A Personal Account of Lifelong Guidance

When I was starting out in self employment, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to tell my own career story in the NCGE magazine Guidance Matters. 3 years later, reposting this seems fitting because it contains so many of the philosophies by which I work.

First published Spring 2019, Guidance Matters

When I was 23, I worked as a waitress in a family style restaurant that I am sure you know well.  A man sat in my section one Sunday evening when the restaurant was quiet. In my memory, he greatly resembles Ernest Hemingway; he was a big man, white close-shaven beard and he wore a flat cap.  I irritated him when he ordered pork ribs for a starter and I advised that they didn’t come in half portions.  He ordered a bottle of red wine “and I’ll drink all of that as well.” I smiled and he smiled back and the tension was broken.  We chatted as I broke down my section.  He shared that he was very disappointed that his son was ‘only’ a waiter in a trendy city centre hotel.  I told him that I thought waiting tables was a great job: you work with a microcosm of society; you develop great coping and leadership skills; it is time well spent. I told him I had a Masters in History. He was greatly surprised.  I pointed out some of my colleagues.  Rita was a teacher in Lithuania before she came here, I told him, and Jane is doing her degree in Psychology right now. I ended up sitting at the table with him.  I don’t remember what we talked about but I remember how I felt and I hope he remembers how he felt.  I often think of him. I wonder did his feelings about ‘unskilled work’ change after we spoke.   

Luck

I am very fortunate, I have two parents who believed in me and believed in education and I had every privilege associated with that.  I am very aware that life has been made easy for me and that repeatedly throughout my life, I have been able to make decisions based on what I wanted to do rather than what I needed.  Still, my interest has always been to level the playing field for those less fortunate than me, and so I have found myself naturally moving towards the field of lifelong guidance.  

Persistence

While waitressing, I volunteered with the Dublin Simon soup run.  I discovered my sense of purpose there.  I began working in homeless shelters as a keyworker. Several years later, I moved to Canada and I tried to get employment there in a homeless shelter.  I remember the interview and how the HR Manager made me feel.  “My concern is that you just don’t know the local resources”, she said, shaking her head and smiling.  I made the point that knowing local resources is surely a matter of learning a handbook; that the people skills I had were less learnable and more important.  But she was immovable and I felt powerless against it.  It gave me a sense of how easy it is to close a door on someone who has less than you, someone you can classify under ‘other’.  I took a research job that I was grateful for.  But it gave me no energy.  I felt tired.  Again, I started to look for solutions.  I needed transferable skills to make me less vulnerable.  I needed qualifications so that HR Managers couldn’t shut me out. 

Purpose

I focused on where I got my energy. I thought about how I wanted to help people to develop their potential.  I began to study a Masters in Career Development through distance learning from ECU, an Australian university. 

Australian career theory is very exciting.  There is a focus on social learning theory and on narrative theory, and on chaos as a learning opportunity because life is, after all, not linear.  I learned a systems theory approach, where the importance of the individual is accompanied by an exploration of the system within which he/she lives.  There are Lifelong Learning Principles and Luck Principles and particularly interesting theories like HB Gelatt’s Positive Uncertainty Principles:

1.    Be aware and wary about what you know.

2.    Be focused and flexible about what you want.

3.    Be objective and optimistic about what you believe.

4.    Be practical and magical about what you do.

I loved these principles.  I loved how applicable they were.  They seemed to make space for the truth in between two extremes. 

Optimism

Halfway through my studies, I married and moved home to Ireland.  I found work in a Dublin Local Employment Service as a Guidance Worker in addiction support services.    I began to base my work on finding a realistic way forward for clients, grounded in their life experience and personal circumstances. 

In my work, I aimed above all else to give clients a positive experience of linking with the service.  I wanted them to develop a lifelong openness to new experiences.  I took the long view.  I believed in everyone and I met them where they were at. 

Flexibility

At 33, I moved abroad again with my husband’s work.  I was nervous about leaving a job that gave me such fulfilment and sense of identity.  I shared this with a colleague who said, “just think about all the things you would love to do if you weren’t working fulltime.  Now is your chance to do them.”  While abroad, we had our children.  I thought about my colleague’s lines from time to time.  At first I interpreted them shallowly.  I joined a cooking club (which I left), I thought about signing up for language classes (which I did not do).  Mostly I tried to survive those difficult, all consuming years of pregnancy and babies.  It took me four years out of the workforce before I connected with my dream.  I was standing in the kitchen one morning.  I suddenly thought, I have always wanted to write!  I hadn’t thought of this in 20 years.  It gave me a degree of understanding of how deep you need to go, how removed you need to be from external distractions, to remember your dreams. Connecting with it helped me to see how creative I am.  From that creativity came the thought that maybe I want to work for myself and follow my own interests and passions.  Being a stay at home parent has much of the autonomy of self-employment and now that I had that, I did not want to lose it.

Risk

Since coming home three years ago, I have reconnected with my professional self by studying modules of Adult Guidance and Counselling Skills at Maynooth University.  I have set up my own business – www.careercounsellor.ie- where I focus on the needs of people distanced from the labour market.  I am committed to the principles of social equity that have always driven my work.  I have become aware of how deeply skewed the world is against women.  I want to support people from immigrant and marginalised communities to feel valued and respected for who they are.

