It’s that old philosophy that if we’re feeling desperate, we’ll do things that we will regret sooner or later. How does that translate to career management and job search? Let’s spend some time talking about the real estate industry as a current example.
Many industries rise and fall in predictable cycles. Whatever industry we choose for our career path has to serve our needs. Obviously we are attaching our families’ livelihoods to it. Take a good, hard, diagnostic look at your career industry. How stable is it predictably to be? What are the outside influences that could cause an industry to change positively or negatively?
Make strategic adjustments to your career path as best you can before your industry hits disaster. Carefully assess the skills, characteristics, abilities, background and education that you possess for the ability to be transferred from one industry to another. Try to be insightful and foresightful about when it might be necessary to make a change. Will you choose to be the adventurer who finds new opportunity in new places? Will you choose to hold steady, loyal to your industry and able to afford its ups and downs? Or will you be caught too late by an industry that isn’t performing and you don’t have the resources to wait for it to turn around?
If you can, shop for job when you can negotiate from a position of stable strength, not when you’re too hungry.
Susan Reynolds is a senior partner at NewMarket Careers in Santa Clarita, a job search and career strategy firm geared toward managerial, executive and senior level professional careers. She can be reached at sreynolds@newmarketcareers.com or 661-702-1345.