August Newsletter: Looking for a Better Job? Define “Better” First
Welcome to the latest edition of the Job Guy Newsletter. Each month, I share observations from the world of careers, practical ideas you can apply immediately, and resources to help you stay market ready. As always, feel free to comment or suggest content you would find useful. This space is built for job seekers who want clarity, not noise.
Earlier this month, I wrote about what happens when dissatisfaction with a job reaches the point where "anywhere but here" starts looking pretty good.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to escape a bad situation. The problem is assuming that because you know what you want to escape, you also know what you want next.
Usually, you don't.
A bad boss, conflict, layoff, or change in culture may be the event that finally gets your attention, but job satisfaction usually erodes over time. Recognition disappears. Opportunities for growth become limited. Responsibilities change. The culture evolves. Little things that seemed tolerable individually begin to add up.
That means figuring out what you want next requires looking beyond whatever happens to be bothering you today.
Start With Your Entire Career
When I begin working with someone on career direction, I interview them about the different aspects of work that have mattered throughout their career. We identify things they would like to keep, things they want to leave behind, and things they would like to add.
There may have been something about a job eight years ago that you loved and would like to have again. There may have been a reason you left the job before your current one that you never want to experience again. Your entire career provides data about the environments, responsibilities, people, challenges, and conditions that allow you to perform at your best.
No job is likely to eliminate everything you dislike or provide everything you want. That's not the objective.
You don't have to find the perfect job. You do have to define what better looks like.
Once you've done that, you have something against which to evaluate the possibilities.
Don't Start With Job Titles
The next step in my process is what I call Value Mining. I ask clients to tell me about times in their careers when they performed particularly well. I want to understand the skills they were using, the activities they were performing, the results they created, and what made them different from other people doing similar work.
The client supplies the evidence. My job is to interpret it.
I'm not simply creating a list of skills and turning those skills into keywords. Many perfectly legitimate skills make terrible search terms. Search for "healthcare," for example, and you may find every job offering healthcare benefits. Search for "education," and you can find the word in almost every job posting.
Instead, I look at the combination of skills, interests, experience, and preferences and consider what kinds of work that combination might suggest. From there, I develop searches designed to take the client into parts of the market I want them to investigate.
The first pass through the job market isn't really about finding the job. It's research.
Clients bring back what they find and we review the results together. What interests them? What doesn't? What surprised them? What reservations do they have?
That information allows me to refine the direction and send them back for another search. By the second pass, we are usually looking at a much narrower and more meaningful range of possibilities.
Job titles change over time. The underlying work often changes much less. The objective is to understand where a person's demonstrated value could fit, then learn what employers happen to be calling that work today.
Three Questions for Every Opportunity
Once a possible direction begins to emerge, there are three questions that need to be answered. An opportunity needs to work for you personally, be realistic in the market, and make sense as part of a longer career.
Would I want this?
This is where the work at the beginning becomes useful.
How does the opportunity stack up against what you decided you wanted to keep, leave behind, and add? Look beyond the job responsibilities. Consider the environment, culture, compensation, flexibility, growth, level of responsibility, people you will work with, and the other things that determine whether you are likely to be satisfied.
No job will check every box. The question is whether the tradeoffs represent enough improvement to make the move worthwhile.
Could I compete for this?
Wanting a job and being competitive for it are two different things.
Ultimately, you have to convince a hiring manager that you can create the results the organization needs. That doesn't mean matching every qualification in a job posting. Everyone brings a different combination of experience, skills, strengths, and gaps.
It is also remarkably easy to underestimate yourself. I regularly have clients tell me they lack a particular skill only to remind them of something they told me during Value Mining that demonstrates they have already used it. Other times, they misunderstand what a qualification in a job posting actually means.
Before deciding you aren't qualified, make sure you understand both what you have demonstrated and what the employer is really asking for.
Does this put me on a path that makes sense?
This may be the easiest question to overlook.
Most of my clients are in the middle of their careers. The next job may be important, but it certainly shouldn't be viewed as their last one.
What will this job make possible afterward?
What skills will you develop? What experience will you gain? What relationships will you build? Where have people in similar roles gone next? Will the move make you more marketable and expand your options, or could it gradually take you somewhere you don't particularly want to go?
Sometimes the market turns up a job that looks terrific but is currently a stretch. You are missing something important.
That isn't necessarily bad news.
If the direction makes sense and the gap can realistically be closed, an interim step might provide the missing experience. Instead of abandoning the destination, you can identify the move that gets you closer to it.
Suddenly, you aren't merely planning your next career move.
You may be planning the one after it as well.
That's career planning.
Proof that it Works
Several years ago, I worked with a mental-health counselor who was convinced she needed to leave the field. She had a master's degree and years of experience, but her work had become increasingly difficult.
When we began looking more closely at what was making her unhappy, it became clear that counseling itself wasn't necessarily the problem.
She was working with people facing serious mental-health challenges and often left sessions feeling that there was little she could do to meaningfully improve their situations. The hours were long. The work included home and clinic visits, sometimes in places where she didn't feel particularly safe. Urgent situations were part of the job.
What if she could keep the part she valued, helping and advising people, but change the population she served, the problems she helped solve, and the environment in which she did it?
We ultimately identified college counseling as a direction.
She made the move in 2018.
When I recently congratulated her on her seventh anniversary, she wrote:
"Thank you!! I know... the time has flown!! Still so happy I made this move and am always appreciative of you helping me open my eyes to new opportunities. Hope all is well!"
She didn't need to throw away her master's degree, her experience, or the part of counseling she found meaningful.
She needed to understand which parts of her career she wanted to keep and where those things could create value in a different environment.
Job Guy Tip of the Month: A Skills Gap Can Be Good News
Finding a job that excites you and then discovering that you don't meet one of the important qualifications can be discouraging.
Before crossing it off the list, determine whether the gap is real.
You may have demonstrated the skill in a different context without recognizing it. You may also be interpreting the employer's requirement too literally.
If the gap really exists, figure out what it would take to close it.
Perhaps you can gain the skill through training, certification, a project, or additional responsibility in your current job. In other cases, the best way to acquire the missing experience may be through another job.
Finding a skills gap doesn't necessarily mean you've found the wrong direction.
You may have just identified your next two career moves instead of one.
Career direction isn't about predicting exactly where you will be decades from now. It is about knowing enough about yourself and the market to make the next move intentionally.
Ask yourself:
Would I want this?
Could I compete for this?
Does this put me on a path that makes sense?
If you can answer all three, "anywhere but here" starts becoming something much more useful.
It starts becoming somewhere worth going.
