Making Adaptations in Style to Match Job Search Requirements
As you begin your job search, evaluate the communication styles of the people you meet. Make guesses about the best way to interact with people that are not connected to your job search. Then practice communicating with members of each group in the style you perceive them to prefer.
Then ask yourself: Were you right? Was your interaction easier?
You'll find your judgments get better as you go. Practice may not make perfect, but it will surely improve your track record. In any event, by tuning in to their words, actions and surroundings, and paying attention to them as individuals, your communication will be more rewarding. Why? Because your attention is concentrated outward toward them, rather than inward toward yourself.
You'll also want to use different styles of resumes, different kinds of letters, and different ways of interacting in interviews, based on your judgments about styles. Those adaptations will be discussed in later chapters.
What Kind of Job Should You Search For?
After completing the exercises in the last section, you have a good idea of your skills, strengths and weaknesses; goals and objectives; and your communication style. You still may not know what job you are best suited for or what you should search for.
Part of this is related to your basic makeup. It's more comfortable and less effort to look for the same kind of employment you had before. Radically changing job types can be a great personal risk. Can you face the challenge of a second or even third career at your age? Or should you stay in the same kind of job because you aren't ready to risk that much?
Now really is the time to consider whether or not it's time to change the direction of your work life. A well-known executive recruiter conjectured early in 1990 that executives and professionals working today can expect to have at least six job changes during their working careers, four of which will be involuntary.Some other interesting statistics (and not so interesting, if you happened to lose your job at the time) also tend to lend credence to this idea. At the end of 1989, you couldn't pick up a newspaper without reading about a major company entering Chapter 11, going out of business, closing down a location or locations, laying off a number of employees, or offering older employees early retirement. Big business lost more than two million jobs, while small business and new business start-ups were responsible for the creation of over 22 million new jobs.
Harry Levinson, a famous industrial psychologist, writes frequently on career topics and career changes.In numerous articles, he has pointed out that the most critical factor for people to consider in choosing a second career is their "ego ideal." The "ego ideal" is central to people's aspirations, and is an idealized image of the way they hope to find themselves in the future.
People strive throughout their lives for their ego ideals, but never fully achieve them. When people feel they are progressing toward their ego ideals, they feel more positive about themselves. The closer they get to their ego ideals, the better they feel about themselves. The greater the gap between their ego ideals and their current self-images, the angrier they are at themselves, and the more inadequate, guilty and depressed they are apt to feel. (This loss of the ego ideal is one of the worst features about being unemployed.)
When careers help satisfy ego ideals, life and work are rewarding and enjoyable. When careers do not meet these self demands, work is a curse. The desire to attain ego ideals is the most powerful motivating force. Delivering on the promises you make to yourself, then, are an extremely important aspect of choosing a new direction.
What Is Your Ego Ideal?
Levinson suggests that reviewing your family history, school and work experiences can help you to outline the needs that are critical to your ego ideal. Answering the following eight sets of questions will help you know your ego ideals and help you recognize your own sense of purpose.
- What were your father's or father-substitute's values? Not what did you father say or do, but what did he stand for? What things were important to him? What was the code he lived by? Similarly, analyze your mother's values.
- What was the first thing you did that pleased your mother? (This is important because usually the first person that children try to please is their mother. Later, pleasing their father becomes important, too.) For women, the mother's value system may have more weight in forming their values (question 1), while the activities they did to please a parent (question 2) were more often performed with the father in mind. These two questions should give you insight into the way you have formed your current values system.
- Who were your childhood heroes or heroines? Did you idolize athletes, movie stars, or political figures? What kind of people do you now enjoy reading about or watching on TV? What kind of achievements do you admire?
- Who are and where your models-relatives, teachers, scoutmasters, preachers, bosses, characters in stories? What did they say or do that made you admire them?
- When you were able to make choices, what were they? What was your major in college? What jobs have you accepted? (These may appear to be random, but they were not. Look at them carefully to find the pattern.)
- What few experiences in your lifetime have been the most gratifying? Which gave you the greatest pleasure and sense of elation? The pleasure you took in the experience was really the pleasure you took in yourself. What were you doing?
- Of all the things you've done, at which were you the most successful? What were you doing and how were you doing it?
- What would you like your epitaph or obituary to say? What would you like to be remembered for? What would you like to leave as a memorial?
