most recent, and document the things you’re most proud of, the things you enjoyed, and the things you’d rather not have to do again.
During this process, also take note of the work environments you liked and disliked, the people involved, and any leadership or teamwork you did.
You can ask yourself questions like the following, to help you dive deeper into your inventory:
(1) Describe a time when you felt most happy in your career –— a time when you were having fun and doing a great job. Describe the situation. Explore these areas:
- What was it that created a sense of happiness and fulfillment?
- Who was involved? What did the person(s) do?
- What did you do that contributed to your own sense of happiness and fulfillment?
- As you think about that time when you felt most happy, what workplace characteristics stand out for you as important or necessary for your happiness and success?
- What about that time made it meaningful?
(2) There are often times in our lives when we feel particularly energized and positive. Looking at all your life experiences, can you recall a peak work or learning experience when you felt most alive, most involved, or most excited about your work? Possible areas to look at include:
- What made it an exciting experience?
- Who were the significant others in the experience?
- Why were they significant?
- What was it about you that made it a peak experience?
- What were the most important factors in the work that helped to make it a peak experience? (Please explore this to better understand. Examples might be relationships, leadership, resources, etc.)
Questions and exploratory exercises like this will help you achieve that ultimate goal of setting a clear target for your career and your job search.
Once you’ve identified some of these drivers in your fulfillment and happiness, you can research: industries, positions, and companies.
The goal here is to look for a fit with the strengths, values, skills, etc. that you identified in your inventory.
Below, I’ve included resources to help you with each segment of this research:
Industry
- Bureau of Labor Statistics has a comprehensive list of industries
- Global Industry Classification Standards (GICS)
- Profession & Industry-Specific Blogs / Publications
Company
- ‘Best Places to Work’ lists, like Fortune or Glassdoor
- ‘Top Company’ lists for a particular industry and/or location
- Research business operations, leadership, news, and recent events
Position
- Onet Online & America’s Career Info Net (ACInet) – descriptions of different types of jobs, video interviews with real people in those jobs, transferrable skills
- Your network networking with new people
During this research, commit to finding industries/companies/roles that align with the values and strengths you identified in your inventory. This will make your job search – and ultimately your career – much more rewarding.
Step into Your Career Power
By identifying the things you value most in your inventory from step one, you’ve laid the foundation.
You now have much more clarity surrounding the types of companies you want to target, the roles you want to go after, and the industries you want to work in. This foundational knowledge allows you to make your own decisions and wield your power as a job seeker.
There are a few aspects that go into realizing and stepping into your career power.
One of them is your professional brand.
Your professional brand basically boils down to the top skills you have (that you’re not only really good at, but also really passionate about) that also align closely with your career target.
Use your inventory findings as a basis for creating your professional brand, and use that brand as a theme or an anchor throughout all of your job search materials, including your resume, your LinkedIn profile, and even the way you answer interview questions.
In creating your brand, make sure that you are really determining your unique value as it relates to the roles you’re targeting.
And this can be difficult, especially for career changers, because it can sometimes be hard to bridge the gap part, to connect the dots between what you’ve done so far in your career and what you’re wanting to target now.
But when I work with career changers, what I try to get across to them is that if you’ve identified a direction that you want to go, you’re probably not picking it because you’re bad at it.
You’re not picking it because you’ve never done anything even remotely close to that. That’s probably not the case.
The truth is typically when you’ve done this inventory and you’ve done this research, there are concrete reasons in your background and in your personal values that make you feel confident that you can perform successfully in the role.
Identify the pieces that come together that let you know for sure that you can do this – and that’s the unique value you offer.
This is true for all job seekers and especially for career changers: it’s about the different pieces that come together that make you qualified. And that is what you want to highlight in your brand.
Another aspect of your professional brand you may (or may not) be familiar with is a professional portfolio. Professionals in creative fields or in education/academia commonly use them, but the practice isn’t widely used outside of that – at least not yet.
