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At a Crossroads in Your Career?

If you feel as though you’ve reached a crossroads in your career and aren’t sure which direction to take, these tips by professional career coach Gill Lambert from Tailored Career Coaching may prove useful as you decide on your next steps.

As a career coach I have spoken to a number of people recently who are feeling stuck in their current role. They have outgrown their job, are doubting their skillset and are finding their career lacklustre. Quite a lot of people feel like this at some stage in their career and my advice is firstly to do some self-reflection.

Analyse the Problem

Try to identify whether the problem is to do with your current company, current role or current profession by asking these questions:

  • Who would be the ideal employer for you, with your current job title? And how happy would you be dong that job?
  • What are the skills needed in your role? How many of these skills do you have?
  • What would your ideal job look like? What tasks? Which sector? Which company?

If You Want to Move Company

Engage whole-heartedly in a job search. A half-hearted search means you won’t come across strongly, so will have little interest from employers, and your confidence will plummet. An effective job search starts with: building a CV around the typical skills for the role and applying for advertised jobs. I also think that speculative letters are really important and have been blogging about this here.

If You Want to Change Career

I suggest you spend some time thinking about what possible careers might suit you by looking at your interests, skills and what motivates you. A key step is then to thoroughly road test ideas by talking to people who currently do the job: for example being a midwife may not only involve delivering babies, but may also involve an overload of work, long anti-social hours and a lot of stress.

If You Want to Set Up in Business

Think through the logistics of your offering and how you would finance and market it. Test out the market as much as possible: who competes? who are your customers? why are you unique? If you are currently in paid work, I would advise you to transition gradually to your own business, perhaps starting with weekends and evenings, then moving to part-time working. This way you can keep some cash coming in whilst you test out your business plan.

One key thing when starting a new business is to set some annual income and profit targets, both aspirational figures and walk-away figures. Whilst some new businesses take off and beat all the targets, quite a number do not. I have seen a lot of entrepreneurs continually struggling in loss-making businesses because they are too emotionally engaged to walk away.

If you would like some support with a career decision, from a St Albans-based licensed career coach, check out the programmes on my website and take advantage of my offer of a free 30-minute phone call.