Hello everyone, and welcome back to The Job Hunting Podcast. As you know, I’m your host, Renata. Today, the key topic I want to discuss with you is very topical, timely, and incredibly important for us: goal setting. With the 2024 Olympic Games in full swing, there’s no better time to draw inspiration from some of the world’s greatest athletes.
Their journeys, characterized by rigorous training, goal setting, and relentless pursuit of excellence, offer professionals like you valuable lessons that we can apply to career goals and job searches in the short term as well. Whether you’re aiming for a new role, planning a big career change, or looking to advance in your current position, setting clear, ambitious goals is key to success.
It all comes from a piece of research done in the 60s and 70s that has been repeated over and over again because it’s such a great goal-setting recipe. We’ll talk about that in a minute. In my solo episodes from now on, I also want to touch on topics that come to mind because of my career coaching work and the news of the day.
When I’m doing a solo episode like this one from now on, you will get from me, from time to time, episodes that discuss a series of different topics, not just one. That’s because I think I’m developing a pretty good relationship with you, and it has become like a chat between friends. There are topics that I think are important for us to discuss right now. I don’t want to wait until I record an episode again to talk about it because it may lose momentum, and I want to address it right now. So, if you want to listen to just one of the topics I’m discussing, your best friend is the episode show notes.
If you go to the written notes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening to us, you will see timestamps that we’ve developed. We’ve been doing this forever since the first episode. You can go through the timestamps and find the topic you want to discuss. You can do that for every episode, not just this one and the ones coming up. Or if you are one of our loyal listeners and like to have me in your ears as you drive to work, go for a walk, or cook, that’s even better. Make sure you’re subscribed to our weekly newsletter so you never miss an episode and always have a link to the newest chat. There will be a link to subscribe to the newsletter below.
I’m always surprised that people listen to me week in and week out and are not subscribed to the newsletter. I just find it so much easier to be subscribed to the newsletter. Maybe it’s my personal preference. Whenever there is an influencer or expert that I trust, like Sam Harris or someone else I can’t think of at the moment, there are so many great weekly newsletters that I receive and love to read. I hope mine is like that for you as well. I know that for some of you it is because you usually reply back to me to say you got something out of it, and that warms my heart. It makes my day. Nothing makes me happier than knowing that whatever I shared with you has made a difference in your day, job search, and career.
So keep that feedback coming. It’s quite lonely sometimes, especially recording episodes. When I’m doing private coaching, group coaching, or career consultations, it’s wonderful because then I’m, of course, not talking to you or people like you that are looking for jobs, and nothing makes me happier. But when I’m recording episodes like this, it’s quite lonely, so it’s good to get feedback from you. You can probably notice I have a bit of a husky voice. I was so sick last week that I could not record an episode. It was more than a week that I was really sick. I felt worse than when I had COVID, that’s how sick I was. I’m still talking funny and coughing a little bit, so apologies if you can hear that in my voice. It was so awful and difficult for me to operate while I was so unwell with that bad cold that I had to cancel most of my client meetings. It was a coaching week for me. I coach clients every other week, and then I see my corporate clients, or I do corporate work, every other week. So that is how I operate. This week I’m working with corporate clients, which is fantastic, but last week I had to postpone most of my coaching sessions. I apologized profusely to the clients I tried to go ahead with because I was so unwell I had to stop halfway through.
Last week was so bad that I had to rebroadcast an old episode. It is, however, a very important episode for those of you who are keen on being a non-executive director, or being on a board. If you’re in Australia or overseas, it doesn’t matter. Our guest for that episode that was rebroadcasted last week, episode 249, is one I recommend to all my clients and people who book consultations with me to talk about board positions. Marion McLeod is the facilitator of the training program here in Australia that prepares people for due diligence, governance, and board positions. It’s facilitated by the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and Marion is one of the facilitators of that very hard program. It’s not an easy program to do, and I 100% recommend listening to that old episode. It’s a very good one.
