He'll probably go on to say, "Well, I started my career as a minister up in Maine. While I was chaplain at a prison up there, I put in a lot of educational programs, and they asked me to become assistant warden. I did that for about eight years, actually left the ministry, although I still did a lot of counseling. By then I had a family and needed more income, and a guy who knew my work asked me if I wanted to join the human resources department at a Fortune 150 company's marine colloid division in Portland. It was a big change, but I really enjoyed the job until I was transferred to Philadelphia. That got old real fast, but I was doing a lot of career and family counseling on the side, and I liked that. Met a guy at a conference who asked me if I wanted to combine everything I've ever done into one job, and boom! I was working for him."
If you look closely at these profiles, you'll notice that each provides a frame of reference. It is anchored in three dimensions, each of which addresses fundamental questions that must be answered in order to describe someone, including yourself, as a product:
How much experience do you have? How flat or how steep is your learning curve? And how much money is it going to cost to employ you? It also enumerates your roles and functions. Exactly what can you do for your next employer? What is your primary area of competency? What other skills and abilities can you contribute and how do you most want to be used? It also reflects where have you performed most recently, and how similar was that setting to the one in which you're now seeking employment? What earlier settings did you perform in and what does the chronology of settings in which you've worked during your career imply about the kind of setting you most like working in?
Unless and until a listener has at least some information on all of these areas—level, roles and functions and setting—he's missing crucial pieces of your profile and can't describe you to someone else or decide that he might want to employ you himself.
Conveying your frame of reference doesn't have to be a lengthy process. Say you meet an old friend in a movie line, and she says, "What do you do?" You don't have a half hour to flesh out the details, but in one or two sentences you can provide enough general information to create a basic product profile: For the past eight years, I've been in charge of sales support for a small importer of Tibetan toupees in Topeka. Mainly, I organize and track the new leads generated by customer information cards in GQ, Tonsorial Monthly and Modern Maturity magazines.
Level (eight years), roles and functions (manage the sales support) and setting (small Topeka importer) are all there. Based on this brief but pithy movie-line summary, perhaps you'll get a call from her brother, the product manager for a whole line of personal grooming products at Gillette. This sort of thing happens all the time—but not if you can't teach others how to describe you in the three essential dimensions.
Level can be suggested in many ways: number of years out of college or grad school, job title, scope of authority, age, budget responsibility you've had, and so on. For career changers, however, the question of level poses an interesting problem: an individual can be very experienced in a prior role or setting, and can have tons of life-tempered judgment and street smarts, and still be an absolute beginner in a newly chosen field. An employer will therefore have to expend some time and money developing these new competencies, but he'll be investing those resources on a mature, motivated person (you have to be motivated to make a major career change). How much "credit" should be given for a high level of authority or responsibility in a prior work life? Any career changer has to anticipate and address that question.
Roles and functions are straightforward: What is it you can do? What value do you bring to the employer? Can you prove it? Like the movie-line example above, this description can be short and tight. Generally speaking, however, the more time you have to explain your frame of reference (two minutes, ten minutes, or a whole hour) the more action verbs you should add. Why action verbs? What you are describing is activity. Too many people tend to describe themselves in terms of "I am"; it's far more effective to describe yourself in terms of "I do." "I manage the compensation and benefits function." "I evaluate potential merger and acquisition targets." Action verbs get remembered. Passive verbs don't.
The issue of motivation enters into roles and functions. There's an enormous difference between what someone is capable of doing and what they're temperamentally suited to do, which is why more than two-thirds of the people surveyed in the United States routinely say they dislike their jobs. Someone's functional resume, for example, may list five or six areas of competency-administration, staff development, treasury, management information systems (MIS), human resources (HR), and project management, but no relative pecking order is given for these claimed functional competencies. Which does the person do best? Which does he want to do most?
The question of setting focuses not on what you can do, but on where you want to do it. A potential employer wants to know all about your last work setting in order to compare it with the possible new setting. The more similar the two settings are in their nature, scope and operative features, the more the employer can infer that whatever you accomplished there you can accomplish again. Because employers are natural risk-reducers, this is a logical inquiry.
A review of your prior work settings also can reveal a lot about your motivational map. Where you chose to work and how long you stayed in each setting can send some pretty strong signals that certain kinds of settings are comfortable and highly motivating for you, and others are turnoffs. If your resume shows that you worked two years in the private sector, then the next 16 years in the world of nonprofit foundations, isn't the reader entitled to infer something about your value system?
Or, if your career path starts with a Fortune 500 multinational, heads off into a specialized division, does a one-eighty into a start-up consulting firm with 15 employees and no job titles, and finally levels off into a sole proprietorship, isn't it fair to assume that your career path expresses a "theory of choices" and is relevant to the kind of setting you'd be happy in?
The problem this issue poses for career changers is obvious. A conventional job seeker who presents a linear career profile with ever-increasing responsibilities in a progression of roles in generally similar settings is easy to pigeonhole. The frame of reference is clear and unambiguous. But when confronted with someone who's making a major shift in level, role or setting, the job market raises some immediate alarms: Is this a flight to something or from something? Why move away from the stability and comfort of an established career identity? Is this a rational, reasoned move or an impulsive symptom of a midcareer crisis?
Career changers, in effect, have to be ready with two frames of reference: one that describes their past work life and another that describes their future objectives. They also have to be ready with a "bridge", or a credible explanation of the factors and timing that have led to their decision to make a change.
