Find Your Dream Job: Insider Tips for Finding Work, Advancing your Career, and Loving Your Job

To have a great career, you need passion. But you also need a solid plan.  Specifically, you need to know how your passions and ideas will be marketable in an ever-evolving job market. This week on “Find Your Dream Job” we’re talking about career management and how to build a plan for a remarkable long-term career. Mac interviews professor and author Larry Smith, whose provocative TED talk, “Why You Will Fail to Have a Great Career,” has attracted more than six million views. Larry urges his students to explore their passions--but also to think about their ongoing relevance in the job market. In this 35-minute episode you will learn: Why passion is a prerequisite to a great career--but not enough in-and-of-itself. How to market yourself and your ideas How to discipline your passion as part of your overall career management plan Why everyone needs a 50 years career management plan Why even non-creative professionals need to be creative when managing their career This week’s guest: Larry SmithAdjunct Associate Professor, University of WaterlooAuthor, No Fears, No Excuses: What You Need to Do to Have a Great CareerWaterloo, ON, Canada   Listener question of the week:  Everyone tells me to “do what I love” for a job. But how am I supposed to know if I like something before I do it? There are so many different jobs out there. I feel like I will be limiting myself if I pick a direction too early in life! If you have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode, please contact Jenna Forstrom, Mac’s List Community Manager at jenna@macslist.org. Resources from this week’s show: "How to Find Your Passion" | Seanwes’ Podcast, Episode 101 "Why You Will Fail to Have a Great Career" | Larry Smith's TEDx Talk Larry Smith’s Facebook Page No Fears, No Excuses: What You Need to Do to Have a Great Career Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond) If you have a job-hunting or career development resource you’d like to share, please contact Ben Forstag, Mac’s List Managing Director at ben@macslist.org. — Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support! Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All too often people only think about career management when they are actively looking for a job. This is a big mistake! Ongoing, proactive career management while you are employed can pay huge dividends next time you are looking for work. Don't wait to lay the foundation for your next job search! On this bonus episode of Find Your Dream Job, Marsha Warner, owner of Portland-based Career Factors, shares professional regrets she's heard from her clients. She reads “Lessons Learned By The Recently Unemployed”, her contribution to our book, Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond). Avoid future regret! Here are Marsha's tips for help you prepare for your next job search: Keep your own file of reviews and accolades Don’t wait until you’re unemployed to start networking Keep your LinkedIn profile active When your job ends, take time to mourn the loss and acknowledge your emotions, then let it go Teaching is a great source of career satisfaction Proactive career management means stepping up to a challenge Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support!   Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com. Transcript Mac Prichard: This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want and make a difference in life. I'm Mac Prichard, your host and publisher of Mac's List. On today's bonus episode we're sharing exclusive content from our new book. Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond). Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond) compiles all of our best job search tips and career management tools into one simple, easy-to-read guide. It's the definitive tool kit for anyone looking for meaningful work. The book also includes special contributions from an array of job search experts and today you'll hear from one of them. Here's Marsha Warner, owner of Career Factors, reading her contribution Lesson Learned By the Recently Unemployed. Marsha Warner: Recently, a client shared what he wished he'd done before he found himself on the job hunt. Here's a list of best practices for career maintenance that are applicable to everyone. He said, "I wish I'd kept of copy of my performance reviews." Lesson: Keep your own file of reviews and accolades. They are helpful to promote accomplishment statement, review for interviews and remind yourself of achievements when doubts creep in. He said, "I wish I'd continued to network and develop outside contacts." Lesson: Don't wait until you're unemployed to start networking. Stay in touch with colleagues, classmates, ex-bosses, other parents, fellow volunteers, and so on. He said, "I wish I'd joined LinkedIn earlier on." Lesson: Keep your LinkedIn profile active. It's a tool for recruiters, a way to stay connected and a source of information for professional development. Spend at least an hour a week updating your profile, reconnecting, joining interest groups and staying current. He said, "I wish I had not taken it so personally. I let this lay-off really get to me." Lesson: When