Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

serendipity

6 Ways Finding a Job is Like Fishing

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Having just returned from a great fishing trip to Canada with my 87-year-old dad, 3 brothers, and my cousin, I could not help but make the connection between finding work and fishing.

#1. Fisherman says:  When I get to a new lake I try to find the best place to find fish.  It might be a bay with weed beds, logs, a drop-off, or other structure for fish to hide in, but I will know it when I see it.

Job Advice: If you have found success in one industry or type of work and you enjoyed it, that is a GREAT place to start looking.  You are familiar with the language and skills required and you probably know people who can help you.

Pike I caught in Canada on a fly rod

#2.  Fisherman says:  I’ve found the place, now I need to pick a lure.  I always use a Mepps spinner for pike and I love the red & white colors, so that is what I’ll start with.

 Job Advice: Initiative. It is not bad to start with what you are most comfortable with but what worked on one lake (or job search) may not work on your next one.   If you are comfortable looking for jobs on the internet, go ahead and start there for ideas.  The key is to BEGIN now and try something, anything, just DO something.

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Changing Perspectives Using Intentional Serendipity

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Changing Perspective

In my first blog on this topic I spoke about:

[1] helping people embrace chance events in their lives
[2] taking action, and
[3] encouraging curiosity.

Let’s talk about what else you can do as a career advisor to assist people in “intentionally” creating “serendipitous” events to create opportunity by changing their perspective of the situation.

4]    One “gift” we have as career advisors is the ability to reframe events in peoples’ lives in such a way to make it look like an opportunity. (See my article, Advisors Are The Wizard of Oz  http://bit.ly/12nmpIA ).  People bring us their view of unplanned events or surprises in their lives that, all too often, are viewed as obstacles.  Our job is to help reframe the event and to encourage them to look at it as a career opportunity.

Getting laid off from a job, changing their major because “it didn’t work out”, or being rejected again, are events out of their control in most cases.  The old school answer “things happen for a reason” is close but not exactly what people need to hear.

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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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Unexpected opportunities

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In August 2012,  I backpacked the John Muir Trail / Pacific Crest Trail in California, a 195 mile backpacking trip with 2 great friends.  We have now hiked around 1400 miles of the PCT over the past 31 years but this section was amazing!

As you look at this beautiful picture of the mountains we hiked in, try to find the trail that lies ahead of us.  Every day we looked ahead for the trail and we usually saw something that looked like this picture.  Is the trail going to go up this valley to the left?  Or is it going to go up and around the far side of that tall peak in the middle?  Or will it head into the valley and go right before that peak?  Often we did not know for sure.

As people head down their own career path, they all too often cannot KNOW where the path will go exactly.  They can choose a direction but the actual path appears in a serendipitous manner.   We need to help our clients embrace serendipity,  “discovering opportunities by accident”.  We need to help them be open to possibilities that lie ahead.  We can help our clients plan a path, but we need to be open to the possibility that it may not lead to exactly what we thought.  It may veer to the right or left, but I can say that it will take us somewhere.  And that “somewhere” may turn out to be even BETTER than the original path.

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