Today, like I said, we’re going to talk about goal-setting theory in a minute, which is one of my favorite topics. I was a research assistant for a couple of academics working on goal-setting theory back in the early 2000s. Thank goodness for that because it made me so aware of this important piece of research that I now apply not only to myself throughout my career but also to my clients.
Before we go into that key topic, I want to talk to you about two things that have been top of mind for me lately. One of them is when you have to job search but you’re really, really sad. I don’t know if you’ve been in that situation before. I know I have had that situation in my life, and I know some of my clients have in the past. I’m not talking about any client in particular, but some of my clients have had that situation as well. Job searching while sad is very hard to do. Job searching, going through recruitment and selection, is a competition. There are high stakes, and it’s a difficult competition to go through. You’re competing against a lot of people, a lot of professionals. At the beginning of the competition, it might be easier to go through to the next round, but as you get through to the next round and so on, it gets harder and harder because you are competing amongst equals. You might have different strengths and attributes as a candidate for a role, but everybody is very good at the top two, top three, and even the top four.
Mentally, the mindset has to be something you care about, exercise, and develop in addition to other things, like networking and updating resumes. A lot of people come to me to update their resumes, and then they realize that’s just a tiny piece of the puzzle. It will not get you a job in itself. It needs to be a combination of a complex system that gets you a job. Some people just get it, or it comes more naturally to them to go through that process of speaking about themselves and so forth. But for some, and I’d say most professionals, it’s something that needs to be worked on and learned. The people that reach out to me feel like they need extra guidance to go through that process, which I’m happy to do. It’s my job.
If you add on top of that sadness, it is really hard. Sadness can be from the fact that you lost a job. That is the most common sadness I feel in my clients and prospective clients who reach out to me for a conversation. The sadness of being let go, of having a job that you were doing so great at being made redundant. A lot of people think redundancies have to do with performance. They do not. When redundancies are done for real, they are for real. Sometimes the decision is made so many layers above you that your boss doesn’t even know you’ve been made redundant. That has happened to a lot of my clients, where they got a meeting request, were made redundant, and then their boss didn’t even know. You may have heard of stories like that. It has nothing to do with performance. It has to do with restructures in the business. It makes you so sad to let go of all the amazing work you’ve done or feel like you’ve been neglected by your peers who are also kind of your friends, sometimes even considered family because you spend so much time with them. That’s real sadness. But sometimes there are other things that have happened. Sometimes you lost someone, like a real loss. Somebody passed away in your family, somebody close to you, a friend, a sister, a brother, a partner. It’s really sad. Sometimes there are other things happening: you’re caring for somebody who is really sick and unwell, or you are desperately missing your home country if you moved away, if you’re an expat, for example, or a migrant like myself. Dealing with those emotions while also being high-performing as a job candidate is incredibly hard.
I’m saying all of this because I know some of you listening may be going through things, and I want you to stop and reflect to see if those things are not affecting your ability to get your job. You may not even notice that it’s affecting you. For example, you may think, okay, I’m applying, applying, applying. I’m not getting a job. Why is it? I feel like I’m doing everything right, but are you? Is there something else playing in your mind? We know now, although we think it’s woo-woo and a lot of people don’t realize it, but we know now for absolute certainty that our mindset, the things we
say to ourselves, and the way we treat ourselves influence and are incredibly related to the outcomes in our lives.
I want you to remember that and think about the things you may be going through right now that may be affecting your ability to get what you want, to achieve your goals. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do except wait it out. But sometimes there are things you can do to compartmentalize your life in ways that will allow you to perform better at something like job searching or getting yourself together and putting your career back in place, even though you’re sad. There are exercises, strategies, frameworks, and ways of compartmentalizing your life so you can do things alongside and have maybe two speeds happening. Not everybody has the privilege of waiting things out, and sometimes you really need a job right now, even though you’re incredibly sad. I get that. I’ve been in that situation myself.