your job ends, take time to mourn the loss and acknowledge your emotions, then let it go. Evaluate the job market, then take up your career toolbox, and go forth. Know that when you're part of a reduction in force, it's a business decision not a personal decision. Take charge of your career with a personal marketing plan. Manage what you can control, and let what you cannot go. He said, "I wish I had reached out and passed on my professional knowledge to younger colleagues before I left." Lesson: Teaching is a great source of career satisfaction. Some companies have formal programs for knowledge transfer. Seek them out. The effort will be worth the reward you'll feel in sharing your knowledge with others. He said, "I wish I had paid more attention to my own development and taken advantage of challenges that would give me more exposure." Lesson: Proactive career management means stepping up to a challenge. Volunteering for projects and committees or getting trained for new skills are ways to grow. They'll get you noticed by your boss and bring greater satisfaction to your daily work. Ask yourself at the end of each day, what did I learn today? He said, "I wish I'd ask for help early on in my job search. Things have changed so much, I feel a bit lost." Lesson: Feeling isolated and lost is common. A career coach can offer expert information and advice about the job market and how to put your best foot forward. Portland is blessed with great career resources including local colleges, private coaches and job search support groups. Help is available. Be wise, and ask for it. Mac Prichard: If you're looking for more expert advice and insider tips like what you just heard, check out Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond). You'll find everything you need to get a great job whether you're in Portland, Oregon, Portland, Maine, or anywhere in between. The 2016 edition includes new content, and for the first time ever, it's available in paperback, as well as in an array of e-reading devices including Kindle, Nook and iBooks. For more information on Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond) visit macslist.org/book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you know someone who has the perfect job and is getting well paid, too? It might seem that this happened by stroke of luck. In fact, it has nothing do with chance. People with dream jobs have clear goals and plans to accomplish them.  And when you find that job or career, it feels so right, it’s like you were born to do it. But to get there you must first choose among what can seem like an overwhelming menu of career options. This week on “Find Your Dream Job” we’re talking about how to find the work you were meant to do. I talk to Chris Guillebeau, author of the new book, “Born for This: How to Find the Work You Were Meant to Do.” In this 35-minute episode you will learn: How knowing your personality traits can help you find a job that plays to your natural strengths Why it helps people think as an entrepreneur Why making mistakes and taking risks is part of a successful career What “working conditions” are and how they help you find your career path How joy, money, and flow matter when figuring out your career goals Why asking “Did today matter” is an important tool for evaluating your career This week’s guest: Chris Guillebeau (@ChrisGuillebeau)EntrepreneurPortland, Ore.  Listener question of the week:  My ultimate career goal is to own my own business. I’m not ready to make the jump now, so I’ve been interviewing for positions at established firms. Should I share this goal with prospective employers? Will it make me look like I’m not dedicated to the job? If you have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode, please contact Jenna Forstrom, Mac’s List Community Manager at jenna@macslist.org. Resources from this week’s show: Ep. 007: Getting Clear about What you Want from Work Free Myers Briggs Personality Test – 16Personalities Chris Guillebeau’s Book Tour “Born for This: How to Find the Work You Were Meant to Do” Chris Guillebeau’s World Domination Summit Chris Guillebeau’s blog “The Art of Non-Conformity” Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond) If you have a job-hunting or career development resource resource you’d like to share, please contact Ben Forstag, Mac’s List Managing Director at ben@macslist.org. — Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support! Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com.    