Because I specialize in client re-invention (I have done it four times myself) many clients come to me when they want to make a career change. A typical career change may involve a client moving from a consulting role to a corporate role (sounds easy, but it is NOT); someone moving from a product development role to a product management role; or from a design role to a project management role. In some extreme makeovers, over the years, I have helped a software engineer become a zookeeper, and an analog engineer, a sommelier at an upscale restaurant; such transformations are rare—yet doable.

So, what is the one secret ingredient for making such transformations practicable? Apart from having and showing the knowledge (and not necessarily the experience, of course!) the most important element is knowing how to correctly use the language of the destination career that you want embrace.

Why is the ability to use the correct language so important?

Here’s why: When making a career change the person selecting you to join their team is most concerned about your embracing the ethos of the space in which they play their part. Of course, the most basic requirement for embracing the ethos of any culture is the understanding of the nuances of the lexicon they use in their everyday work. So, if you are able to fluently converse with the right language, most of the objections that are likely to be raised during such a career transition become less important—even irrelevant. My view is that it is much easier to overcome the lack of experience in the space where you intend to move by showing your passion, interest, and insight. Being authentic helps, too!

I think that some object lessons will drive this point home:

Case-I: Going from a consultant role to a functional role in the corporate world.

Consultants are known for their problem-solving prowess and for analyzing complex situations. They are also known for their ability to recommend a course of action to achieve what their client is seeking, before engaging them. They are rarely commissioned to produce results by implementing their ideas. I call these characteristics as being a “Greek.” Greeks in ancient times were good at philosophical discourses and for coming up with solutions to complex problems using their analytical powers. However, they were not known for winning wars. Romans were famous for their warrior roles. So, metaphorically, consultants are seen as “Greeks” trying to get into a culture, where being a “Roman” is more valued. The corporate world thrives more on execution and less on analysis of a complex problem.

So, when going from a consulting role to a functional role in the corporate world the consultant must learn how to use the right language steeped in the following areas: socializing change, political savvy, execution excellence, driving results, and measuring success. These areas of focus make them more “Roman” than “Greek.” If you are able to marshal the right language during your selection process, you are more likely to be seen as a worthy candidate for a functional role in the corporate world.

Case-II: Going from a development role to a product management role

Being a product manager requires the knowledge of the market, competition, customer, and how to make money from a given product. So, familiarity with product life-cycle (not development life-cycle), solution space (not technology space), and how customers make buying decisions (not how design trade-offs are made) for a given product or solution are important things to know. Thus moving from product development to product management requires a very different language set to convince the hiring team members that you have what it takes to play an effective role in product management space. Showing them how great a designer or programmer you are will not work because they will not understand that language.

These are just two cases of transition where different language and knowing how to use it correctly will help make these transitions easier. There are, of course, many others.

Once you’ve decided to make a career change one of the first priorities for you is to understand the language of your destination career. How quickly you learn to translate your language from your existing area to your destination career will speed up your success in this transition.

Good luck!

Often, when they tell me this, they become animated, full of life, manifesting a very different energy presenting their idea and telling me how it changed things at work. Yet, when I ask them to tell me how they translated that success into something for their own benefit, they are at a loss to tell me what changed for them, as a result. They defend their inability to parlay that success into their own by reminding me, After all it was a team effort; without management’s active support this would be dead in the water. Although this may be true, in championing their cause, they have to go out of their ways to shepherd their initiative in the routine of their everyday work, and have to end up contributing above and beyond what is normally expected from anyone. So, why don’t they see their career advancing with commensurately greater responsibilities and pay?

They’re great at selling their ideas, but they suck at selling themselves!

This is a common difficulty many face at work. I have various theories why this can happen. One reason may be that the benefit of what they do is so obvious to them that they have some problem (a big one!) seeing that benefit translated into something meaningful to them and to their career. Yet another may be their belief that if they continue to differentiate themselves from their colleagues by making noteworthy and ongoing contributions to their company they will be eventually recognized by their management.

Wrong on both counts!

As I have said in my numerous blogs in the past (in fact, this blog is a complement to my last blog, Thriving in the Zone of Discomfort!) you must develop a very self-centric view of your contributions to your company that go above and beyond your job description and your pay grade. What must be recognized in any company is the ability of an individual to spot new opportunities, take some risk, and be rewarded for the additional value added through their efforts. For this to happen an individual must be very aware of what is in their job and what is “above and beyond.”

