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Intentional Serendipity Can Be Surprising

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I met a person the other day and we ended up talking about how people discover jobs by accident.  His face lit up, “that’s exactly what happened to me!  In high school, I was thinking about engineering or joining the military and then I discovered machine tool.” 30 years later he was the CEO of a large machine tool company and now is a consultant in that field.

While on my honeymoon, I met the Director of a high school technical center.  I had no idea what a Vocational – Technical school was, but four months later,  I was working for him and my life was transformed forever with an understanding and appreciation of all kinds of occupations.

We all have stories about chance events that changed the course of our careers.  Then why is it that students and other clients continue to come in and ask to take “one of those assessments that tells me what to do”. The longer I am in this business, the less assessments I use.

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Searching for Skills and Your Career Security

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It’s not about job titles or college majors anymore, its about skills. It is all about creating your own career security through identifying skills that employers are looking for.  And then telling everyone you know what skills you want to use.

How can we help our students identify their skills?  Here are three possibilities.  Our clients, whether young adults, college students, or more mature adults, all have skills, but they may not be able to articulate them.

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You, my friend, are a victim of disorganized thinking.

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We, as career practitioners, all have the ability to be “…the great and all powerful wizard”  every day.   We must never underestimate the power of our words.   Here are 10 quotes from the classic movie The Wizard of Oz and how they translate for career practitioners.

1. Wizard of Oz to Cowardly Lion: You, my friend, are a victim of disorganized thinking. You are under the unfortunate impression that just because you run away you have no courage; you’re confusing courage with wisdom. 

When we meet with students or clients they often bring to us a preconceived picture of their career path and one of the greatest conversations we can have is helping them reframe their thinking from seeing barriers to visualizing opportunities.

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Nation on speed. E-mails, Tweets, Skype, FaceTime, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more.

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floridamoney

How many of you find yourself attached to this “stinking” computer like an umbilical cord?  Reading e-mails from co-workers, clients, supervisors, friends, families, spammers, bloggers, and who ever else invades our lives like one of the 7 plagues.

We are like a nation on speed.

– Turn on computer

– Read email

– Respond immediately

– Read another email

– Respond immediately

– Bamm, what else you got?

– Bring it on

-Keep sending them, I’ll get through them all!

Really?  Is this what work is supposed to be like?
Whatever happened to the times when you could walk across campus to actually TALK to someone?  Who turned the treadmill onto 8 m.p.h.?  Where is that downtime when you could read an article or simply just sit and think?  Shouldn’t we as professionals in the career advising world be modeling something better than this?

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“It’s Not What You Know….” cuts both ways.

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Sometimes knowing a person can be a problem.  My mother-in-law has always stated “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”  And I argued with her once (only once 🙂 that you also have to KNOW something AND be a good person as well. I KNOW some people and I can guarantee I would NEVER hire them!

As career counselors / advisors, we all know the power of networking and how important it is to find someone on the “inside” of a company, but that is only the first step.  I know a college student who reached out to Alumni with a clumsily written, grammatically incorrect email, that did not bode well for him. (or the college).  Or the typos on a resume / cover letter, or the lousy handshake, or even worse, bad breath.  Knowing someone is great and important, but you have less than 15 seconds in most cases to make that an advantage.

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Failure Makes Me Happy

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Crazy Peacock

Failure #1.   My very creative son who has been drawing since he could hold a crayon. And at 4 years old on an Etch-A-Sketch created a multi-sail pirate ship that was jaw dropping, and in college majored in Advertising, and who took every new career assessment I wanted to try out and always came up “creative”, has taken a job as an analyst working with medical electronic records.  Hardly creative.  I blew that one!  Out of the 1000 occupational titles this would have been 985 just above anthropology, aerospace scientist, and electrician for him.  Nope, would never have guessed it as a career counselor or a father.

You know what?    I failed as a career counselor.  Never saw it coming.  But happenstance in life takes many forms and the end result, at the end of the day, career counselors should be happy if our clients, students, or sons are happy with their occupation.  He is happy.  If he is happy, I am happy.

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