A portfolio is essentially your proof.
It’s your demonstration of the abilities and skills that you have, by providing documentation or examples of work you’ve done.
It comes together in the form of a collection of awards or recognitions you have, projects you’ve done,
publications or articles that either talk directly about you or about a project or event that you had a big part in.
And this isn’t a new concept.
Fellow career coach Madeline Mann (Award Winning Career & Job Search Advice from Human Resources, featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, New York Times) calls this a BAMF Binder; she says it’s her “secret weapon for in person interviews,” and that clients have even used the digital version of her BAMF Binder concept to “bl[o]w away the hiring panel” in digital interviews.
Another fellow coach, Austin Belcak (featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., Fast Company, & The USA Today), advocates for creating a Value Validation Project to go in your portfolio; this allows you to “share potential solutions to a challenge… identify a new opportunity…perform a competitive analysis…[or] gather feedback on a new initiative” – all uniquely targeted around one particular company/opportunity.
However you go about it, it’s important that your portfolio be an ongoing, ‘living’ document you can utilize, make small changes to throughout your career, and really build a ‘proof package’ that you can show to employers.
It’s helpful in your job search to create these resources because it can often elevate you above your competition. Most job seekers aren’t currently creating them, so this is one way you can set yourself apart.
Creating these resources can also be helpful personally, because it can help you build confidence and solidify what your value is.
So if you have a day where you’re feeling under confident or having imposter syndrome sneak in on you, it can be really helpful to look back at your portfolio and remember all the value you bring.
And that leads us to the last thing I want to talk about in stepping into your power, which is that it involves your mindset as well.
It’s important to get into the mindset of fully believing in yourself and all the value you bring.
You have to believe it in order to really step into your power and use it the right way, leverage it to make sure that you are getting the jobs that you want and the things that are important to you in your career.
Control Your Narrative
I work with clients a lot on controlling their career narrative.
This is partially because I work with a lot of career changers or people who are in a transition or shift. But it’s also because this topic is so powerful and so important in the job search, and really in your career as a whole.
Controlling your career narrative means that you are the one telling the story.
You get to connect the dots for your audience, for whoever you’re speaking to, whoever’s reading your resume, your LinkedIn profile, your job application.
You get to tell the story. And the wonderful thing about that is that there are so many different perspectives that you can take.
You can look at any given situation or event or experience from various perspectives and you get to pick the one that best demonstrates the value you have.
Now, please don’t mistake it; this doesn’t mean to wildly make things up.
It just means to look at your experience and try to broaden your perspective to make sure that the way you’re framing it – the way you’re approaching it and demonstrating it for your target audience – Is what they need to hear and what they need to know about you.
Again, this is very valuable and very relevant for career changers, because it is often a situation where you’re coming from something that seems pretty irrelevant and making a shift into something different.
But if you can take charge of that narrative and connect the dots for them, you can show how the pieces of your experience fit together to create relevant qualifications.
And the thing is, if you don’t fill in the gaps and connect the dots for them, they’re going to do it themselves. And they’re not nearly as informed as you are about your career background.
So, you want to build a strong, cohesive narrative to bridge the gap, connect the dots, and/or overcome any background issues, gaps in employment, or anything else you’re under-confident about.
Don’t ignore it, build up a narrative around it.
Try to focus not so much on the deficiency that you feel, but instead build a narrative to turn all of that into a benefit.
Controlling your narrative is a really important piece of the job search puzzle and a really important piece of finding your empowerment.
Spend Your Talent Wisely
And finally, section number four is spending your talent wisely.
This is a topic that is coming up a lot in the careers space lately, and it’s really gaining momentum.
I’ve had some fun and enlightening conversations and listened to some fantastic podcasts lately that revolve around this topic.
Back in January, I interviewed Nii Ato Bentsi-Enchill (mentioned above as Jobscan’s #1 Expert to Follow on LinkedIn for 2021) for the Behind Hiring segment of my weekly LinkedIn LIVE series, #CareerTipTuesdays.