So, if you have no trouble selling new ideas in your company and watching them translate into something good for the company, then you must learn how to translate that into your own success.

Here are some guidelines on how to do that:

1. Be aware of what the job description is and what is expected in your role. Make sure that you not only meet those expectations, but also exceed them. This gives you license to:
2. Identify what are some of the obvious and not so obvious pain points in your area of work. These may include improving an internal process to developing a better way to deal with the customer for an enhanced customer experience.
3. Analyze the problem and develop a solution that falls within your area of expertise. It does not even have to fall entirely within your expertise area; you can take some license in how you formulate a solution. Collaborating with others—even outside your area of work—can be a boon to your own development when you take this on.
4. Develop a robust solution, sell it to management and make sure that the benefit of your solution is clearly understood in these conversations.
5. Now that you have your management’s attention you must sell yourself—you have already sold your idea to them—and make known what you are expecting from this in return for yourself. This is a very important step. Do NOT assume that you will be automatically rewarded when this project succeeds.
6. Continue to do your day job well—always stay out of trouble—and shepherd your pet project to make visible its ongoing progress. Share that with others and your management. This will also prevent anyone else from taking credit for what you’re doing.
7. When the project is successful make sure that you notify everyone, who initially knew about it, including your management chain, and meet with your manager to extract the fruits of the promise that was made to you before you started working on this project.
8. If you don’t get what was promised and only get excuses in return, make sure that you augment your résumé with this accomplishments (and similar such accomplishments from the past) and start marketing yourself.

Learning to keep separate your ability to sell your idea from selling yourself is an important skill in one’s career growth. Start using these concepts presented here to learn how to practice these concepts to advance your growth!

Good luck!

When clients come to me for help they are often looking for ways to advance their careers and to grow. Yet, when I look at their work and how they are engaged in it, I often find that they have slipped into a zone of comfort, and are not really pushing to grow. When I point this out to them they often get defensive by telling me how busy they are and how they do not have time to take on more work to show what they can really do.

What is happening here is that your hard work—long hours, managing teams in different time zones, and constantly reacting to the raging fires that need to be put out—mistakenly becomes your proxy for your value to the company. Many clients are surprised to learn this at the end of year when their performance review is presented to them. They are disappointed that despite all their hard work they have not advanced their station in any significant ways; perhaps a modicum salary increase, some kind words from the boss, and a few tips of encouragement: Keep up the good work!

What is happening here is that the client is mistaking hard work for creating new value for the employer. When you are doing the same work, more or less in a transactional mode, you have slipped into a comfort zone, and, despite all your hard work it is not going to make much difference in how it reflects on your résumé or in how the company sees your value. So, in every such case my guidance to my clients is the same: find something in your area of work that puts you in a zone of discomfort, take it on, and show the value you can create.

Even to do this right there is some method, which you must follow to translate your undertaking into something meaningful to both your career and to your growth. Here are my recommendations on how to do this right:

