Why It Pays To Get Career Help From Experts

People like to give others the benefit of their experience and expertise – especially to receptive listeners. This opens the door to ways to make new and influential friends in the job market through exploratory or informational discussions with experts in sessions that are normally pleasant and informal interactions. They involve none of the heavy pressures on both sides that exist in most job interviews, and this path is open to all job seekers and career-minded folks, from entry to executive levels.

Career Opportunity Research

Let’s call our approach Career Opportunity Research – or COR. It involves talking with high-level people in a business or industrial field or a specific organization – NOT to apply for a job – but to explore the question of

• Whether your qualifications satisfactorily fit employment in that business, industry, or organization;
• If so, whether such employment offers you good possibilities for a rewarding future;
• Where such prospects are most likely to be the best for you.

Let’s also set some ground rules, because this approach is not familiar or comfortable to many. And it is one of the very best strategies!

The 6 Rules of COR:

1. To succeed with the COR approach, you should have already gone through some self-analysis of where your interests are, what your strongest qualifications are, and what kind of work excites you.
2. You should have prepared your communications, i.e. resume, letters, biography, LinkedIn or other social media profiles, etc. This should cover online and offline scenarios. Observe how your communications align with employers’ needs while you’re in this approach. Then modify as needed.
3. You should adopt the belief that most people in responsible positions – from department heads to presidents of major organizations – are highly receptive to folks who come in with a strong interest in their field of work, activities, challenges, and successes. They are often even more responsive when those folks have relevant good ideas to contribute.
4. You should have researched and learned beforehand about the functions, products, or services with which the experts you are contacting are most immediately concerned. You should do this so that you have more than a passing familiarity with the kinds of problems they face, along with ideas about those problems appropriate for applicants at your experience level.
5. Ironically, you should use the COR approach with the firm personal conviction that you are NOT looking for a job offer. Instead, for the moment, you are only seeking to explore that field of work or organization as one that may offer the kind of opportunity you are looking for. Even if it’s true that you will consider any job offers that come your way, that’s not your immediate goal.
6. You should have enough confidence in yourself and your ability to serve your contact’s needs to email, call, or yes, even simply show up at the office of the man or woman you want to talk with and ask to see him or her if it is not practical to arrange an introduction through a mutual associate or friend. And this is important. You want every encounter to be with a person who can immediately make the decision to hire you or greatly influence that decision.

I’ll leave this blog post here so that you can decide whether you are ready to use the COR approach. And in my next post, I’ll explain exactly how it works!

I always love to hear from you! Please comment below.