I want you to think about that and reflect on what’s affecting your performance as you’re looking for work and see if there are things you can do or things you can learn from a career coach, for example, that will help you deal with the situation better. I just wanted to let it all out there. I think those things are very bespoke, and ideally, I’d like to work with you on a one-on-one consultation, which you can book on my website, or work with you as a private client for a couple of months to really support you. Every case is different, and there’s very little I can say in a podcast that goes to so many different people, but at least I wanted to acknowledge it and hopefully educate you as well on being kind to yourself and understanding that sometimes things take time and take longer, but there is no reason why you won’t achieve your goals in the future. No reason whatsoever.
Most of the time, I’m really surprised that people are so anxious about things. I’m working with a few managers who have been made redundant. They came to me through a corporate client, and the biggest fear most of them have is that there will be a gap in their resumes of a few weeks or a few months. Nobody cares about that. The level of anxiety that unemployed professionals have is not correlated to the realities out there of how people perceive you in the workplace. If there is a recruiter that looks at a month or two-month gap in your resume as something negative, then that recruiter really doesn’t deserve to talk to you. Let’s find somebody else that’s more deserving of your expertise and experience. It’s harder and harder these days to find those really bad people in recruitment. I think most people understand that restructures, layoffs, and career changes are more common because we’re working so much harder and longer than any other generation before us. No wonder from time to time you’re not going to be successful. What were you thinking? What were we all thinking, that things were always going to be rosy and perfect? It’s impossible. It’s just not realistic.
Job hunting when you’re sad is not easy to do. Keep that in mind. Talk to me if you need extra help or at least talk to someone. I think it might be very helpful for you. Then there is the other issue that’s happening right now, which is the financial market is crashing all over the world. As I record this, it started in Japan, then Australia, as they kept opening, the financial markets were crashing. There are lots of things happening. There are big restructures happening in so many different sectors from pharma to tech to retail to manufacturing. Whenever there are losers, there are winners. I want you to know that. It’s never downhill for everybody, and I want you to be smart in understanding where the potential opportunities will be in the months ahead as we go through these difficult financial times. The Western world, at least.
I want you to think about, okay, if this is hard for me, a job seeker looking for full-time employment in this sector, what can I do in the meantime? What are the opportunities and strategies I can implement? The world is always balanced. It’s always yin and yang. So it’s balanced right now, even if the markets are crashing and going down. There are people winning in these situations as well, but the world will eventually balance itself out in a couple of months and you just need to wait it out. I know it’s a privilege and some of us can’t afford that, but I want you to use your intuition and not your instincts to navigate the situation better. When we use our intuition, we use wisdom, knowledge, and experience. When we use instincts, we’re tapping into some primitive stuff in our brains, the monkey brain, the reptile brain. That’s not very good for us. It’s fight or flight, leaves us anxious, and it’s not really to our benefit to be tapping into that right now.
I have just today done a webinar for those clients that bought the Reset Your Career program, which I’ve just redone completely. I’m so happy and relieved that finally, you know, it’s the fourth time I’ve recorded Reset Your Career, and it needed to be redone. So now it’s basically brand new. To celebrate that, here’s my voice. I’m losing my voice a little bit. To celebrate that, I invited everyone that bought the new reset and the people that had bought it prior for a webinar this morning. One of the questions we received was about the job market slowing and the financial markets crashing, what my personal view was, yada, yada. One of the people listening said, “But what about interim executive jobs?” and she was right. I said, “You were right. Interim executives are doing fine. It’s a different lifestyle and a different way of working.” When I say they’re doing fine, they understand that if you are working short-term contracts and interim executive work, that from time to time you will not be employed and that’s fine. You’ve opted for that style of working.