1. First make an audit of your workload and evaluate how you spend your daily time attending to your work. Find repetitive work and see how much of that you can delegate it down, sideways, and to the trash heap. A case in point: When I was managing a large project with over 300 people I used to get urgent phone calls all day along about various project matters. When I decided to wait 24 hours to return many of those calls, nearly 80% of the requests vanished as the callers had found other ways to address the issues!
2. Expect people around you, including your direct reports, to do more than they are doing. It if strange, but when you expect more from people, they often come through!
3. Now find some worthy project or cause that you really want to sink your teeth into. Find the value of that initiative to the department, your boss, your company, and to your customer. Take on a high-value, high impact initiative that will make your résumé shine. Put together a plan and make a business case for it before going to your boss. Get it fully vetted and then present to your boss in a way that makes him look good in front of their superiors. More importantly, it should provide you a significant professional growth opportunity.
4.  It is here that you negotiate how you are going to be rewarded for your initiative before you take it on. Do not assume that your boss will remember your work at review time and give you what you deserve out of the goodness of their heart. It does not work that way. You do not get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate beforehand! Get specific commitments. Merely hearing from your boss, We’ll take care of you, is not enough!
5. Make sure that you have organized your project with sufficient resources of time, staff, equipment, and support. Generously use your ability to acknowledge people’s help by writing emails of commendations with copies to many higher-ups in the organization. It is amazing for a simple email of recognition what lengths people are willing to go!
6. Keep a journal of your progress and evaluate what you are learning and how you are growing. Keep track of the benefits that are the result of your work. Such benefits might be: A more efficient workflow, a better product design, a smoother customer interaction, and so on. Try to monetize those benefits so that you have some ammunition at the time of your annual review, and for a bullet on your résumé.
7. Make your boss an integral part of the ongoing activities in your initiative. They must feel committed to the project, so when it comes to taking credit it is appropriate. Also, when it gets into some trouble your boss’ neck is also on the line.
8. At key milestones send out emails about what you have accomplished and, once again, acknowledge all those who have helped you get there. This will ensure their continuing help in the overall success that remains ahead.
9. When you have completed what you have set out to do make sure that you send out an email documenting your overall initiative, how it has helped (or will help) the right cause, and how you were able to succeed getting this done with the help of those (with names) who worked with you!
10. When your annual review comes due make sure that your contributions are well acknowledged with a commensurate change in your compensation. Remind your boss of the promises you extracted before you started working on this (a’ la # 4 above). Also, revise your résumé to get it market ready!

Getting out of your comfort zone is where your growth is. So, next time you start slipping into a rut, follow this advice and do something for yourself!

Good luck!

Why?

When you are out of work it is easy to get in a state of funk. I personally have been laid off three times and had been out of work until I found a job (in each case by re-inventing myself into a new career). Getting into a new career is even harder when you are out of work because you must demonstrate something special in how the potential employer sees you in what you can do for them. What I learned from that experience was that how you project yourself and the confidence you display in selling your re-invention is what gets you past the obstacle you are facing. Your lack of expertise in the area of your re-invention is rarely a showstopper—as I found this out three times in my own case. On the other hand if you look diffident, downtrodden, and desperate no one is going to offer you a job regardless of how competent you are in the area of your specialty.

So, what does this all mean? Here is my guidance to those who are out of work and are trying to get back into the work force:

1. First and foremost, do not translate being unemployed into something personal. Do not personalize your plight by wondering what you might have done to avoid what happened. Instead, take what has happened personally, which means taking charge of what you can do to move ahead and figuring out the best strategy to do that.
2. Prepare a really strong branding message by redoing your résumé and by charging up your LinkedIn Profile. Learn how to come out at the top of any search on LinkedIn by correctly Profiling yourself. Avoid showing your current state of unemployment by volunteering and by engaging in contract or consulting work.
3. Launch a campaign that combines responding to open jobs with prospectively looking into companies of your choosing. Approach someone in senior position to present an idea and get in front of them.
4. Avoid going only to networking events where others looking for work also congregate. Although such support groups are helpful, going there too often can bring you down and it will show in how you project yourself.
5. Quickly build your search pipeline and campaign hard to generate action. See where the setbacks and obstacles are. Each rejection should tell you something that you need to do differently the next time. Do not be shy to ask recruiters when they call you with a rejection about what you could have done differently.
6. Keep in shape through physical exercise and through meditation. When things are not going well it is normal to resort to alcohol and other substances. Avoid those and keep your mind and yourself looking sharp.
7. Keep a daily routine. Our work provides us our daily structure. So, when we are out of work that structure goes way, exposing us to an undisciplined personal routine, which can wreak havoc in our productivity and self-esteem. Find a space where you can stay as if you are at work and try to maintain a disciplined routine. Get lost in your work!
8. Meet people, who are energized about what they do, and frequently engage with them in activities that energize you. Do not be bothered by where they are in their lives compared to where you are. We all deal with life’s vicissitudes, and must learn how to deal with our setbacks without getting down on ourselves.
9. Regardless of how bad things become or get, always treat yourself and your family well (you do not need to spend money to indulge in this). Just remember that being unemployed for a while is a just a stage that you must deal with and learn from it.
10. No matter how much you need help in finding yourself a job, find someone or some cause where you can help others. Helping others, especially when you are hurting yourself, can be quite empowering and can make you forget your own troubles.

Good luck!