Lifelong Guidance

As a country, we tend to provide Guidance Counselling to young people before they start their careers and we offer Leadership Coaching to business people who aspire to or have reached executive level.  These are important interventions.  But most of us live in that space in between and many people are going through life with seemingly insurmountable barriers to progression.  

This is where I want to focus my work, to help people to make sense of their experiences and develop a response to them. I want to help people to develop the capacity to manage their own lives and their own lifelong learning so that ultimately they can define and create a satisfying life.  

Lifelong Learning Principles – J. Denham

These attitudes facilitate learning and help a person to adapt to changing circumstances 

·      Suspend assumptions and judgements.

·      Take risks and be willing to make mistakes.

·      Be willing to admit you don’t know everything.

·      Be curious, ask questions and try new experiences.

·      Apply what you learn and persevere.

·      Frequently remind yourself of strengths and preferences.

·      Be kind and patient with yourself while you learn.

·      Develop and maintain a support network.

 Planned Happenstance or Luck Principles - Krumboltz et al

These skills allow a person to capitalise on unexpected events

·      Curiosity.  Exploring new learning opportunities.

·      Persistence.  Exerting effort despite setbacks.

·      Flexibility.  Changing attitudes and circumstances

·      Optimism.  Viewing new opportunities as possible and attainable.

·      Risk Taking. Taking action in the face of uncertain outcomes.

View original article here

The Benefits of Assessment Tools

The first step to creating a new future is to make sense of what you’ve been through so far.

Career Assessments may not be for everyone. Nothing is.  But they can be a very useful tool to bring into the process of defining what you want in your work life.

When you have a career problem, it helps to bring new things to the surface that you may not have been aware of.  Maybe you want to better define what you are looking for and create a path towards that goal.  You are looking for solutions. 

Career Assessment tools are online tools that help you to explore your career interests, your personality and other aspects that all become part of answering those questions you have about what you’re looking for.  In my work I offer MyFuture+ which are well-researched, adult-oriented tools from the Careers Portal platform.

My Future+ tools are freely available to all my clients

The benefit of a Career Assessment is that it can highlight to you that there is a suitable work environment that you are likely to find rewarding and satisfying.  We are trying to find career options that are a good fit for you.

Here are some things to consider about assessment tools. 

·       The tools are realistic.  They may not necessarily tell you what you want to hear but they will hopefully provide you with insight into what would be a satisfying career for you. 

·       The tools are self-reported.  There should not be any major surprises here.  Done right, the results should feel like a good alignment with the way you see yourself. 

·       The tools are not right or wrong or set in stone.  Rather, they provide us with questions to consider. 

·       The tools should only be considered as a support to the career counselling process.  They are an aid to decision-making, not an answer in themselves. 

·       Discussion with your career counsellor can help you to narrow down choices into careers that you would be both good at and passionate about.

Here are some of the assessment tools I use:

Interest Profiler – This tool identifies career categories and specific occupations that are interesting to you.  By narrowing down a range of 8 interest areas to a top 3, and by thinking about which job sectors interest you the most, you start to think about how to combine these into satisfying work. 

Example: A person works in construction but their Interest Profiler shows a strong interest in Investigative/ scientific work and STEM sectors (Science, Engineering and Construction).  They start to consider options outside construction that build well on the career they have.  They show an interest in Robotics and upskilling in Automated Systems.   

Personality Quiz – What does personality mean to you?  I see it as the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that make us unique.  We use this quiz to explore your innate traits and how they relate to the work environment  Certain job environment will allow certain personalities to flourish.

Example: A conscientious person will enjoy a stable, ordered environment, while an idealistic personality seeks meaning and purpose through their work.

Career Values – It can help to look at your life values and whether your career choices relate well to these.  Do they align and bring satisfaction, or are they misaligned and lead to frustration?

Example: A person’s top career value is ‘peace of mind’ but they have worked as an Event Planner for five years.  Seeing these side by side helps them to appreciate that their career choices do not relate well to their top values and that this is generating stress in their life.

Career Skills – This tool separates skills from academic achievement.  It can help you to identify the skills that you have picked up through work, lifelong activities and friendships.  It can also help you to identify those skills that you (perhaps secretly) most want to learn.

Example: A person rates themselves as highly skilled at presenting ideas and public speaking.  This helps them to see that they would like to develop these skills further and become a trainer.  They have more to offer.     They also identify that they could learn practical task skills that would help with their new choice of career such as computer skills and working to deadline.

Multiple Intelligences – The theory behind this tool is that rather than a person having one intelligence pre-determined at birth, there are eight types of intelligence that we can grow and develop throughout life. This tool aims to connect people with their strongest intelligence areas and how they could apply that to their career search.

Example: A person’s top scoring intelligences are Intrapersonal (Self Smart) and Interpersonal (People Smart).  They have been considering retraining as a psychotherapist and this reaffirms to them that it is a good fit and they are likely to enjoy it.

As a career counsellor, I believe assessment tools are a really useful tool.  They can throw new light on a familiar situation. 