If you are interested in understanding interim executive work, contract work, or portfolio career lifestyle, there is a category on The Job Hunting Podcast website called “Portfolio Career.” You will see lots of episodes there with professionals who have opted for a portfolio life, portfolio career, or contract work, and recruiters who do interim executive management work. Go through that list of episodes and listen to the ones you think will help you better understand the way professionals operate differently. For them, there are probably more opportunities now because of the situation we’re in. Keep that in mind because it all comes down to strategy, knowledge, patience, and resiliency. Both with job searching when you’re sad and job searching during a difficult year like this one. We need to wait out the elections, hopefully get some better resolutions on the wars that are happening at the moment, and then I think the market will start to stabilize, which would be great for job seekers. As a career coach, I love when the market is around this time, kind of slow, kind of not too intense, because I think there’s a lot of strategic reputation work, personal branding work, and professional and career development work that can be done during these times. You’re planting the seeds, you’re nurturing the seeds that you will harvest later on if you do this work, the pre-work, when the markets are slow so that when they are busy and you’re in demand, they will think of you first. That’s the sort of work as a career coach that I love doing. So reach out to me if you need any help.
Now, understanding job search… sorry, understanding goal-setting theory. The key topic for today is understanding goal-setting theory. Like I said before, back in 2001, when I moved to Australia, if you read my story on my website, you probably know, I thought I was going to be okay and then quickly realized I was running out of money. So one of the first jobs I got was as a research assistant. That’s when I worked with academics at the University of Melbourne who were doing a lot of work on understanding goal-setting theory. That was so good for me. Let’s start with the basics. The goal-setting theory was developed by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham. Edwin Locke, I believe, is still alive, and I corresponded with him during that time as a research assistant. It was such a thrill for me. They put together specific and challenging goals along with feedback and realized in their research that this contributed to higher and better learning and task performance. The core principle they framed, which we have been using time and time again, is fascinating. The original book, which I have a copy of because I had to photocopy it (if the book is out of print, you are allowed to photocopy it), is out of print. But if you google it, you will find time and time again, very simplified. My opinion is that they’ve simplified it to the point it’s quite boring. But the book and the research are so interesting on how it’s important to have goals that are ambitious. If you set goals that are not ambitious enough, people don’t aim for them. They don’t work towards them. The right level of ambition in a goal is important for performance. It’s counterintuitive. You would think, “Oh no, if you set a goal that you can achieve, then you will be happier, and then you can move to another goal that you can achieve and be happier.” Nope. The harder you make the road, not super hard, but if you make the goal harder to achieve, you will work more towards it. You will have better performance if you set an ambitious goal that’s still achievable. That balance, that equilibrium, is part of their research. It’s so interesting to read about. It’s a pity that the research and the book are out of print. You could find the academic articles in academic journals, but you would have to pay for that. Listen to this episode and you’ll be fine.
Let’s start with clarity. Goals should be clear and specific. How many times have you heard that and how few times have you actually written down your goals? We talk about clarity and the need to be clear and specific, and then we never actually put pen to paper
and write things down in a clear and specific way. Not only should goals be clear and specific, but your reputation, your personal brand, and what you want to reach for in your career should be clear and specific. I find that when clients lack that, over time, as they get older and wiser, it can have a detrimental effect on their careers. Over time, you want to build your reputation to be crisp, clear, and specific. When you are changing careers completely, which happens from time to time, and it’s totally fine to do it, you need a certain level of vulnerability and humility to start building that clarity back again and informing people that your goals have changed, that your brand has changed. Clarity is important in so many different ways. The best way to reach clarity is to take things out of your brain and onto paper.