Many of my clients are individual contributors vying to become managers. Others are already managers and are dreaming about executive positions. In such cases one of the recurring themes that comes up is the demonstration of their “soft skills.” There is such misapprehension around this phrase that I decided to devote an entire blog to this topic!

First of all, many up-and-coming managers think that management itself is a soft skill. They believe that the hard skills they have learned stem from their knowledge of the technical area of their expertise.

Contrary to common belief knowing how to manage is also a hard skill. For example, a manager is expected to perform the four functions of managing: Lead, Plan, Organize, and Establish Controls. Each one of these functions has its own tasks under them, with the attendant rules for making those tasks efficiently executable. Ironically, some believe that to be a good manager one must be “soft” in exercising their managerial authority.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For a manager—or for anyone, for that matter—getting things done through others requires knowing what makes people tick. The technical skills that stem from your expertise as well as your managerial skills that allow you to get things done as a result of your position, both constitute hard skills. The soft skills stem from your ability to get others to do what needs to be done, despite your authority or influence, and not because of it!

Let me explain:

Someone in a managerial authority has the power to order their subordinates to do what they want done. Although this is how hierarchical management structure functions, a person in a managerial position can be much more effective in how they get their team members to respond to their needs if they take a more human approach to what they are trying to accomplish. So, if you can exercise your leadership authority and not your managerial power to persuade someone, who works for you, to get them to respond to your needs as if they are responding to their own, then you have succeeded in persuading them to own that task. A leader influences by virtue of creating willing followership; a manager gets things done by ordering others around. You are an effective manager when you are able to get things done merely by virtue of your leadership authority! By applying this subtle shift in how you approach getting work done through those who report to you, you have mastered the necessary soft skill. If you understand this subtle difference then you have began to appreciate what the “soft skills” are all about.

The best demonstration of one’s soft skills comes from how they approach others when they want you to do something for them merely through the power of influence—and not authority. I often get Introduction requests when someone in my LinkedIn network wants me to connect them to a hiring manager I know. Even though the managerial job that they they are after specifically asks for “demonstrated soft skills,” their approach to how they go about this simple step in their pursuit of this opportunity betrays their lack of those very soft skills that they are expected to have!

For example, a request to me couched in a curt and peremptory tone as, “Can you introduce me to Dave? I want to apply for a job that he just posted.” I have many Daves (or another such very common name) in my LinkedIn network, so without any further context I have no clue who this Dave person is. I am not inclined to spend any more time on this request for a person I just know casually, and am likely to ignore such a request. But, if I decide to honor this request—because of my relationship with the requestor—by first researching, then finding this Dave person, and then forwarding this poorly drafted request to Dave Smith, VP at NetPlus Systems, he is not going to be impressed by the requestor’s soft skills, or lack thereof (because he has the ability to see the entire request chain).

If, instead, the requester had framed their request differently, e.g., “Dilip, I see that Dave Smith, VP of Development at NetPlus Systems is in your network. This is very fortuitous for me! He just posted a Director opening in his group. I am very interested in this position. So, can I impose on you to please forward my request for an Introduction to him? I’d really appreciate it if you do!”

If you can see the difference in tone between the two Introduction requests I’ve cited here, then you are well on your way to master the “soft skills” that are so much in need these days!

Good luck!

“The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”—Charles Du Bos, French critic and essayist (1882–1939)

Happy New Year!

As we embark on this New Year, I thought to use this space for some guidance to those who are still in the process of making resolutions for this New Year. This guidance comes from having worked with many clients over the years and how they have been able to advance their career by doing simple things; things that require some sacrifice, some discipline, and holding yourself accountable for your success!

1. Take a stock of your career and evaluate if you are enjoying what you do, and what it will take to bring joy back in your work. Make a list of things that you need to change, including your job—even your career—to venture out to do something you always wanted to do! Learn how to wake up scared (in a good way) every morning! Remember, “The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine.” – Mike Murdock
2. Identify one thing that you would want to improve and find some ways to get on a routine: e.g., if you want to improve your communication skills find ways to learn to write better, speak effectively, and make presentations impactful. Find someone to help you with this on an ongoing basis. Nearly 90% of my clients come to me because I can help them express what they have on their mind better than they can.
3. Find a mentor or coach who can provide you ongoing guidance in your career. Do not wallow in the state of “unconscious incompetence.” Almost everyone who comes to me for guidance tells me that they did not know what they did know before coming to me for making a change in their career and their life.
4. Mentor someone. You learn so much more by mentoring others. It does not matter where you are in your life or in your career.
5. Find out the joy of working on something that truly engages you. Even if a small part of your work allows you to get yourself lost in it, the rest of the drudgery in your job can make it bearable.

