Volunteering for Career Change

If you’re considering a career change, your career counselor or coach may encourage you to take a volunteer position in your new industry. Alternatively, you may be encouraged to take up volunteer work when you’re between jobs, as a way to update your resume.

(1) Non-profit organizations often have a history of transitioning volunteers to full-time careers. For-profit organizations rarely do.

If you seek a job in a for-profit organization, be cautious about offering to work for free or for a deeply discounted salary. Instead, try to leverage your skills to a new position. For instance, an IT professional who wants to move to marketing could apply for tech jobs in marketing firms.

(2) Recognize that volunteer positions often differ dramatically from the paid positions.

This difference works in both directions. Once I met someone who volunteered for a social service job. She was horrified: heavy workload, depressing conditions, and ineffective supervision.

“Social work? No way!” she declared.

I suggested she talk to professionals with degrees who worked in the field. I also suggested she investigate different agencies.

At the other extreme, volunteer workers often miss the political hassles and informal job requirements that are critical to surviving in a paid position.

(3) Volunteer work may be a bridge when you are in transition.

Career change articles often urge workers to build up their resumes with volunteer work. Sometimes you can pick up skills that will be transferrable but don’t assume you’re building your resume. The gap between for-profit and non-profit can be enormous and career direction typically goes one way: from for-profit to non-profit.

If you are not working at all, I first recommend investigating some form of self-employment or freelance work, preferably in your field. I’d also be open to short-term jobs that bring in cash.

Volunteer work may give you some structure and introduce you to new people. It’s better than sitting on the couch at home. It’s usually better than working in a low-paying retail job (unless, of course, you seek a retail management career).

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Another career myth: Career change is a straight line.

Most career change comes about through serendipity, not linear planning. Research shows that nearly every career choice and career change includes an element of luck or chance. For example, you run into an old college friend who tells you about a job opening in his company. You hadn’t considered this field but you take the job and discover you have an aptitude.

True Story: A medical social worker moved to a small town with his significant other. Finding no demand for his services, he accepted a clerical job with a real estate agency. He grew restless, so he studied for his real estate license to become an agent. He found his first client when he overheard a conversation in a coffee shop.

Three years later, he was the top real estate agent in the county – a career he would never have anticipated by logical planning. He would have scored near the bottom on any test measuring interest in real estate and aptitude for sales.

Another example:

Following a long job hunt, an attorney reluctantly accepted a job in the finance field. She had never been interested in finance and scored low on math aptitude. To her surprise, she soon realized she enjoyed the job. Her firm encouraged her to take finance courses and one day she realized she loves what she’s doing. She has received bonuses and promotions.

Both these examples are true.  Many of us find our new careers by answering an ad we stumbled across by accident. That’s certainly what happened to me.

After years of working in corporate jobs, I answered an ad to teach in a small private college. I had taught part-time in a community college but hadn’t considered a full-time teaching career. Teaching came naturally to me and I found myself thinking, “Why not?” So I enrolled in a doctoral program and embarked on a 20-year career.

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Career Change Book: Recommended

So far I’ve found two career books to recommend: Working Identity (Herminia Ibarra) and Finding Your Own North Star (Martha Beck). Now I’m adding this one to the list. Beck focuses mostly on choosing what you want; Ibarra talks about the search process. Now I recommend The 10 Laws of Career Reinvention by Pamela Mitchell.

Mitchell doesn’t have a lot of soul-searching exercises, like “What should be on my tombstone.” She invites readers to heed their intuition. Like Martha Beck, she believes the body knows more than the mind: if you find yourself feeling ill when you contemplate a type of work, it’s time for a move.

Nor does she spend a lot of time on the trappings of a career search, such as resumes. If you need to writea resume, she invites you to download samples from her company’s website.

Some useful points:

Career reinvention takes chronological time. She points out that many career-changers think “six weeks” when they should be thinking “six months.” I would agree more with Ibarra in Working Identity, who says three years is not unusual.

Besides chronological time, you need time during your week. One of my own clients said she could talk to me on Sunday evenings at 6 PM Eastern. Her weekdays were completely taken. She was too busy to change careers; she needed to take an interim job that would free up her hours.

Functional fear versus dysfunctional fear. Functional fear is based on realistic situations that you have to deal with.

Real qualifications versus negotiable qualifications. To be a doctor, you need an MD. For other careers, you may be able to substitute experience for academics.

