How to Identify Career-Advancing Opportunities
Navigating an unfriendly job market has been an overarching topic for many of our blogs, and with good reason: It’s an ubiquitous part of any career. But what if you’re in the market not out of necessity but out of desire? What if you’re looking at the job market as something to conquer, not necessarily to overcome? What if your job search is about advancing an already sterling career?
It can be difficult to know up-front whether any given position will actually provide us the career advancement we seek. There are questions of responsibility and skill-set which we may not find easily answered. What formula can we follow to figure out whether that wonderful-sounding position will actually be the career stepping-stone it seems to be?
I’m a broken record about certain truths of the job market, but perhaps none more than this: There is no magical panacea. Not for any of it, and certainly not for identifying career advancement. Especially if we’ve never explored the job market from a position of power, we may be unaccustomed to what we should be looking for and where to look! Learning to use job postings, interviews, and connections to our advantage is key, but that takes critical thinking, research, and reflection.
What doesn’t?
As you scan through job postings, reach out to your network, and consider hiring a placement service, here are some questions to keep in mind:
Will this new position add a skill-set to my background? Will it close a skill gap or better position me to learn skills I’ll need in the future? Will it teach me something I’ve been hoping to learn?
Will this position help me become more well-rounded?
Will this next position substantially change my work/life balance?
And if you’re happy with your current employer but don’t feel you’re being challenged in your role, it may behoove you to seek internal opportunities for advancement first. Therefore:
Do you understand how to navigate your company’s internal job posting system?
Have you volunteered yourself for cross-departmental projects?
Having a wide network within your organization will not only be helpful in determining if/when new roles open up, but allows you to have open and honest conversations with colleagues at various levels throughout departments. That could help you wade through any ambiguities in the job postings themselves.
So if you’re comfortable where you are but not necessarily happy with what you’re doing, I suggest you seek out internal job postings. You’ll have a natural advantage over the competition, and because all employers —even those within the same industry— tend to have different hierarchies and role expectations, you’ll likely have a much clearer sense of what an appealing position actually entails.
For job postings at other employers, we must learn to be comfortable breaking down job descriptions and teasing out the necessary information. Especially if it’s your first time seeking out a career-advancing role, you may be unaccustomed to analyzing a job description for more than the qualifications required. In truth, however, they’re quite useful things, lovingly crafted by HR departments and stuffed with information about a role’s directive, its list of responsibilities, and the immediate projects a hired employee will be staffed on. Already, you can use this information to make a rather cogent determination about how similar this role is to your present one, what skill-sets (if any) you’ll be able to further develop there, and if the position’s responsibilities even appeal to you.
There’s no substitute, however, for 1-on-1 conversation and questioning. So it’s important we are comfortable leveraging the interview process in our favor. Although we have a natural urge to “sell” ourselves in job interviews, we must learn to not only listen carefully to whatever information is being presented to us, but to ask the right questions. We should ask about corporate hierarchy and where this role fits within it. We should ask about our exact responsibilities, and what the opportunities are to grow within the role, and how it will challenge us, especially compared to what we’re doing now. Before we even go into the interview, we should know what holes in our understanding need filling, and we should feel confident in our right to acquire the necessary information.
But these methods of information gathering will all undoubtedly fail if we have not previously identified what exactly we’re seeking from a new role, and how we want our career to advance. Yes, that may require a significant amount of critical analysis and reflection. It may require notepads and paper and copious conversations with trusted loved ones. But it’s only once we know what we actually want that we can go out and get it.
If you’re unsatisfied in your role but can’t seem to identify why, a conversation with a job coach may be helpful. Reach out to me, Nancy, on LinkedIn or at www.idealinterviewco.com/contact to get a professional’s opinion.