January Newsletter: The Importance of an Annual Career “Self-Health Check”
Jack Welch, who was CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, provided one of my favorite quotes to outline how those in the executive suite often view their teams. As background, during his tenure, Welch increased GE's market value from $14 billion to $410 billion. He did this through aggressive implementation of six sigma principles and legendary focus on managing talent.
Mr. Welch was highly committed to staff development but expected excellence in return. He summed up his philosophy nicely when he said about GE: "We do not guarantee employment, we guarantee employability."
In other words, while GE encouraged and supported employees to acquire leading edge skills, the company was not at all hesitant to dismiss those who did not keep up with the needs of the business. We have all seen how quickly some employers reduce staff to placate nervous investors and partners. Whether or not you are ushered out these days is often out of your control. But making sure you get back in the game quickly is very doable with the right plan.
The Three Step Process to Optimize Employability
Step 1: Conduct a Simulated Job Search:
Whether you are looking for a job or not, searching for jobs in January ranks among the best tools out there to ensure continuous and increasing value in the job market. Anyone reading this can take a couple of hours on a snowy winter morning now to avoid having to take months (or more) to land a job with underdeveloped qualifications.
An annual career self-health check not only helps to maintain market awareness, but it is also a great tool to make sure your resume and LinkedIn profiles are current. Even if you are not in job search mode, having a current resume will be a godsend if an amazing but urgent opportunity is presented to you out of the blue. And a well-built LinkedIn profile will increase the likelihood that those opportunities come to you when you are not even looking.
The process is simple: use LinkedIn, Indeed, or other preferred job site to search for a job as though you were actively on the market. Given that job titles can vary from company to company, it can be very helpful to do this search using your skills (software used, activities performed, etc.) instead of your title.
These searches will reveal how many jobs are out there, the titles companies use for those jobs, the requirements that employers list for those jobs, where the jobs are, and what the jobs pay. For this purpose, I advise searching nationally because it will give you a much broader sense of the trends than a locally focused effort would.
If you can’t find any jobs that you are reasonably qualified for it is time to focus on a career change. Don’t wait until you are at risk or on the market to do this as deciding a new career should not be rushed.
Career coaches like Job-Guy help with that, of course!
Step 2: Align Your Resume and LinkedIn Profile:
Compare your resume to the responsibilities and qualifications listed in the job postings you have found. Add any responsibilities or credentials that the prospective jobs ask for to your resume. If you use my resume building approach (recommended, of course) you would use paragraphs under each job in the professional experience section to claim day-to-day responsibilities. This allows you to get maximum key word presence with the least amount of space knowing that companies typically use language from their own job postings as key words.
Using paragraphs for the basic stuff will enable you to use bullets for things you want to draw human interviewers’ attention to such as accomplishments, awards, or examples of when you picked up additional responsibilities.
This is also a good time to update those accomplishments. Most professionals fare poorly on claiming accomplishments because they do a lousy job of keeping their resumes up to date this way. I know this because most of my clients struggle big time to recall examples of successes more than a year or two back. You can avoid having to charter a ride on the way-back machine by simply keeping up with it.
Once the resume is the way you want (need?) it to be, it is time to update the LinkedIn profile to match. Nowadays it is appropriate that the work history on the resume matches that on the profile as closely as possible. Two areas where they may be different are:
· It is permissible to use personal pronouns on a LinkedIn profile especially in the “about” section. LinkedIn is, after all, a social media site used for professional purposes.
· LinkedIn allows members to claim specific skills. Using skills from LinkedIn’s database increases the likelihood that your choice of words will align with employers’ keyword selections. You can either do this within each job by simply using the skills section in your job description or adding a skills section to your profile. For how to add this section to your LinkedIn profile, click here.
3. Address Skills Gaps
If you are lucky enough to be fully qualified for the roles you would compete for when the time comes, you can then just focus on maintaining those skills and tracking your accomplishments to remain ready for the unexpected.
If you do have gaps, try to find ways to gain those skills while performing your job or through a third-party training resource.
Many times there are ways to acquire skills in the workplace if you are creative in viewing them. Employers tend to place great value on candidates who do the job using present day tools and techniques. But what if your employer doesn’t require you to perform those tasks? Often times, the answer is: do it anyway!
My favorite story in this vein is about a client who was in an administrative role but who wanted to leverage his dual degrees in finance and economics. Every one of his target jobs wanted experience generating reports in Excel. While his employer had installed Microsoft Office, they had never used Excel to generate reports and didn’t think they needed to. I suggested to my client that he should just generate a report that would enable him to claim Excel’s VLOOKUP and pivot table expertise and show his work to his supervisor. I explained that whether the supervisor liked it or not he was still able to claim that he generated that report using those methods. The supervisor ended up liking the report, so things got even better. Oh, and he got a finance job elsewhere doing exactly what he wanted to do.
In larger organizations there may also be opportunities to volunteer for projects outside of your core duties that would allow you to truthfully include key skills in the experience section of the resume where it will be more easily found and valued.
If learning on the job isn’t possible, there are several third parties who offer great training for relatively low cost. The most popular are:
LinkedIn Learning: $39.99/month or $299.88/year
Coursera: $59 a month or $399 for a full year (individual courses can be bought as well)
Udemy: $35/month or $12.99 to- $199/course
edX: many courses are free to audit; certificate tracks start at $50
Skillshare: $32/month or $168/year
Pluralsight: $29/month or $299/year
Codecademy: $19.99/month or $239.88/year
Choosing to pay for a certificate course would depend on whether or not you wanted to just learn a new skill or claim a defined level of training. So if you already use Excel at work and want to learn how to use it better you could save money by auditing a course or taking uncertified coursework.
If hard skills are required in the next job, it would most likely be worth the investment in a certificate program that you can claim on the resume and display on your LinkedIn profile. Staffing teams tend to value certificates because most of them would struggle to measure a candidate’s technical competence using tools that they are not familiar with themselves. Certifications prove a comfort level that an applicant has achieved a certain standard of competence.
A Favorite LinkedIn Testimonial
Ben owned a print shop. He could see the writing on the wall that his industry was shrinking, and he needed to pursue an entirely new role and industry. Once he sold the shop and we identified the best fit for him was to target account management, Ben was able to navigate a two-step transition that took him from account manager for a global printing company to an AM role with tech firms, and finally to vice president of sales.
Here are Ben’s words:
“John is a master of his craft. Smart, thoughtful and engaging, John has all the tools to help you succeed. He is an excellent collaborator, both proactive and reactive. John explained very clearly what works and what doesn't in the job search process, and more importantly delivered results. John is personable, witty and often funny too. His approach is upbeat and positive. When he says "he helps the miserably employed find work there gonna love and make some money doing it," he means it. My only regret is that I didn't find John soon enough.”
Job Guy’s Search Tip of the Month
The key to successfully managing a career is to maintain consistent awareness of market changes and employer needs to stay ahead of the curve.
Employability is not always based on how well you do your job. It is centered on how well you fit organization or industry need going forward. Don’t be victimized by job market changes when there are so many tools available (if you know where to look) to gauge how demand for your target jobs is evolving and what it takes to remain employable. To learn more about trends in the workforce for 2025, see my original blog post.