They can provide you with language to describe what you are already experiencing. What you have learned about yourself. What skills you have to offer. What you want your future to look like.

They can offer you a portfolio of yourself that you can bring with you and incorporate into future plans. It can be motivating and gratifying to see yourself clearly described in black and white.

But it is the discussion they generate – and the decisions and plans that come out of that discussion - that is their greatest value.  Learn from the past. Think of the future.

For more details on MyFuture+ see MyFuture+ | Irelands National Career Development Programme (careersportal.ie)

Coping with Anxiety in the Workplace

In relation to problems you may experience in your career, coping with anxiety can frequently come up. 

It is very difficult to cope with anxiety: worry about the future is characterised by feeling undefined, overwhelming and out of our control. 

I would suggest that the best strategy to pull anxiety back is to turn those characteristics around:

·       by defining it

·       by putting it in perspective

·       by clarifying what elements of your stress are within your control.

This post focuses on the elements of your stress within the workplace that are within your control. A job change may not necessarily solve this problem for you.  It can help to stop and think more closely about what you are experiencing in the now.  You are learning how to cope with stress.

What are the Problems Within the Workplace

The first step is to make sure you are very clear on where the problems lie.  Identify the sources of stress and whether you can develop a response to them.  For example, it may be that you are unclear about who you report to and what is expected of you.  Perhaps nobody is developing your skills. Or there may be elements of your work that you find especially challenging, and these may flood your thoughts but actually represent only a small portion of your work.  Perhaps stress is a pattern that has followed you from job to job, indicating that the core changes you want to make are in how you respond to work stress in general.  Perfectionism can also be a source of stress and may require a response where you adjust your personal expectations or your kindness to yourself when you experience a setback.  It’s important to be clear on what you are experiencing before you can decide how best to respond.

If you are trying to articulate what is wrong, this graphic may be helpful. These are ingredients for happiness and well-being. Where work is meeting none or few of these needs, it can be considered a source of stress.

Ingredients for Happiness and Well-Being. Source: Dr. Patricia Daly, University of Limerick, 2019

Are any External Factors Impacting on your Performance and Happiness

If one aspect of life is causing you distress and it begins to impact on other parts of your life, it inhibits your ability to act purposefully and protect yourself from burnout.  It may be helpful to mention to someone at work (that you trust) that you are experiencing difficulties outside work.  Each company culture is different, and someone who understands your work context could be a helpful ally in figuring out what would be the next step in order to cope with work tasks alongside this external stress. You may need nothing more formal than an occasional check-in by your colleague, or you may decide that it would relieve your stress to be open about difficulties you are experiencing outside work to a manager or to HR.  Generally it is best to try to put strategies in place that can keep home stress and work stress separate.

Relaxation is a Skill

If we can turn on relaxation, then we can turn off tension.  Regulation of anxiety through relaxation is a skill that can be learned through practice.  While implementing change, take time for yourself and self-care strategies that meet your needs, such as alone time, exercise you enjoy, phone-free evenings, early nights or meaningful connections with others.  Develop skills that you enjoy outside of work. Consider mindful practices that keep you in the moment, such as writing in a daily journal or sitting quietly while drinking a hot drink.  When you are working, pace yourself and plan breaks (or rewards) after periods of intense work.

Keep the Consultation Going

Not knowing when or how to say ‘help’ can lead to escalating anxiety.  If you do not have clear communication with your boss and this causes you stress, try to establish a regular slot or structure to communicate better.  Explore whether you can prioritise some tasks while delegating or postponing others.  There may be skills or training that would interest you and increase your enjoyment of work. Generally a communication breakdown is bridged when people have a better understanding of each other’s needs and experiences.  Make sure your employer understands your needs and keep the consultation going by communicating with your employer and colleagues on a regular basis.

Who Can You Talk To

A friendly chat with someone you trust is a vital support to stress in the workplace. Reach out to someone who knows you well and who can provide an external point of view.  This may be a family member, a friend, a colleague or a person you studied alongside.  Consider the value of a professional support service such as a counsellor, who can help you towards insight, self-acceptance and who can support you if you decide to no longer engage in behaviours that create stress for you in the workplace.  Sometimes, validation from someone who cares about us is all we need to cope.

Don’t Overdo It

When  managing anxiety in the workplace, small changes can make a big difference.  Small changes, implemented thoughtfully, can change your life.  Once you have a clear idea of what is causing you stress, try setting a reasonable response to it.    In the long run, little and often may the best strategy to change.

How to Change your Career

The feeling of being trapped in a job you don’t want to do is a very overwhelming and blocking feeling. 

Change is rarely a single distinct event.  The change process usually begins when you move from being unaware of something being wrong to gradually becoming aware of an unhappiness and a change that you want to make happen in your life. 

If you are feeling stuck, trapped, restricted: pay attention to that feeling.  It is trying to tell you something.  Try asking yourself what is happening for you here and what can you do to relieve it?

Take time for yourself

It is tempting to always want to be somewhere else but it is really important to focus on what is going on for you and to develop a response to that in the here and now. 