My only quibble is that Mitchell can be a little too firm on some points. The term “laws” in the title sets the tone. For instance, on page 27, Mitchell suggests that “Patty” who dislikes a marketing job will not find happiness by moving to Google, which is after all an onlne advertising company. Yet in fact the culture of a high-tech company will be so different that a job with the same title might be transformed. I’ve seen people change their whole attitude to a career when they switched companies or even moved to a new geographic location. It’s not always easy to pinpoint the source of discomfort.

Similarly, researchers find that serendipity plays a key role in both career change and career success. By staying active and following the steps Mitchell lays out, you are more likely to experience the kind of serendipity that propels you forward. But I’ve met few people who logically chose a career and then took a linear path to get a job in that field. Mitchell undoubtedly understands the zig-zag pattern of career change, but she doesn’t highlight it the way Herminia Ibarra does in Working Identity.

Still, this book is one of the best career books I’ve seen in a long time. I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more publicity. The long, awkward name and bland cover might have something to do with it. The blurbs on the back cover don’t really convey excitement and the subtitle is a yawn that doesn’t even describe the book.

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Time Management for Mid-Life Career Change

Mid-life career changers often feel totally overwhelmed when they contemplate all the things they have to do. In fact, the reason most career change fizzles is related to lack of time. If you’re working 40 to 50 hours a week, how will you squeeze in your search for a new career? And where do you start?

– Career change time doesn’t work the same as career success time.

When you have a job in a corporation, you often realize you need to focus. Your mission is to “get the job done.” But when you want to find a new career, openness is more important than focus. A distraction may turn out to hold the key to your next life.

Serendipity used to be considered woo-woo and even a little silly. But browse through serious academic journals of career research and you will find a surprising number of people find a new career by accident, not through a step-by-step careful process.

For some reason, though, working through a step-by- step process can trigger a serendipitous experience. You consider a career that combines your love of math and mechanics with your fascination with medical miracles. One day you meet someone who enrolled in a degree program for biomechanical engineering and you have an “aha” moment you could never have achieved by deliberate planning.

– Think of juggling several balls in the air, not pitching one of them at a time.

When you’re just getting started on a search for your next career, you need to explore multiple options simultaneously, not sequentially. For instance, you might be considering a return to school for an advanced degree, a temporary job to pay the bills while you start a business and a new role in your current company.

When you focus on just one option, you may need weeks or even months to sort out the possibilities. Any of these options could turn into a dead end. If you just focus on one thing at a time, you’ve lost weeks and months with little to show for your efforts.

– Make career planning your number one priority.

Recognize that you may have to give up some recreational activities and personal time. Remove nay-saying friends from your life. Get the family on board even if you have to hire a counselor or relationship coach.

Mid-Life Career Strategy can be especially challenging because the rules keep changing as you move in new directions. Now you can download a FREE gift, “3 Secrets of Successful Midlife Career Change,” at Mid-Life Career Choice. For a proven time management system visit Time Management For Careers. From Cathy Goodwin, Ph.D., an author, speaker and career consultant who specializes in helping mid-life mid-career professionals and executives navigate career journeys.

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Aging Gracefully and Graciously (If you’re healthy, wealthy and aged 50-75)

Review of The Third Chapter: Passion Risk and Adventure in the 25 Years after 50
Author: Sara Lawrence Lightfoot
Published in 2009 by Sarah Crichton Books, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux

As a sometime career consultant, I continue to search for a book targeting people at mid-life. This book seems to be about preparing for the years just past midlife, which Mary Pipher characterizes as the “young old.”

As I’ve noted in reviewing other books, I often think it’s impossible to write a really helpful book about this stage of life because (a) there just aren’t a lot of choices for everyone and (b) there’s such a variety of people, health levels, skills, aptitudes, background and more. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot deals with (b) by focusing on a small slice of the population: educated, healthy people without financial worries. Within that group, she finds common patterns: a yearning for something that can’t always be named, a resistance to change (possibly because successful people tend to resist changing a cherished identity) and finally a learning that differs from previous classroom experiences.

It is insights like this one that led me to give the book a 4-star rating rather than 3-star. I agree with reviewers who complained about the length of interviews, details of subjects’ lives and narrowness of subject range. I also agree that the book doesn’t present as many original ideas and frameworks as readers might expect from extensive research. But as a former academic myself, I think it’s appropriate to work with a narrow sample, as long as you make it clear upfront, preferably in the book’s title. There’s value in asking explicitly, “If money were no object, how would people choose to enter their sixties and seventies?” At the same time, these people are insulated from many consequences of aging.