Then you have challenge. Goals should be difficult enough to be motivational, but not so difficult that they are not attainable. That balance is hard to put together on your own. You may be too tough on yourself and write a goal that’s completely bonkers. The goal can be unattainable for different reasons. Most of the time, I find that professionals set goals that are attainable but not in the timeframe they want. For example, I know someone is really out of the loop when it comes to recruitment and selection if they are a senior executive and think they will get a job in a month’s time. They will not get a job in a month’s time. It does not happen and has nothing to do with them. It has to do with how recruitment and selection work. People who get from one job to another in a month’s time are usually in clerical or retail jobs. If you’re a manager and above, it will take you more than a month, more than two months, possibly more than three months. If you go to any averaged-out frictional unemployment data from your Bureau of Statistics, wherever you live in the world, you will see that the number of weeks between employment is usually around 12 to 13. During the pandemic, it went up to 20, 23, and that’s an average. But if you are closer to the top of the pyramid of an organizational structure, there are fewer jobs, less movement, less turnover. For you, it will be higher, and you just need to be okay with that. As a career coach who specializes in job searching, my goal is to always reduce that time for my clients to the best of my ability. I’m a dog with a bone and I will try my very best to reduce it by a month or two. I don’t only want to give my clients knowledge, but I want to make it worth their investment. That’s my goal as a professional coach. It’s important to understand the realities of how recruitment operates. As much as I want to reduce time, recruitment takes a certain amount of weeks. Between the time you see the job advertised and the time an offer is made, it can be two months. That’s really important. That’s just one way that goal setting in terms of clarity and challenge can be challenging for you in terms of deciding it on your own without feedback from a coach or people who have done this before you.
Then there is commitment. There must be buy-in from the individual setting the goals. This is super important and sometimes people want to work with me, and when I explain to them, and that’s why we have the discovery call for private clients, when I explain to them that in addition to sessions with me there’s work to be done between sessions, they have to think about it. Why? Because they need to commit. The commitment in job hunting, working with a coach, and so forth requires time. It requires carving out time. Where is that time coming from? Is it coming from the time you sleep, go to the gym, or spend with your family? It’s a tough decision to find the time to commit to job hunting. It’s really hard to take time away from relaxation or family time. I don’t want people to do that, but we need to agree on how much time you can dedicate. That’s usually why people opt for private coaching with me for six months instead of three months. When I explain to them the time commitment they will need to have, they go, all right. I make six months more financially enticing for people for that reason because I don’t want them to burn out when they decide to look for work. That’s the worst thing that can happen. We just spoke about sadness, so burning out is another big no-no. You need to be at the top of your game when you are in front of recruiters and being assessed.
Then the next thing when it comes to goal setting is feedback. Regular feedback helps you adjust and refine your goals as needed. When you go to market and you’re looking for work, you usually go with a minimal viable pitch. A lot of people think they need to go to market with a perfect personal pitch or elevator pitch. It’s impossible. There is no such thing because until you get feedback from recruiters, you’re not able to adjust and refine your goals, adjust and refine your pitch. That feedback is really important. That’s where networking comes from. That’s where getting advice, mentoring, and coaching comes from.
Then you have task complexity. For complex tasks like recruitment, like job searching, it’s important to ensure that the goals are achievable given the skill set of the individual. I’m going to repeat that. For complex tasks, it’s important to ensure that the goals are achievable given the skill set of the individual. This is a really interesting part of goal setting because 100% of my clients are excellent professionals in their fields of work. They are financial managers, financial controllers, CFOs, marketing managers, product managers, communication managers, CEOs. They are a whole bunch of things from executive assistants all the way to C-level professionals. They are great at what they do, but the task complexity of job searching is different from the task complexity of being a product manager or a marketing manager. It’s completely different. The complexity of the tasks is where people get confused when they’re looking for work. They think that by being great in the work they do, they will get the job they want. Then they bump into an ATS system when they’re applying for work and realize they do not know how to apply for that job, beat the ATS system, and talk about themselves and explain the sort of work they’ve done and how they fit with the new organizations. Sometimes it is very straightforward. For example, if you’re a financial controller in one company and want to be a financial controller in another company, it’s more straightforward. Most of my clients are not like that. Most professionals are not like that. They want to change roles, advance in their careers, go from a financial controller to being a director of finance. They want advancement, they want to change sectors, they want transferability. That’s where people find how to convey the message. If you also add to that changing countries, changing sectors, even if you’re in the same country but changing towns, you lose your network. Even from one company to another, even if they are competitors, they might use different ways to explain things, jargons, and narratives. All of that needs to be adjusted. Even though I’m not an expert in everything, I am at least an expert in recruitment, so that helps if you’re working with a career coach.