I believe there is always a solution and that there is real power in clearing an hour of your day to focus and to clearly articulate to yourself what is going on for you and how are you experiencing it.

Look at your whole life.  Look at how you spend your time.  What qualities in yourself are important to you?  What are the supports and interests that sustain you?   Outside of the personal elements of your story, what are the systems that are holding you back.  Are you blaming yourself for feeling a certain way when there are other factors (such as time shortages, financial hardship or a toxic boss) that are having a negative impact on you.   

Making changes needs to wait until you have defined what is causing you stress and suffering. 

Explore how much you want to change

Think of dropping a pebble into a pool of water and the ripples it causes.  Sometimes a small change can have a very big impact.  Be honest with yourself so that you can more closely define what you are looking for.  Career success and career contentment are very different things.  

Are you suffering from a lack of meaning or are you experiencing daily stress that a change of context (such as a change of team, of leader, or an adjustment to your expectations) would improve.  If it is a problem of burnout, explore whether this is a repeating pattern in your life and whether the changes that you need to make are in how you respond to stress, rather than allowing this pattern of burnout to continue to follow you into a new role.

You need to define what this change means to you so that you recognise it when it happens.  Try to define what would help you to feel a little bit better.  Hopefully you’ll gain insight from that. 

Make a decision on what you want

At this point it can be helpful to broaden your thinking.  Do you want to change your job or do you want to change your relationship with your job? Allow yourself to daydream.  What subjects did you like most in school. What did you want to be when you were a child and what does that tell you about yourself? 

Would you feel happier in your job if it was meeting more of your needs, and can you reconcile those needs at work without making bigger changes.  For example, if you are experiencing a lack of control in work, is there an aspect of work that you can request to coordinate or manage, to meet that need for control without changing the entire context.  

What would happen if you got involved in projects or causes that reflect your interests so that energy flows back into you.  The more practical the better.

Defining what is causing your distress is not easy to do alone, which is why I believe career guidance can help you build the life you want.

Act on your world so that it better matches what you want

It’s time to take action when you decide that there is a definitive change you want to make in your life.  Once you know what you want, then break it down into steps.  What do I need to put in place to make it happen? 

When planning change, it’s important to know how far into the future you can see.  If you can only see the short term, plan only for short term change.  However, if you have decided where you want to be in 5 years, then set that goal, and break it down into stages with milestones along the way.

As you contemplate change you will come up with arguments against yourself.  You may experience ambivalence where you counter the reasons to stay unchanged in your career (the hassle, the fear the risk) with potential benefits of change.  The way to combat that is to ask yourself honestly, what are the good things about changing, and what are the not-so-good-things.  And which do I want most?  

Life is a complicated compromise between what you want and what is enough.

Setbacks are as human as you are

If you are changing and able to maintain that change consistently, well done.  Your goals are clear to you and your steps are achievable.  

If you are changing and experiencing a loss of motivation or a setback, be gentle with yourself.  Setbacks are part of being human.  Ask yourself what has worked so far and what can you learn from that? 

How can you raise the quality of your thoughts again?  How can you prevent your energy from continually flowing away from you?   What has worked in the past and what does that teach you? Don’t be hard on yourself, long term change takes a few cycles before we get it right.

Perhaps bring the plan for change back to little changes and leave the bigger changes until the timing is right. 

I am sure there is one thing you can do this week that can take you a step in the right direction.

Self-Care: Simple Tools that Can Work

I’d like to talk about self-care.  It’s important because if we look after how we physically and emotionally feel, our cognition will also function better and we will be able to think more clearly and make more reasoned decisions.    Self-care is in many ways the core of all good decision making. 

I am going to write today about a number of tools that I have found effective in diagnosing stresses and improving our relationship with ourselves.

Voice the Difficulties

The first step to change is to name the difficulties.  If you write out a typical day hour by hour, you can note where your stress triggers are.  Do they happen during the working day, during the transition from work to home life, during idle hours when dissatisfaction seeps in?

Manage the Manageables

Then draw a large container image. You can see the container as a membrane between yourself and the world. 

I draw three sides of a rectangle that’s open at the top.  Everything you write inside the jar are things you can control.  Everything that is stressing you but that is outside your control goes in the white space outside the jar.

The Container helps you to visualise the membrane between you and circumstances beyond your control

The container helps you to appreciate that there are limits to what is within your control and to visualise what life would be like if you focused your energies on managing the manageables.

The Incredible 5 Point Scale

The Incredible 5 Point Scale is actually a sensory tool developed to help children to emotionally regulate by becoming more aware of the stages and levels of their emotions.  However like many sensory tools, it works well for almost everyone.

To develop your own self-care scale, draw a table.  4 columns, 5 rows :

Example of an Incredible 5 Point Scale Table. Make your own!

And start to fill it in, relating your emotional state of mind to what you do when you are unaware and what you could do instead to move yourself down through the scale to a calmer state.

Reflect on What’s Changed

When developing new coping strategies for yourself, reflect on what you have learned about yourself that you didn’t always know.   Many of us have experienced transformative change during the pandemic and drawn on resources we didn’t know we had.  What’s changed for you?  What new information have you learned about yourself?  Did you discover new coping strategies or new joys in your life?