Among the many unique insights he brought to the conversation, one was the concept of, “if consumers vote with their dollars, then job seekers [can] vote with their applications”.
The idea of consumers ‘voting with their dollars’ means they can deliberately choose where to shop and spend their dollars based on the way a business operates or the social and/or political causes it supports (or doesn’t support).
Converting that to the job search, Nii Ato says “[As job seekers] We would reward companies…by trying to flock to them because they’re doing the right thing as far as social justice is concerned.”
He says, “what that could hopefully bring about, with enough momentum and enough people doing this, is that the companies that are not walking the walk of actually trying to recruit diversity within their ranks…will lose out in the competition for talent because the talent will go elsewhere.”
Then in February’s Behind Hiring segment, I interviewed another colleague and friend Greg Leos (Senior Financial Services Executive, long-time hiring manager, and founder of Career Focus Network) who expressed almost the exact same sentiment – saying just like consumers can choose where they spend their money, job seekers can choose where they spend their talent.
He said, “Money talks…and if companies start to recognize that they are not getting talent walking in their door then that’s when we’re really gonna see some things change.”
I also had a recent conversation with Anthony Vaughan, and learned about his Monday Anticipation concept, through which he emphasizes the power employees have and the idea that they have much more power than most companies would have them believe.
And Madison Butler similarly acknowledged this power as a guest on a recent episode of the Punk Rock HR podcast, saying (among many other brilliant and powerful things) she believes companies should feel honored to have people want to work there – not the other way around.
I don’t know about you, but I try to pay attention when several people I respect and admire start saying a lot of the same stuff.
It means they’re on to something.
So wield your power as a job seeker.
Do your research about companies that interest you, and deliberately target companies that align with your values, that align with the things that are important to you. That mean something to you.
And when you get into the interviewing phase – wield your power there, too.
This is one stage of the hiring process that I know is very intimidating for job seekers for a lot of reasons, so the first thing I’ll say is that you do have power in the interview process to ask questions, to get transparency, to ask about the things that are important to you.
Interviewing is a two-way street.
It is just as much about you feeling happy with the offer and the company and the job as it is them feeling happy and comfortable with wanting to hire you.
So put the ball in your court by asking good questions throughout the interview process.
This is another place where you want to make sure you do your research so you can be as informed as possible and have some strong questions prepared.
Maybe you want to ask about how they support remote workers.
Maybe you want to ask about how they support families and a healthy work-life balance.
Maybe you want to ask about the diversity of their employees, leadership, or board members.
Or the plans they have to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Or how they support their LGBTQ+ employees, their BIPOC employees, transgender employees, or the community at large around their company.
Whatever is important to you – feel empowered to ask those things.
And there are two reasons for that.
#1 is because it is important that you find an alignment – that’s important for your own career happiness and it’s important to make sure that you have the life and the career that you want,
#2 It is an excellent way to hold companies accountable.
When one person goes into an interview and asks some of these really pointed questions, the company may take notice, but it’s not really enough to drive change.
However, if everybody reading this and everybody out there in a job search starts to feel their power and starts to ask these questions that hit hard at a point, and that really hold employers accountable –
Companies will start to take note.
And if you ask those questions, don’t find the answers that you want, and then decide to instead spend your talent or vote with your talent by working somewhere else, that is enough to drive change.
Hold employers accountable for the things that are important to you.
And hold them accountable for fair practices. Try to get as much transparency as possible throughout the process, and be sure to note any red flags that come up.
If something happens in the interview where they don’t answer a question very directly, or they answer a question with something that you find is counter to what your research was, or maybe they ask you a question that makes you feel uncomfortable, note these red flags and recognize that you have the power to say, “Hey, that, that doesn’t feel right to me. That’s not the level of ethics that I really want to operate on.”
And you can make the decision to go work somewhere else.
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