Now, Olympic athletes and goal settings. I love the Olympics. It’s the time I do the least amount of exercise because I just sit in front of the TV and watch everything and dream about doing exercises like that in the future. They epitomize the essence of goal setting. I always think of Michael Phelps because I’m from that generation where we watched that amazing swimmer win so many medals. I remember reading many articles about him back then. How long ago was that? Ten years ago? He was a fantastic swimmer, and his goal-setting process was so meticulous and detailed and involved not just the end goal of winning the gold medals he won but also daily and weekly targets for his training sessions. His approach highlights the importance of breaking down long-term goals into manageable short-term objectives.
I want to use this opportunity to say that the group coaching program is coming back, and that’s really the first thing we do with private coaching clients and group coaching clients: reflecting on yourself, your strengths, and identifying what your true personal goals are. It’s not even career goals. What do you want to achieve 20, 30, 40 years from now? Then we break down the long-term goals into manageable short-term objectives. That’s even before we look at resumes, everybody. This is the most important thing because if you work with that as your key, it unlocks everything else. It just makes you perform so much better in front of recruiters when you have a good sense of self and a good sense of what you want to achieve.
In this Olympic Games in 2024, Simone Biles is considered the greatest gymnast of all time. She truly is. She sets such high but realistic goals for herself and knows when to take a step back. That was so beautiful to see in the previous Olympics in Tokyo. She quickly understood that she wasn’t feeling her best, that she was having issues with her performance that had nothing to do with her physical training, and she pulled out of the race. She was trying to win a race while not being well. There were things happening in her life. If you watch her documentary on Netflix, which I recommended in my newsletter a couple of weeks ago, you will know what those things were. Those things were affecting her performance, and it was all in her head. That’s why the holistic way of engaging with your goals is so important. It’s not just about the physical performance and training. In your case, as a corporate professional, it’s not just about getting your resume crisp and clear, getting the best possible job application, or looking back at your career and thinking you’ve done all the right things. No, it’s how you present yourself on the day, your mindset, and how
your brain is in sync with the opportunity in front of you to talk to people and present yourself in a way that denotes trust and likability. That’s what wins the race for you. In Simone’s case, her ability to push the boundaries for her sport stems from her deep commitment to her goals and a structured plan to achieve them. Her story teaches us so much about resiliency, grit, and adaptability in goal setting.
How can you apply Olympic strategies to your career? I hope I’ve already addressed that, but you can apply these strategies to your career goals. First, set clear and specific goals, not just in your head. Sit down, stop the episode, sit down and write them down, and have them as specific as they can be with performance targets. Even if you don’t add a timeline right now, which is something you can get advice on from a coach, mentor, or people who did similar things before you, make sure you write the clear, crisp goal for yourself. Then break it down. Breaking it down might need some support from others. Long-term goals can be very overwhelming. They’re exciting, in my view, but breaking them down into smaller, more manageable tasks is great. It creates a timeline for these tasks and keeps you on track. That is the secret sauce. It’s not so much that you have an amazing ambitious goal in the future, it’s how you project manage it. Some people are naturally good at that, some people need a bit of help in understanding how long tasks take, how many tasks are needed, and what those tasks actually are. Sometimes there are too many tasks, and do they all have the same weight in the game? I can tell you that no, some tasks are good to have but not essential, while others are really essential.