Make a list for yourself that you can draw on: Things that help you cope.  Be as specific as you can be. Is there a certain TV show, a certain moment in the day or a view you really enjoy? Name it!

Early Warning Signs

What are the warning signs for you when the self-care is slipping?   Are they likely to trigger you into feeling worse?  Make a note of them so that you can recognise when they’re happening. These may be the things that will move you up the 5 Point Scale instead of down

Maintain your Supports

Now that you have named what works for you , keep it in your mind by writing your list of coping strategies somewhere you will find it, like at the back of a work diary.

I like to write it in a gentle way.

I Can Try:

• Keeping a little structure on the week; Getting exercise; Only scheduling two things a day; Sitting in my garden; Drinking water with ice; Making time for play.

Start changing your life by changing your self-care and see if it helps you to identify your stress triggers and make clearer decisions.

Take the Mystery out of the Interview Process

job Interviews are draining experiences for many of us, made all the more stressful when there is an information gap about what we can expect.  Here are some tips to help to reduce the stress of the unknown when preparing for a formal job interview.

1.       I am not sure what I’m being tested on in an interview

An interview can feel like an unknown entity where you fire word missiles into space and hope that by some miracle you score a hit.  The hiring panel are there to make a decision, and they will have a methodology and a scoring system to select candidates.   You can contact the company in advance and ask if you can have the interview process explained to you and what you can expect.  For example, in a structured competency-based interview you can expect to be scored across 5-6 competencies, which are probably listed in the job spec to help you prepare.   

2.       Interview panels intimidate me

An interview panel is actually a good sign that a company is aware of the risk of bias when hiring and is trying to use a structured method to reduce it. If your interview panel has at least three people and reflects gender balance, then it’s a signal to you that the company is trying to have good hiring practices.  A panel might comprise a HR Representative, a Manager and possibly an external interviewer or Board Member.  The interviewers listen and score your answers and the person who scores highest will be offered the position first.  By understanding the reasoning of this system, you can prepare better for the task.   

3.       The thoughts of travelling to the interview fill me with anxiety

If you have reasons for why you would strongly prefer an interview by Zoom rather than in person or if you need to gain a good understanding of their interview process and what you can expect in order to prepare, don’t be afraid to reach out when you are offered the interview.  Don’t let anxiety of the unknown harness this moment and become a barrier to you.  Contact the company for more information or to request adaptations to the interview process.  And trust your gut feeling; if they’re inflexible about accommodating you, perhaps their company culture is not the right fit for you anyway.

4.       I’m never sure if I am waffling

If you are told in advance the length of an interview and if you know the size of the interview panel, you can calculate how many questions you’ll be asked and how much time you’re expected to spend on them.  30 minute interview?  You can probably expect 10 questions, and you should spend about 3 minutes on each question. 3 person interview panel?  You can expect that each interviewer will ask at least 3 questions.  Therefore if you have not heard from one interviewer yet, make sure you allow yourself enough time and material to answer their questions.  Using these benchmarks can help you prepare a balanced picture of yourself and an opportunity to score points across the board.

5.       I couldn’t find any information on the company

When you are researching the company in your interview preparations, you may want to consider contacting them.  The team you wish to join might be happy to hear from you and to answer some questions you have.  Be sure to have your questions ready and double check that they are appropriate to ask.  Always know the reason that you are asking a question and if the reasoning is unclear to you, drop it from the list.

6.       I don’t know how to handle myself when I walk in

While most interviews are now on Zoom and walking in is less of a worry, you are still auditioning for a role in a company that has an existing team and you want to demonstrate that you align well with the culture of that team.  Don’t enter the meeting until you are ready to start a conversation.  And when we do go back to interviews in person, be on form from the moment you enter.  Be courteous to people you meet in the reception area, be warm and professional to the person who comes down to escort you to the interview room.  If you are nervous or tense, take five deep breaths to centre yourself.  First impressions of you are important. 

7.       I like to prepare really carefully for my questions

It’s great to know your key examples for each competency but the most important thing is to listen to the question you are being asked.  It is tempting to launch into prepared material  but it may not be that relevant to the question.  If you’re not answering what they’ve asked, they can’t score you on it, and you are losing yourself points.   Know your key examples for each competency.   Similarly, you may have that one question you are nervous about answering, but if you spend all your time preparing for one question, and if you spend ten minutes of your interview answering one question, you are not giving your interviewers enough material to score you across competencies.

8.       I don’t know what to say when I’m asked about a work skill I know I haven’t done before

You want to communicate hunger, preparation and interest.  Your interviewers want you to do well and are often eager to hear you speak the words that allows them to score you highly.  Know that women are much more likely to stick with what they’ve already done, while men come in and speak about what they can do.  Practice saying ‘YES I can do that’ and keep practising until you can say it with conviction.  Demonstrate that you are able for new tasks, rather than focusing on whether you have done them before.  Because if you don’t say you can do it, the next person being interviewed is going to score those points that you have passed up. 

9.       I would love to get to the point where I feel ready for the interview

The night before the interview, think about the three core messages you want to get across.  Know the job description really well and relate it to what you can do.   Know these three messages and go into the interview with a clear and open mind.  This is your moment. 

