It takes more than a career coach to get back into game

Posted on 02. Nov, 2005 posted by Bill in Employment News

We are a service-crazed society that fervently believes in personalized help.

We also believe — whether it involves our looks, our physical fitness or our careers — in the Holy Grail, certain that, if we look long enough and hard enough, we can find the perfect expert out there to help us move further along that conveyor belt of self-improvement.

When it comes to our careers, that can be a confusing notion.

Because of endless ups and downs in an uncertain economy, the changing nature of work itself and the fact that most people out there, even prospective employers, are distracted and overwhelmed by their own work, we constantly hear that we need to take individual responsibility for our own careers.

And a whole new industry of service people known as “career professionals” has sprung up, eager to help us do just that.

But the problem these days is that anyone who wants to hang out a shingle in this industry can, calling himself or herself anything from a “passion mapper” to a “life coach” to the more mundane career counsellor, strategist or consultant, all of them willing, for a few thousand bucks, to help you figure out your next move. (There are even “retirement coaches,” which makes me wonder, don’t we ever get to say we’re done?)

The best career coaches know they are dealing with a minefield of emotions and that people pursuing a major career change or a new job are vulnerable — they may have been let go, and are not in the best shape to face being judged further and found wanting by prospective employers.

Or they hate what they do so much they may be in psychic pain.

That makes it frustrating for both the coaches and certainly, judging from the host of e-mails I receive, for job seekers themselves, who mostly rage against the human resources machine.

For instance, one e-mailer in his late 30s inveighed one day against “the silence, the slammed doors, and unreasonable selection criteria” combined with the “you’ve got one minute to impress me over the phone” ethos.

A 60-year-old man who ended up with a good job after 10 months of looking wrote: “I suffered a great deal and not even my wife knows.”

Another bitter job seeker blasted all the human resources types who treated him so badly that he thought: “If this is the way you treat future employees, I can only guess how you treat existing employees.”

And one woman, a librarian, complained that she was “overwhelmed on a daily basis” by the career counselling industry itself with its “costly flash-and-dazzle crap, which they promise will bring career success to all and sundry.”

And so in an already debilitated state, these seekers ponder the plethora of self-described career consultants, advisers and strategists, trying to figure out, often without much information to go on, whether (if they are not covered by a corporate outplacement package) to spend their dwindling resources on outside help, and if they do, what is snake oil and what is elixir for their rÃ©sumÃ©s.

Aware of this confusion and wanting to sharpen its image, the Toronto chapter of the Association of Career Professionals International invited me for an informal chat one morning.

Though its members number about 120, they were a small group that day — eight or so friendly middle-aged faces, one of whom, Nelson Cusitar, handed me a business card with a musical component — a blare of trumpets as you open it.

He also offered his conviction that the most important thing any interviewee can do to convey his or her value to a prospective employer is to “make the cash register ring in the interviewer’s head.”

At least one of them said firmly, as if he were talking about windows, “I don’t do rÃ©sumÃ©s” — that is, write them from scratch for clients.

Others said they felt that their clients expected too much of them, and almost all expressed interest in being flexible when it comes to fees and approach. (They might offer initial consultations for $100 to $200, and then work-search or other packages that range into several thousands of dollars.)

As Mr. Cusitar rightfully acknowledged, “a thousand bucks is a lot of money,” especially to someone whose finances are probably precarious to begin with.

Anyone looking for help from a career consultant has a right to expect value for that money.

Elaine Sigurdson, the president of the Toronto chapter of the association — a group that exists, she says, because it wants to “offer some protection to the public” — says that an effective career counsellor will help a client “understand better who they are and what they want and bring a bigger sense of the market context.

“We have extensive knowledge of certain markets and sometimes clients don’t know their own worth,” she said.

The greatest mistake career consultants say they see is a rÃ©sumÃ© not focused enough, not showing exactly what accomplishments have led applicants to be ready for the job in question, and not detailing how hiring them would benefit the employer.

One irony of all these independent career counsellors is that more than a few of them had, as Ms. Sigurdson diplomatically acknowledges, “some experience with transition themselves.”

Maybe it’s a new career track — lose your job and then go into business helping others who have lost their jobs — but perhaps that helps counsellors understand the fear and anger out there.

They were all bright and informative, and if I needed to, I suppose I would try any of them on for size. After all, apart from badgering your spouse or friends with the question, “What should I do next?” there’s a certain luxury to paying an outsider to ask perceptive questions, assess your skills and probe what you want.

Yet as Ms. Sigurdson acknowledges, our society creates an intense feeling of insecurity on “just about every level there is.”

The challenge of career professionals is to show people real ways to improve their careers.

How precisely, for example, to deal with those impervious human resources departments, or where to go to upgrade your skills, and how to avoid those who further prey on their insecurities or offer them meaningless self-image pap.

Counsellors should probably also tell their clients that not everything in any career is fixable, and that when it comes to career counsellors — just as when it comes to life and work itself — there is no such thing as the Holy Grail, even if we like to believe there is.

Or, if we really want to take responsibility for our own careers, “Grails R Us.”

EmploymentDigest.net

It takes more than a career coach to get back into game

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