Seek feedback and adjust. Just as athletes adjust their training based on feedback, seek mentors, coaches, peers, and adjust your strategies based on feedback to stay on the path towards your ambitious goal. Stay committed and resilient. Commitment to your goals, even when facing setbacks, is crucial. Commitment is interesting because it involves committing through a timeline. I’ll give you an example. I was going to the gym every day until I got sick. Now I have not been to the gym in over 10 days. In my past, I would probably feel very distraught about it, a bit anxious, and a bit punishing myself for not going back sooner. But I know that I will get there. My commitment to going back to the gym is still there, and there’s a bump in the road from being sick and having some family visiting and not having the time. But I know that tomorrow I will be back in the gym, and I’m actually super excited about that. I’m not sad that I wasn’t able to go for over 10 days. Setbacks are opportunities. You need to stay resilient and see them as bumps in the road, not punish yourself and say, “Oh, I haven’t been committed because I skipped the gym for 10 days.” It’s a setback. You’re coming back, and you can use the same learning for job searching. Sometimes there is a setback and you just don’t feel like job searching. Take a week off if you have the privilege to take a week off. It’s not going to unravel your job search. If anything, it will make you stronger. You’ll come back refreshed. You’ll come back after probably overcoming some of the sadness of not getting a job you really liked or not receiving an offer for a role. You come back more resilient if you take a break. I’m a big fan of taking breaks. Some people perform better when they go from one thing to another very quickly. Those people are anti-fragile. Not everybody is. You can build that up over time. Personally, in my life, I prefer to take a couple of days off, build myself up again, and come back stronger. Whatever works for my clients is what we focus on. Whatever works with their personality and strengths. If you can reflect on what works for you, what has worked in the past in terms of keeping you motivated and incentivized, that’s what you should adopt as a strategy.
Celebrate small wins. Don’t wait until the big win that’s all the way out there. I recently recorded an episode with an ADHD expert, and we discussed putting the celebration even before you do a task. That tends to work better with ADHD people. I think everyone should think about that. Some tasks in job hunting are really annoying. You don’t need to like everything about it, although I really want you to enjoy the process. Some tasks can be really difficult to do. To break the ice, think about the best way to incentivize yourself to achieve your goals. Celebrate the small wins and your achievements along the way, no matter how small, because it will help you maintain your motivation and keep you moving forward. Treat this as a project that has some great tasks that need to be done and some not-so-great tasks that need to be done.
The current job market and goal setting. We spoke about the financial market at the moment. It’s crashing hard. The job market is really slow in 2024. With that, it can be daunting to set ambitious goals. Many professionals hesitate to even seek out opportunities because of the uncertain times. I feel that is criminal. If you’re unhappy with your job, feel like you’re being underpaid or underemployed, and had envisioned taking steps forward this year for career advancement, progression, or change, this is precisely the time to set and pursue career goals. The market is slow, so you can take your time and do the preloading of the work now. Refine your pitch with more time, refine your career plans and transition plans with more time. By setting clear goals and working with mentors, your network, recruiters, or a career coach like myself, you can navigate the job market more effectively and position yourself better for future opportunities. The job market will eventually turn around. Many companies are reassessing their workforce needs and how they engage with employees. Some employees will always be engaged in a permanent fashion, while others might be contract-based. There is a unique chance now to align your career goals with the evolving market. Analyze and see how your profession will evolve in the future. Use this time to upskill, network, and refine your career strategies to meet those new demands. Remember, the job market will eventually stabilize, and those who have remained proactive, even if you do a 1% improvement in your career readiness every day, will be better positioned to take advantage of new opportunities.
Those 15 minutes could be how you engage on LinkedIn better, the more connections you have on LinkedIn, that email you sent to someone you worked with ages ago to reconnect, that coffee break you took with a colleague or your boss. That is already you working towards your goals.
I want to give a special shout-out before I end today to my listeners who follow me on Instagram. The reason I decided to record this goal-setting episode was because you chose it. I gave you four options to choose from, and most of you chose the goal-setting episode. Thank you so much for engaging with me on Instagram. I find that Instagram is a safer place for you to engage with me if you don’t want anyone on LinkedIn to know you’re commenting on a job-hunting expert’s post because you’re currently employed and don’t want people to assume you’re looking for work.