And honestly, breathe into it and enjoy the moment.  You’re at the table.  You’re here.  Be proud of yourself that you have made it this far.

6 Ways to Use Your Phone to Improve Your Job Search

Most people would say their favourite gadget is their phone.  For many, it is their only gadget.  2017 research found that nearly 90% of Irish adults own a smartphone, with the top three uses being email, social media and news/weather.  28% of people check their phones all day, every day.

Your phone gives you a chance to contribute to wider conversations, it allows you to focus on your strengths and interests and it builds your knowledge.  For most people, it’s indispensable.

But a smartphone is probably also your kryptonite.  Job searching can pull down your emotions and your fatigue to the point where you are not thinking clearly and are losing your potency of thought.   A phone can exacerbate that fatigue. 

Here are 6 ways to use your favourite gadget to centre your search and raise the quality of your thoughts again.   

1.     Follow the Path Already Travelled

There are people already doing what you would like to be doing. List five organisations you would love to work for and follow them on all your social media pages. Look for inspiration, industry knowledge, opportunities.  Go directly to Career Opportunities listings on their websites instead of waiting to see them on job sites.

Search for jobs on job sites that have a more personal handprint.
JobAlert.ie is a smaller Irish job site with strong employer engagement.
Activelink.ie is a specific site for the community and non-profit sectors.
Jobs.ie have a 4.6 star rating on their app and you can apply directly to the employer.

Look for professionals within those organisations that may have a public profile that is worth following on a platform you already use.  Look at the About Us section of organisations, or take a look at their list of board members.  Consider small recruitment start-ups.  Do they have CEO’s with strong public profiles?  You may see opportunities by following the individuals as much as the organisations.

By bringing new voices into your newsfeed, you may spark an idea you haven’t had before. 

2.     Name Your Themes

Quieten the noise by knowing the themes of your job hunt and following these as hashtags across social media. 

One of your themes is the sector of work you are looking for.  Follow this theme using hashtag functions on social media, in particular LinkedIn.  Build your knowledge.

Jobseeking is another theme.  #Jobsfairy and #Jobfairy are useful follows across social media.  If you find a good resource for jobseeking in your context, follow that resource directly and keep an eye on it.

Another theme is a community that you may belong to.  Do you have characteristics which define your job hunt?  Are you a career returner?  Have you moved to or returned to Ireland?  Are you looking to juggle work with home life or a sideline? What about your age group?   Your location?

Use these keywords to find support and communities to join on Instagram and Facebook.  Look for groups and organisations that ‘get’ you and your context.

3.     Instagram and Facebook

Consider separating your professional self from your other social media personas.  Instagram is surprisingly effective for setting up a work-focused page.  It is better to have a separate Instagram page that has 25 priority-focused follows than to add them into an already busy feed.  The imagery that floods your feed generates calm, motivation and ideas.  And going there to jobseek is a conscious decision that you make.

JobAlert.ie provide targeted job listings by county.  So you can follow ‘Galway Jobs’ or ‘Tipperary Jobs’ on Instagram or Facebook, making it easy to spot new opportunities.

Replenish your energy.  Follow local groups that spotlight your area with free initiatives like your Local Development Company, your local Council or innovative responses to things you care about.

Is there a Facebook group for your profession in Ireland?  This is a place to generate ideas and build connections within your industry.  When you are contributing to a discussion, aim to be a helpful person who stays on point.

4.     LinkedIn 

LinkedIn should be an app on our phone so that when you move to kill time on social media, you get into the habit of opening LinkedIn as much as any other app.   

All you need is a simple LinkedIn profile with all sections complete and a professional-looking photo (not a holiday snap).  At the top of your profile you can click to show recruiters you are open for work, and you can control who sees this.

Start to say hello on LinkedIn as you would in real life.  Add a short note to an invitation to connect. Comment on people’s posts.  Build a network.  Start to look for people whose message you connect with or who are living out your dreams.  

Use LinkedIn like Facebook: comment and share and like content. Done right, your LinkedIn feed will look like a vibrant Facebook-like newsfeed with a professional orientation.

5.     Zoom

Job searching is an isolating experience.  Try combatting that by scheduling a Zoom call over coffee with a good friend.

Make it someone who won’t give you platitudes but will be happy to offer you practical help such as endorsing your skills on LinkedIn or introducing you via email to a friend who works in your field.

Make it someone you have fun chatting with!

6.     Know When to Fold

You may want to try scheduling times of the day when your phone is not with you. You can see it as a placeholder for something else in your day.  Put your phone out of your reach so that you have to consciously stretch for it. Choose the radio, a podcast, a book, a chat or some quiet reflection instead. Change the habit and see how it makes you feel.

Finally, if you spend a lot of time on a network that has yielded no opportunities, it is time to rethink that and reassess where you spend your energies.

Job searching is an act of putting yourself out there for external approval.   It takes its toll.   By valuing your time and how you spend it, you are showing yourself a kindness. 