I also liked the author’s review of the way the notions of aging and retirement have changed. I would have liked to see more on this topic. When I lived in New Mexico I met people who lived in those “55 and up” communities, including one woman who took care of her aging parents. When her mom died, she was in her early fifties: too young, according to the community. I also met people who wondered why I didn’t want to live with my age-mates, an idea that makes me feel suffocated. It’s good to have the historical perspective.

The best part of the book was the author’s interview with economist Matthew Gladstone. Gladstone’s perspective makes sense, possibly because I have a b-school background and enjoyed my economics courses. Gladstone suggests that as we continue doing work, the law of diminishing returns sets in. If I understand him correctly, I believe he might suggest that a successful lawyer might get enormous joy out of winning her first case, then her second…but at some point, she will be less joyful. It’s like eating a meal when you’re hungry; as you start feeling satisfied you don’t enjoy the food as much.

I think we could extend economic thinking even further. When you reach a certain age, you certainly can invest whatever time, energy and money you have to learn something new or start a new venture. But your ROI – return on investment – will be limited. You might write one novel and maybe you will even sell it, but you won’t have time to go on and write a series that would bring you the real rewards that come to authors after a long career.

I don’t agree that the book reads like an academic article or a dissertation, having seen too many examples of the real thing. In fact, I think the book would be stronger if the author had introduced more sociological concepts to frame many examples. For instance, the interviewees made transitions from high-level professional or organizational settings to a more right-brained, artistic and/or spiritual focus. I know many people who never want to stop working. Volunteer work and the arts will never be enough for them (and I feel that way myself). The author notes that one interviewee, Pamela, feels frustrated because there are structural and institutional limits to her contribution. Yet anyone over 50 who wants to continue earning money faces much bigger challenges.

Finally, I admit to being jealous of those who found their new artistic callings. I wish I’d thought of singing lessons, but suspect I will still be advised to tap along to the songs rather than try to sing them. Over the past ten years, I’ve taken pottery classes in two different states. Each time I had less talent than anyone in the class. It was fun, though, and I just resumed. This time I decided to take on throwing. I still have less talent than anyone and I also have sore deltoids in my left arm. Still, I resonate to the experience of the interviewee, Josh, with learning the piano: trying to aim for a higher level does bring psychic rewards

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Mid-Life Career Strategy: Job in Danger? 5 Warning Signs

Blog Talk Radio Show:

Date / Time: 10/10/2009 8:30 AM

Call-in Number: (347) 855-8042

Or go to http://www.blogtalkradio.com/midlifecareergame to listen live or catch the replay afterwards.

Are you being paranoid (or just realistic)? Something seems odd…but is it your imagination? On this call we will talk about 5 warning signs most people miss. We’ll talk about how to tell if it’s all in your imagination. And what do you do if you’re not being paranoid: your job really might go away?

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Mid-Life Career Advice for the 21st Century: Job Getting Too Personal?

Clients often find they are challenged to maintain a line between business and personal lives. There are 5 ways you can encounter problems from over-disclosing:

(1) Stereotype – most dangerous

Every psychology class will tell you: people hold stereotypes. It’s not always fair but it’s part of human nature.

For example, if you’re getting a divorce, your colleagues will pull up their stereotypes of divorce, mostly negative:
“She won’t be able to concentrate.”
“He’ll be drinking a lot.”
“She’ll be depressed and miserable to be around.”
“He’ll be financially stressed.”

Do you need this hassle? I think not.

(2) Labeling

One day after a few drinks, you tell your colleagues, “I’ve been in therapy for a year. I’m trying to deal with issues about my relationships.”

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Millions of people are in your shoes. But one of my former colleagues learned (the hard way) that even this simple disclosure led to labeling him as “the guy who’s got relationship troubles.” Colleagues started asking him more personal questions and disclosing their own personal details. Worst of all, his personal life was discussed more than his many valuable contributions at work.

(3) Interpretation

Expect anything you say to be distorted and interpreted through your colleagues’ cultural lens. . “My sister was in a convent for awhile” can become “She was a nun for 5 years.” It can even become, “She’s a religious fanatic who doesn’t have a romantic life.”

