The main virtue of the first strategy is that you never lose your identity: "I used to be a CPA; now I'm a marine biologist." The rub, of course, is that you lose level: you must stop your career, go back to school and then re-emerge as a beginner. When you recast yourself in terms of your transferable abilities, you have a better chance of maintaining level. People understand that they have to pay for experience, but you lose your identity until you acquire a new one as defined by your new role. In the meantime, you're just an "ex"-something ("I'm a former CPA ...") with a bunch of transferable abilities that could be put to good use in scores of different kinds of jobs.
Getting Personal
For our purposes here, your personal qualities translate into a set of preferences concerning your type of work, work setting and co-workers. These preferences define what makes you comfortable and productive.
By personal qualities, we don't mean the Boy Scout virtues: kind, trustworthy, brave, obedient, cheerful; personal qualities are those dimensions of your character or personality that determine what motivates you, gratifies you, delights you, annoys you, terrifies you or brings out the worst in you.
Put another way, your skills and abilities tell what you have to sell, and your personal qualities focus on what you ought to be buying in your next job; what you should expect and demand of any role that's truly a good fit. The point of working through the often uncomfortable process of holding a mirror up to your psyche isn't just to acquire a lot of abstract information. It's to identify job situations and potential colleagues that recognize and value your interests, style, values and preferences in thought and action. It's much easier to shop for a job if you're clear about what it will take to make you contented, challenged and vocationally well-fed.
In developing a meaningful career path, it's absolutely crucial to attend to and honor your personal values. Before you get heavily into networking or interviewing or much less decide on whether to accept any one job opportunity, it's important to ask yourself what personal values need to find expression in your work. Do you want to provide service to others or expressive your creativity? Is it about competing and winning and having power and control over what you do? What do you see in a job, security, friendship or independence? Balancing work, family and leisure priorities? If your work doesn't support your personal values, your problem isn't establishing a fit with an employer; it's a lack of fit with yourself.
Your personal qualities also are important on the "sell" side of the equation, in establishing a sense of comfort in the employer. A wise old headhunter once confided, "You know, there really are only two interview questions: What can you do for me and why do you want this job, anyway? In other words, understanding your motivation is important to an employer. It may not be as important as the value your skills and abilities represent, but no employer should want to hire someone who's temperamentally unsuited to the job—even if the person is capable of performing satisfactorily. When we use abstract words like rapport and chemistry to describe fit, we're really talking about something much more pragmatic: the employer's sense that your job-related priorities, values and motivations are in sync with his.
This is a question often asked during seminars and one that always stymied the participants.
Most employers will tell you they want an employee who is goal-oriented. They'll also say they want an employee who is results-oriented. What's the difference?
Give up? Think of results orientation as a psychological craving for measurable outcomes, for closure, for the bottom line. According to one preference-measuring instrument, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), about 75 percent of the people in the United States are truly results-oriented; that is, they're more interested in ends and outcomes than in means or the quality of the journey. Any employer who operates in the private sector has got to be fundamentally concerned with outcomes, and, when hiring, will look first for evidence that an applicant shares the emphasis on getting things done.
Goal orientation is different. A goal, put simply, is something you want. Goal orientation, therefore, is a measure of what you want and how much you want it. It's another term for motivation. In addition to a solid results orientation, almost every employer looks for an appropriately motivated employee rather than a bored, listless or indifferent employee.
Cataloging Transferable Abilities and Personal Qualities
There are a variety of approaches to trying to develop a realistic perspective on your aptitudes, abilities, personal qualities and operative values. Your local bookstore and your library stock many books that offer self-scoring profiles. All of these profiles have the virtue of forcing you to look at yourself systematically. Keep in mind, however, that anyone is allowed to try to sell anything, and many profiles' validity and reliability are suspect. A danger with some so-called "personality tests", particularly the kind you find tucked into Cosmopolitan or Penthouse, is that they may compromise validity for simplicity. Be sure that the instrument you use to guide your future has been created by someone who isn't making up theory as he goes along, or hasn't been told by the magazine's editor that the test should be skewed to make people feel good.
In addition to the self-help books and proliferating self-assessment computer software packages, plenty of outside purveyors of the psyche stand ready to help you get a fix on The Real You. They're a varied lot: psychologists administering batteries of "assessment instruments" and "projective testing"; career consultants using their experience and judgment, perhaps enhanced by some time-honored interest and personal style inventories, charlatans spreading you with their own brand of processed cheese; even your favorite uncle, who seems capable of assessing your character and career prospects in five words or less.
Before you invest time and money in other forms of vocational assessment, there's one classic exercise you ought to try, to begin to acquaint yourself with yourself. As part of the vocational assessment process they work through with their clients, almost all career consultants and outplacement counselors use some variation of The Past Accomplishments exercise. I recommend it highly, and I suggest that you enlist the help of a family member, friend or other job seeker to provide you with some objectivity as you work through it.
In postulating what he called the "Pleasure Principle," Sigmund Freud touched on a fairly obvious psychological fact. When people experience something they find satisfying, they will consciously and unconsciously try to find other situations where whatever produced the pleasure can find expression again. They will, in effect, keep feeding their preferences. By feeding them, they reinforce them. People's past experiences tend to include sizable doses of what they are capable of doing and what they find enjoyable.
If you take the time to look carefully at the 10 to 15 accomplishments in your adult life—whether work-related or not—that gave you the most intense satisfaction, you'll see reflected in them a veritable inventory of both your transferable abilities and your personal preferences. This apparently simplistic exercise starts with an innocuous instruction:
Jot down a brief description of 10 to 15 accomplishments in your adult life that meet two simple criteria: "I did it well" and "I found it enjoyable or satisfying."
Accomplishments may come from work or from other activities in your life; write them down in any order as they come to mind. Many people report some difficulty at this stage and say that they can't think of anything major or important that they've done. This complaint is a signal that they're not focusing on events that have motivated or pleased them, but rather on things that external judges would find impressive. The point here is to identify events or activities that stick in your mind as satisfying memories, even if they might seem trivial to someone else.
The next step is to arrange your accomplishments in priority order. My instruction for this step usually goes, "If I took all your accomplishments away from you, save one, which one—for any reason at all that's important to you—would you choose to keep?" Then, "Which would be second?" and then the third, fourth, and so on.
After you've arranged your accomplishments in your own priority order, enlist your helper to "disassemble" each accomplishment into its most important factors. First, summarize the accomplishment for your helper: describe the situation that led up to the accomplishment, the activities you performed to make it happen, and the result of your activities. Your helper should then cross-examine you in great detail about what went into this accomplishment and should take notes about the skills and abilities the cross-examination reveals.