Jobseeking: Connect first with yourself, then others

Here’s how I became a Career Counsellor:  I went to see one for advice.  I wasn’t making inroads in my career of choice.  I was sitting opposite the Career Counsellor when I had the realisation: I really want your job.  I sought her advice then and there: how do I do what you do? 

She was interested by my interest in her.  A week later, she rang me.  She’d been contacted by a university promoting distance learning studies in Career Development.  Would I be interested in learning more?  I said yes.

 Two years later and I contacted an Employment Service for advice.  I asked the Manager if she would meet with me and she said yes.  She gave me an hour of her time, even arranged for me to work shadow one of her team for a morning.   I didn’t ask for a job, instead I asked: how do I prepare for working somewhere like this?  

 A few days later, she contacted me that she had heard of a vacancy in a sister service.  I applied and interviewed and I got it: my dream job.

We are all Self Employed

In many ways, employment is temporary.  It is your career that you are in control of.  You are the decision maker.  And the way to take control is to know that you are working for yourself now.  Let people know what you need and give them a chance to respond to it.  Expand your knowledge base by asking for advice.

 Develop your interests to form a new network with a wider reach than the one you have now.  What is the worst that can happen?

Job Seeking Skills are actually Self-Marketing Skills

Self-Marketing means you focus on your employability, not on being employed.  You want to create and sustain your own opportunities in work, learning and life. 

In these COVID times, reaching out can be gentle.  You can sign up for something and quietly attend.  You can make connections in a way that is comfortable for you.

• Keep a structure to your day:  Get up at the same time.  Make space in the day for making connections and give one hour to it every day.  

• Spark your interests: Make a cup of tea and watch a TED talk.   Listen to a podcast.  Sign up for a free webinar from the library.  Enjoy taking the time to know yourself.  Pay attention to what interests you. 

• Control your filter:  fill your social media feed with new content by following employers, magazines or professionals who write about your industry. Follow one and then from their feed pick two more to follow.  Unfollow or hide content you no longer enjoy.

• Know what you’re looking for: write down three knowledge gaps.  Tell yourself: I’m going to do one thing this week that moves me closer to filling one gap.  I’m going to persevere and practice.

• Fill your knowledge gaps: take a new course (I link to free ones below), learn new skills, sign up for a conference, attend a webinar on anything you find interesting.  Use your new sources to generate ideas.  What are other people listening to?

• Make connections: set up a Linked In page and invite people to connect with you on Linked In – say hi on a Zoom chat at a webinar and see what happens!    Look for new opportunities to learn and practice filling those gaps, one step at a time. 

 Don’t keep your jobseeking a secret

 Don’t be scared of networking. What’s now called networking is how Irish people have operated for millennia.  We love a good recommendation from someone we trust before we do anything. People often turn to a family friend or a neighbour to get a leg up.

 So if you have ever posted in a Facebook or WhatsApp group looking for a recommendation or if you have ever replied to one, then you have networked.  It is no more mysterious than that.

 Let someone in your network know you are actively seeking a job. Think about all the people you have worked with or who know you well.  Choose someone who is positioned well to introduce you to others and who is likely to be happy and interested to hear from you.

Be clear about what you want. If it is someone you know, you can let them know you are actively seeking new work and that you are looking for some advice about where there are vacancies or how you would prepare to work somewhere like their work.

Connect with those who are connected with others

Then list potential prospects: list organisations that do what you want to do, and who you could contact there.  Are you more comfortable starting with someone you know or a stranger?  Make it a planned and targeted networking campaign.  

 If it is someone you don’t know, don’t ask for a job.  Ask them for advice.   Ask them for a half hour of their time.  And try to leave that meeting with one more recommendation of someone you could talk to. 

I contacted lots of people at the time I contacted the Employment Service but I only needed one to be the right opportunity.

Make a connection.  First with yourself, then with others.

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A Personal Account of Lifelong Guidance→

This article was featured in the NCGE publication Guidance Matters, Issue 2, Spring 2019

When I was 23, I worked as a waitress in a family style restaurant that I am sure you know well.  A man sat in my section one Sunday evening when the restaurant was quiet. In my memory, he greatly resembles Ernest Hemingway; he was a big man, white close-shaven beard and he wore a flat cap.  I irritated him when he ordered pork ribs for a starter and I advised that they didn’t come in half portions.  He ordered a bottle of red wine “and I’ll drink all of that as well.” I smiled and he smiled back and the tension was broken.  We chatted as I broke down my section.  He shared that he was very disappointed that his son was ‘only’ a waiter in a trendy city centre hotel.  I told him that I thought waiting tables was a great job: you work with a microcosm of society; you develop great coping and leadership skills; it is time well spent. I told him I had a Masters in History. He was greatly surprised.  I pointed out some of my colleagues.  Rita was a teacher in Lithuania before she came here, I told him, and Jane is doing her degree in Psychology right now. I ended up sitting at the table with him.  I don’t remember what we talked about but I remember how I felt and I hope he remembers how he felt.  I often think of him. I wonder did his feelings about ‘unskilled work’ change after we spoke.   