Good luck and have a great year!

In a keynote, Seth Godin, a well-known marketing and leadership consultant spoke  (watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgKAuz_wsgA) about how we should put art in any job that we do. By art he meant an ability to have freedom to contribute something inspired, stemming from the creativity that freedom allows in a job.

What a great idea!

On the backdrop of this admonition a client of mine, who is an executive at a US-based company, which is now known for its draconian Asian culture , came to see me the other day and started telling me how his company, despite its huge global presence and its competitors from the Fortune-100 roster, merely dictates to him what he must do in his job on a day-to-day basis, with no latitude for any discretion. They dictate to him whom he should see in the customers’ companies, what he must say to them, and how long he should spend.

They also tell him what outcomes he is expected to bring regardless of the competitive landscape that the customer sees. He was embarrassed to tell me that because of the company’s policy to have “handlers” with him wherever he goes, he has no latitude in doing anything creative in his job, because his handlers immediately report everything to the company’s HQ brass! By being at this company my client has now surrendered himself to become its obedient servant. To quote Godin, Obedience does not get us better productivity it gets us better dogs!

How sad!

The bottom line of Godin’s message is that if we are engaged in a job that is so precisely defined that it does not allow for our creativity, then we should not stay in that job, no matter how well compensated! Because, if we stay engaged in such jobs—and I have clients, who are in such jobs, in varying degrees—then we are wasting our energies in the wrong direction, staying there. So, what was my advice to this client?: Find another job that allows you the freedom to create so that you become alive in what you do!

Actually, this client had called me a month into his new job little more than a year back when he first realized this. Since he had just started there I was reluctant to tell him to quit and to look for yet another job. Instead, I advised him to stick it out for a while, learn new skills, with an eye on how his résumé will have to look to make him marketable when he has reached a “yield” point in his job—when staying beyond this point would be to his detriment. It was clear after last week’s meeting that he was now at this point.

So, what is the lesson from this nightmarish experience in light of Godin’s admonition? Here is my take:

1. Before you get into a new job, especially at a company with deep foreign roots and culture, do some rigorous due diligence to understand how you are expected to perform in that culture. Talk to current and past employees to get their perspective, research on-line (e.g. glassdoor.com), and carefully evaluate the cultural compatibility with your value set.
2. Do not be seduced by the salary and other benefits that are offered to you, especially if they are too good to support your open market price.
3. If you are not able to fully uncover what you are in for, and get into a job that becomes a nightmare, evaluate to see if you can stick it out long enough to improve your marketability. In the case of this client he was able to focus in on two areas that were new and in high demand, despite his lack of experience in these areas. But, because he was able to bend, his company allowed him to play in this new area—as long as he was able to follow their orders. Thus, within the year that he has suffered there, he was able to use that time to his advantage to improve his marketability. He was, thus, able to offset his robotic existence with his ability to learn a new skill that he badly needed.
4. In a less draconian environment, see if you can identify something that is being ignored by your company, and try to make a case for pursuing it. If that pursuit is in an area that improves your marketability, as it happened in the case of my client, then you can use this opportunity to continue your learning until the time comes when you are able to make a move.
5. Do not look at your place of work as an obedience school! Try finding avenues to express your “art” and demonstrate your creativity through subterfuge if you have to. In more forgiving companies such behavior is rewarded if they are able to see the benefit of your “subterfuge.”
6. Always keep your eye on how your résumé is going to look next year and three years from now, no matter where you are. Depending on the job-market drivers identify a few skills that you must have on page-one of your résumé and work diligently to get them under your belt.
7. Learn from even harsh experiences and try to find new meaning in what is available to you. Despite my client’s surprise at the beginning of his new job and his deep disappointment, he was able to regroup and reinvent himself by applying his energies in a new direction. You, too, can do that!

Good luck!

In all cases I listen to what they have to say first, and then ask them to look at the following 10 questions. After their review of these questions I reconnect with them (by phone or in-person) to go over their responses—orally. Their honest responses tell me much about their potential success in their new job.

