Consider This...

It’s natural to have questions and concerns about investing in career/job-search coaching. Before you decide whether and with whom to engage in this process, we invite you to consider the following points gained from our years of experience.

Get the support you need.  No matter how accomplished you may be in your career, you may have little to no experience in making conscious and purposeful career plans or conducting a proactive job search.  Consequently, no matter what your level or career experience, you may have precious little expertise in job search.  And why should you?  You've never had much practice!

At Nexus, coaching individuals through career choice and job search has been our focus for 20 years!  It is our area of expertise and we look forward to sharing it with you to realize your continued success.  

It's time to invest in yourself!  Yes, deciding to engage in career coaching is an investment in time, money, and energy.  And with today's busy lives, that is not a decision to be taken lightly.  Financial resources and time spent on one thing means they are not being spent elsewhere.

It's easy to put off addressing your career dissatisfaction or to try to do it all on your own, but neglecting to invest in yourself has costs as well -- months or years of dissatisfaction, more time-consuming job searches, longer periods of unemployment, lower earnings.  Not to mention the resulting frustration, lack of confidence, and discouragement - not exactly the mental outlook that supports a successful job search!

Choose your advisor wisely.  For something as critical as your career, it's important that you feel completely comfortable with your coach.  This will allow you to build the level of trust needed to honestly discuss your concerns and to raise questions when needed.   

To that end, we offer a free initial consultation -- to allow you to be sure that Nexus is the best choice to meet your needs.  In addition, we listen carefully to be sure our advice is truly applicable to your situation and pride ourselves on client relationships built on candor and mutual respect.

All advice is not equal.  Well-meaning friends and colleagues may not actually know much more about job search than you do!  Even those who have hired staff may be giving you their own personal preferences, not generally well-accepted advice.  Good job-search advice is practical and based on common sense.  If anyone gives you advice that you don't understand or it seems off target - ask!  They should be able to explain their advice in clear, common sense terms that you can endorse.  If not, feel free to decline it.  

At Nexus, we urge you to take an active role in the career-exploration and job-search process.  We routinely take the time to explain the rationale for our recommendations so that you become better educated in job-search technique and better equipped for lifelong success.  We encourage questions and expect the process to be an interactive partnership.

Think strategically.  Job search is not a loosely connected collection of tactics; it should be a focused, planned effort based directly upon your goals.  You can't expect to reach your goals if you don't know what they are.  And you can't afford to spend precious time and energy on tactics that won't take you to those goals.

We will offer you tools and ideas for creating focused career plans that will help you stay on track, pinpoint what you need to work on, create and maintain momentum, evaluate your progress, and revise your strategy if needed.

Check out your assumptions.  The work world is complex and it is risky to assume that what you, your supervisor, or your company does is "the way it's done."  Be careful of assumptions that could be undermining your efforts.

Through our extensive experience, we have consulted with professionals from an extremely wide range of industries, functions, and levels.  This has given us a broad perspective on the job market and job-search practices that we can share with you.

Know your market.  Each person's job market is unique depending upon their functional area, level, industry, etc.  Job-search techniques effective in one market may be totally unsuitable in another.  Get to know and understand the viewpoints, practices, and needs of your target market.

As experts in the process of career choice and job search, we can draw on our experience with diverse professionals to advise you on the nuances of different job markets and industries.  And, perhaps more importantly, we can direct you to the resources and tactics to get the information you need to make wise choices and develop an effective approach to your market.

You can't please all the people, all the time. You cannot read people's minds, so don't waste energy trying to match every hiring manager's preferences. But what you can and should do is what will make the most sense to most of the people you will be approaching.

Job search would be a lot easier if there were strict rules and formulas, but the work world is much too complex for that.  Despite that reality, developing a well-planned strategy based upon solid information on your market and knowledge of your personal goals and style will give you confidence that your job-search efforts will lead to success.

Isn't it time?  Invest in yourself!