Luck

I am very fortunate, I have two parents who believed in me and believed in education and I had every privilege associated with that.  I am very aware that life has been made easy for me and that repeatedly throughout my life, I have been able to make decisions based on what I wanted to do rather than what I needed.  Still, my interest has always been to level the playing field for those less fortunate than me, and so I have found myself naturally moving towards the field of lifelong guidance.  

Persistence

While waitressing, I volunteered with the Dublin Simon soup run.  I discovered my sense of purpose there.  I began working in homeless shelters as a keyworker. Several years later, I moved to Canada and I tried to get employment there in a homeless shelter.  I remember the interview and how the HR Manager made me feel.  “My concern is that you just don’t know the local resources”, she said, shaking her head and smiling.  I made the point that knowing local resources is surely a matter of learning a handbook; that the people skills I had were less learnable and more important.  But she was immovable and I felt powerless against it.  It gave me a sense of how easy it is to close a door on someone who has less than you, someone you can classify under ‘other’.  I took a research job that I was grateful for.  But it gave me no energy.  I felt tired.  Again, I started to look for solutions.  I needed transferable skills to make me less vulnerable.  I needed qualifications so that HR Managers couldn’t shut me out. 

Purpose

I focused on where I got my energy. I thought about how I wanted to help people to develop their potential.  I began to study a Masters in Career Development through distance learning from ECU, an Australian university. 

Australian career theory is very exciting.  There is a focus on social learning theory and on narrative theory, and on chaos as a learning opportunity because life is, after all, not linear.  I learned a systems theory approach, where the importance of the individual is accompanied by an exploration of the system within which he/she lives.  There are Lifelong Learning Principles and Luck Principles and particularly interesting theories like HB Gelatt’s Positive Uncertainty Principles:

1.    Be aware and wary about what you know.

2.    Be focused and flexible about what you want.

3.    Be objective and optimistic about what you believe.

4.    Be practical and magical about what you do.

I loved these principles.  I loved how applicable they were.  They seemed to make space for the truth in between two extremes. 

Optimism

Halfway through my studies, I married and moved home to Ireland.  I found work in a Dublin Local Employment Service as a Guidance Worker in addiction support services.    I began to base my work on finding a realistic way forward for clients, grounded in their life experience and personal circumstances. 

In my work, I aimed above all else to give clients a positive experience of linking with the service.  I wanted them to develop a lifelong openness to new experiences.  I took the long view.  I believed in everyone and I met them where they were at. 

Flexibility

At 33, I moved abroad again with my husband’s work.  I was nervous about leaving a job that gave me such fulfilment and sense of identity.  I shared this with a colleague who said, “just think about all the things you would love to do if you weren’t working fulltime.  Now is your chance to do them.”  While abroad, we had our children.  I thought about my colleague’s lines from time to time.  At first I interpreted them shallowly.  I joined a cooking club (which I left), I thought about signing up for language classes (which I did not do).  Mostly I tried to survive those difficult, all consuming years of pregnancy and babies.  It took me four years out of the workforce before I connected with my dream.  I was standing in the kitchen one morning.  I suddenly thought, I have always wanted to write!  I hadn’t thought of this in 20 years.  It gave me a degree of understanding of how deep you need to go, how removed you need to be from external distractions, to remember your dreams. Connecting with it helped me to see how creative I am.  From that creativity came the thought that maybe I want to work for myself and follow my own interests and passions.  Being a stay at home parent has much of the autonomy of self-employment and now that I had that, I did not want to lose it.

Risk

Since coming home three years ago, I have reconnected with my professional self by studying modules of Adult Guidance and Counselling Skills at Maynooth University.  I have set up my own business – www.careercounsellor.ie- where I focus on the needs of people distanced from the labour market.  I am committed to the principles of social equity that have always driven my work.  I have become aware of how deeply skewed the world is against women.  I want to support people from immigrant and marginalised communities to feel valued and respected for who they are.

Lifelong Guidance

As a country, we tend to provide Guidance Counselling to young people before they start their careers and we offer Leadership Coaching to business people who aspire to or have reached executive level.  These are important interventions.  But most of us live in that space in between and many people are going through life with seemingly insurmountable barriers to progression.  

This is where I want to focus my work, to help people to make sense of their experiences and develop a response to them. I want to help people to develop the capacity to manage their own lives and their own lifelong learning so that ultimately they can define and create a satisfying life.  

Lifelong Learning Principles – J. Denham

These attitudes facilitate learning and help a person to adapt to changing circumstances 

·      Suspend assumptions and judgements.

·      Take risks and be willing to make mistakes.

·      Be willing to admit you don’t know everything.

·      Be curious, ask questions and try new experiences.

·      Apply what you learn and persevere.

·      Frequently remind yourself of strengths and preferences.

·      Be kind and patient with yourself while you learn.

·      Develop and maintain a support network.

 Planned Happenstance or Luck Principles - Krumboltz et al

These skills allow a person to capitalise on unexpected events

·      Curiosity.  Exploring new learning opportunities.

·      Persistence.  Exerting effort despite setbacks.

·      Flexibility.  Changing attitudes and circumstances

·      Optimism.  Viewing new opportunities as possible and attainable.

·      Risk Taking. Taking action in the face of uncertain outcomes.

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