Here are these 10 questions:

1. What surprised you in your new job in the first few weeks (something that did not surface during the interview process)?
2. What is going really well?
3. What is going off track that needs immediate attention?
4. What one thing can you do that will define your leadership in the next 3-6 months? (my note: This question applies to everyone, even an individual contributor!)
5. Now that you know the place better, what is that you really want to be and do there?
6. What are you doing well that is helping you get there?
7. What are you not doing well that is preventing you from getting there?
8. What will you do differently on your next day at work to change that?
9. How and where can I help?
10. Where do you need most help (even if I cannot provide that help)?

Depending on how my client responds to these questions, one at a time, I form an opinion of how well situated they are in the new job and what they need to do to improve their engagement, value, and their enjoyment in their new job. Once I hear their responses, I provide them with a success score (#/100) that tells them how well they are likely to do in their new job going forward. I also tell them what they can do to improve the score. This change that they need to make includes improving their job skills, their relationships with key stakeholders, and also their attitude in how they are engaged in their job, among other things. Once I have a good sense that the client is able to make these changes in their new job I ask them to stay on track with these changes and call me in a few months to check again if there is any change in any of the areas of interest.

In some cases the score is low to begin with and the client is less enthusiastic about turning things around, even during the early stages of their new job. When the follow-up call (about 4-6 months into their new job) does not show much progress in their scores, I tell them that they need to consider a change, either within their own company or outside. My view is that when you are not properly engaged in your job and you are not able to turn things around to make them better, it is time to move on to something different and better than to delude yourself with the hope that things will somehow change—as some clients often think. They rarely change on their own accord for one, and if there is a basic mismatch in the job, they do not, even with a major effort on the client’s part. So, when this happens it is best to cut your losses and to move on to other opportunities.

I hope that you look at your own job and ask some tough questions about how you are engaged in your job and decide if you’re better off making a change to improve your own situation.

Good luck!

During my life I’ve been laid-off three times and I have re-invented myself each time—and then some, with four re-inventions to my credit so far. In managing a career life cycle I have identified seven stages in which this cycle completes itself. So, as I work through my fifth career, here is some learning that I’d like to impart to those, who are equally adventurous about how to best manage each of the seven stages:

1. End of life of one career: There are many telltale signs that you are at the end of your current career: losing interest in your work (not just your job); inability to compete with the new-generation of your counterparts; planning your weekends at work on Monday mornings, etc. When you enter this stage in your job you must assess if it is the job or the career that you are in that is causing this angst. At the first sense of becoming aware of this condition, you must act quickly, instead of going into denial over it (a common reaction). Either you must seek expert help, or find ways to bootstrap your own re-invention to transition yourself into your next career. This is one of the hardest conditions to detect (because of our ability to go into denial over it, coupled with your overconfidence in your ability for a re-invention), and also one of the hardest decisions to make to leave behind what has been your comfort zone so far.
2. Transition Period: If you want to make a successful transition into a new career you must start actively thinking about a new career, well before you become a job—or even a career—zombie, which involves doing your job even without putting any effort into it. As you slowly devolve–even degenerate–from being “in” your job to being “on” it, you have successfully transitioned into the zombie state. You must plan to undertake your transition into a new career before you become a zombie, if you want to transition successfully into a new career. If you’ve allowed yourself to become a zombie for too long, you may not be able to transition successfully. This also applies when you are out of work.
3. Re-invention: The key to a good re-invention is your ability to fashion and verbalize a new marketing message (your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP) and use that as a platform to become a strong candidate in a market that is new to you. There are several strategies that can be effectively applied to making this re-invention with speed and efficiency. Creating a coherent brand around your new USP is one of the most challenging undertakings during this process. Yet, it is not as hard as it may appear.
4. Marketing Your New Message: Marketing a new message requires an understanding of your new audience and targeting of your message using multiple channels (résumé, LinkedIn, and other social media), including your business card. There are several ways to accelerate this brand building, but without this momentum it is difficult to transition into your new career in a seamless way.
5. Engagement in Your New Career: Most people underestimate what it takes to get traction in your new career. My own experience with myself, and working with my clients, whom I helped in their re-invention, is that you should allow yourself about three years establishing your new brand in your changed career, so that you are seen as a veteran in that space. In my current career, it took me about that time before potential clients started coming to me for paid advice. As you get ensconced in your new career you must also take some key actions to keep your brand fresh and relevant.
6. Managing Your New Career: As with any endeavor, managing your new career takes diligence, proactive actions, and a learning mind-set. Here, too, there are several strategies (now obvious) that have worked for me and for my clients. Although this is not rocket science, you must be prepared to experiment and learn what works best for you and for your new career.
7. Getting Ready for Your Next Career: Once you have gone through the first career-change cycle, transitioning into the second and subsequent career avatars get easier. One thing you learn here is how to best use the available “runway” to make a seamless transition. My hardest transition, which I did on my own, was when I was laid-off as head of engineering at a high-tech company at 48. I did not know anything else then (nearly 22 years back), and career coaching as a profession did not exist as it does today. So, bootstrapping was the only way I was able to transition into my second career, and three others from then on. But, as you learn how to do this, it gets easier.