True story: In one company, a new CEO decided to be open about his personal life. Introducing himself, he said, “My divorce is being finalized next week. I’m set to marry my girlfriend in just three months. We’ve been together in Dallas for over three years and finally will tie the knot. I have two kids in college and one starting his freshman year.”

In the 21st century, this story seems straightforward. Most people would be bored.

But a few of this CEO’s colleagues did not share his moral values. Some held religious views on divorce. Others were married or divorced with children of their own. One said, “I cannot believe he is living with another woman before the divorce. I will never be able to respect him, no matter how much he does for this company.”

I talked about his at http://www.BlogTalkRadio.com/MidlifeCareerGame
where you can listen to the replay.

Career consulting is available (limited) at http://www.midlifecareerstrategy.com/coaching.html

(4) Red flag for future assignments

Your boss has ten people who all want the next promotion or plum assignment. She’s looking for good, solid reasons to make a decision. If you’ve just shared your personal life – your divorce, financial problems, or bad medical news – she’s got an easy out. And you handed it to her.

(5) Vulnerability

Being vulnerable is a healthy part of being in a personal relationship. It’s not a healthy part of a business relationship. Even if you feel scared and insecure, you want to be strong.

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Mid-Career Planning: How Personal Can You Get…and Should You?

How much of your personal life should you disclose at work?

Penelope Trunk, author of Brazen Careerist and now famous blogger, likes to be controversial.  That’s a good thing when you’re a blogger. Recently she posted about a very personal topic: having a miscarriage at work. She also wrote about her desire to get an abortion, which was thwarted by a three-week wait in Wisconsin. And she says we need to be more open about these topics because 25% of pregnancies end in miscarriage and many of those miscarriages happen at work. Whew! She’s hit about six hot buttons in just one short article. Read her full post here.

As you read this post, how do you feel? Disgusted? Annoyed? Admiring? Do you feel it’s an appropriate topic for a blog that’s supposed to be about careers? And how much should you reveal in the workplace about your personal life, health, family and so on? It’s a complicated topic because the answers will differ depending on your company and also on your situation. When someone asks, “How was your weekend?” you can disclose a lot if your married with two kids on soccer teams. If you’re single and dating someone new… well, that’s different.

These days when so many people are informal and open, it’s even more important to set boundaries. The damages from self-disclosure aren’t always obvious or swift. Even when you have your own business, you have to consider what to share with clients and potential allies. Some people believe in “let it all hang out” and others believe in tight compartments. I’d like to hear from you: what are your challenges, recommendations and solutions?

I’m talking about this topic next Saturday morning on my Blog Talk Radio Show. You can listen live, participate in discussions or catch the recording afterward.  Meanwhile, post comments below. Just click on the word “Comment” to post.

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21st century career advice: Use Google Alerts

Set a google alert for your own company. Add alerts for your boss and key top managers. You will be surprised at how much shows up.

Just one thing…use your own personal computer account!

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Why Mid-Life Career Change Doesn’t Happen

Many mid-career executives and professionals are miserable in their jobs and frustrated with their careers. They wake up each day, dreading to go to work. They swear they’re ready to make a change. They buy a ton of self-help books. And nothing happens. Here’s why.

Mistake #1: Feeling desperate (and hopeless at the same time). You think, “Well, I’m so comfortable… Then you realize, “I’ve been here three years. I can’t wait another day. I’ve got to get out of here. Clients sometimes say things like, “I don’t care if I get fired,” or, “Maybe I’ll go bankrupt. So what?” What they mean is, “The situation is scary. I’ve waited so long…and it seems hopeless.

The truth is: waiting too long for a change can damage your career. When you are really unhappy, you can sabotage your own success, often unconsciously setting yourself up to be fired. But when I begin to talk with these clients, we almost always uncover realistic, hopeful opportunities. The answer is to get into purposeful, guided action. Once you start moving, the panic goes away. Just plan your trajectory so you aren’t spinning wheels.

Mistake #2: Feeling overwhelmed. When you think about career change, there’s so much to do. Networking. Phone calls. Interviews. Research. Career search is rarely linear. It’s messy and zig-zag. Think “playground basketball” instead of “pro football.”

The good news is: once you take the first action, it’s like pulling on a thread to release a knot. First one part unravels…and then the next. And you see daylight just when you are ready to give up.

I’ve written my own prescription for action:  21-Day Extreme Career Makeover.

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