by Randy Place
Your Career Service keeps stressing that even though you’re unemployed, you still have a job. It’s the job of finding a job. In order for your job finding campaign to succeed, you need professional accountability.
All professionals need to prepare. Lawyers, for example, need to carefully prepare cases before they can advise a client or set foot into a courtroom.
Your professional role in a job search is to do the same. When you plan and prepare your job campaign with the same professionalism that you would a work project for your boss or for a client, your search will be a smashing success.
Because a job job finding campaign takes preparation, oranization, and discipline, make a project out of your job hunt. You, of course, are the project leader in charge of making it work. For that, you need to take responsibility for your search by organizing and prioritizing the steps needed to land the job you want.
I’ve worked with job finding clients who try to combine a job search with fixing up their homes and getting caught up with personal chores. Waiting. instead of jumping into your search, can cause great harm. The best time to begin your search is immediately after you lose a job. Why? Because you’re in a working mode. When you just hang out for awhile, your fighting edge begins to dissipate.
So if your goal is to work sooner rather than later, to actively manage your job finding project is a must.
Each year — in good and economies and bad — millions of people change jobs. And millions of jobs are created. All you have to do is find one of them by developing a job search strategy that enables you to market and sell yourself successfully.
You’ll find lots of posts on Your Career Service that show you how to prepare for various aspects of your job hunt, like “How to prepare for an interview.”