In today’s economy everyone must learn how to re-invent for themselves (with help as they need it), and to get into a brand-new area of economic activity. Retirement at 65 is also no longer an option for many because of a variety of circumstances. So, learning to re-invent yourself, while you are in prime of your professional life is the best countermeasure for a long-lasting professional life.

Good luck!

Wrong!

Although one reason for an interview is to check you out and to evaluate the depth of your knowledge in the technical—or management—area of the job you are seeking, the main reason is to evaluate how well you fit in with the culture of the company and how well you work with the team that is part of your working group in your potential place of work. I say this because many of my clients, who come to me after an interview, bragging about how well they answered all the technical questions that were posed to them, are flummoxed by the rejection they get when the recruiter calls them and tells them that they have found a “stronger” candidate. I have to explain to my clients that “stronger” does not merely mean a candidate, who has better knowledge of that particular area, but it means someone with a better fit for that job.

Let me explain:

There are five factors that are important in a selection process as a result of a job interview. They are listed below with the percentage weight assigned to each:

Technical (or managerial) expertise (30%)

Chemistry and Compatibility (25%)

Attitude (25%)

Risk (10%)

Salary (10%)

The percentages for each factor are anecdotal based on my personal experience with thousands of data points. Let us look at each factor and what they mean to you and your interview.

1. Technical or Managerial Expertise: This is the main reason a company is hiring you—your expertise. So, if you are going in for an interview as a Marketing Analytics expert in the consumer web business, make sure that you are equipped with the latest knowledge of that area.
2. Chemistry and Compatibility: This item has to do with how well you get along the hiring team, and the hiring manager in particular. Although there is no set way to prepare for this item, using some of the psychological principles of body language, communication (eye-contact, for example), and confidence (not cockiness) can help you better deal with some of the issues that can come up on this front. Having a conversational exchange, instead of subjecting yourself to an interrogation, also helps on this front.
3. Attitude: This item takes on the same weight as the previous one. Attitude is important because it will project you in a way that will amplify your positive attributes. Having an upbeat attitude in an interview creates a positive energy during the interview process, which can help you overcome some of the glitches that are inevitable in any interview. Projecting a positive attitude is important in acing an interview.
4. Risk: This is a factor that a hiring manager is concerned about. This risk can stem from your not staying at the new company long enough to make it worth their while to offer you a job. Recruiters and hiring managers look at this risk based on your chronology (and gaps) from your résumé. They look for both, the risk of inertia (staying too long) and risk of job-hopping (not staying long enough at one place). In the case of one client, who was at a consulting company for almost 10 years a young high-tech company withdrew its original offer when that company’s CEO felt that the candidate had stayed at one company too long, and was hence risk averse.
5. Salary is an important factor when all else is equal. If your salary is too low at your current place, the prospect employer may find you not ready for the level of responsibilities that the open job offers. If it is too high then they may be unwilling to match it, or wonder if you will stay in the job after accepting a lower salary.

The above factors are not all-inclusive, but provide a good glimpse of what factors go into making a hiring decision. Knowing how these factors play out in a job interview may help you present yourself in the proper light so that your chances of getting that job offer are protected. There are also ways to deal with some of these factors by being aware of them and then by neutralizing them with specific strategies.

Good luck!