Full Transcript Mac Prichard: This is Find Your Dream Job. A podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life. I’m Mac Prichard, your host, and publisher of Mac’s List. Do you know someone who has the perfect job and is getting well paid too? It might seem that this happened by a stroke of luck. In fact, it has nothing to do with chance. People with dream jobs have clear goals and plans to accomplish them. When you find that job or career, it feels so right it’s like you were born to do it. To get there, you must first choose among what can seem like an overwhelming menu of career options. This week on Find Your Dream Job, we’re talking about how to find the work you were meant to do. Ben Forstag has a free online test that can help you get clearer about your goals and your strengths. Jenna Forstrom has a question from a listener who wants to start a business one day but wonders how candid she should be with employers about this. I talk to Christ Guillebeau, author of the new book Born For This: How to Find the Work You Were Meant to Do. Our show is brought to you by our book, Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond. To learn more about the updated edition that we published on February 1st, go to macslist.org/book. We’re excited to have Jenna Forstrom, our new Community Manager, join us here in the Mac’s List studio. Jenna, welcome aboard. Jenna Forstrom: Thanks. I’m excited to be here. Mac Prichard: Yeah, it’s terrific to have you not only on the podcast, but I know listeners who go to the website will be seeing on the blog and people here in Oregon will be seeing you at community events. I got to ask Jenna, because I know our listeners are curious, why did you want to work at Mac’s List? Jenna Forstrom: I started to want to work at Mac’s List a couple years ago when I was looking for a job and my friends recommended it as a resource. I’ve been using it for the last couple years doing freelance work and apply for jobs and it’s just a really great website and resource. I think that it’s amazing because of the people behind it that put in all the love and passion. When you and me were speaking about the opportunity, it just seemed like a natural place for me to show up and I want to help make it great too. Mac Prichard: It’s a pleasure to have you here. You bring to the job so many great skills and experiences but I think you really put your finger on it. It’s the fact that you’re part of the Mac’s List community that I think is a very special asset. Welcome to the studio and welcome to the show, and we look forward to working with you in the months ahead. I also want to say thank you to the four career experts who filled in as our special co-host during the last two months. Those people are Aubrie DeClerk, Dawn Rasmussen, Jenny Voss, and Michelle Hynes. All four are nationally recognized experts and they are very busy people. I’m grateful to each of them for making the time to join us on one or more of the last seven episodes to answer questions from you, our listeners. If you haven’t done so, please check out the websites of these exceptional people. We’ll be sure to include links to their pages in the show notes. Ben Forstag: Hey Mac, Ben here. Mac Prichard: Hey Ben, how are you? Ben Forstag: I’m doing great. One of our most popular episodes on the podcast was Aubrie DeClerk on how listeners can get clear about what they want from work. You know Aubrie has been a frequent guest on the podcast and she was also a contributor to our book. Mac Prichard: Yes, she was. Her podcast actually is our second most popular episode. The topic, you may recall Ben, was how to get clear about what you want. This is a topic that comes up a lot when we talk to listeners. People who do dive into our book will find a couple of key topics that can help. There is information about how you can do the analytical work you need to do to be clear about goal setting. Tools like strength finders and what color’s your parachute. There are also, in the book, tips about how to get to know yourself and your strengths and your challenges. Tips about why you need to pay attention to your emotions and how to build a community. These are all things that can again help you get clear about what you want to do with your career. Jenna, Ben, when in your careers have you two felt like you were doing something that you were born to do? Ben Forstag: I think like a lot of people, there are days or periods in any job I’ve had where I felt like this is perfect. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m on top of this. I feel in control. The one experience where I felt like that was kind of always the case was way back in the beginning of my career when I worked as an outdoor education facilitator for a YMCA camp. I put so much energy in respecting the traditions of that summer camp. It just felt like a very special place to be and I was really invested in the job. Mac Prichard: I’ve had that experience a number of times. I’m actually having it right now running both Mac’s List and Prichard Communications. Throughout my career, I’ve really felt like I was doing my best work when the things that are expert. This week we’ll talk about joy, work, and flow all lined up. In other words, there were jobs I had where it was just a pleasure to go to work. I had the skills and the experiences that allowed me to thrive in that position and I just was experienced in what the psychologist called flow. That state of mind where you lose yourself in the task that you’re involved in. For me, in addition to the work I’m doing now, it’s happened on political campaigns, it happened when I was working for a human rights organization early in my career. It’s a very pleasant state to be in. How about you Jenna? Jenna Forstrom: When a job feels like it was a great fit and you were born for it, it’s when it plays to your strengths. For me, that comes into play because I feel like my strengths are being on the fly and being creative under pressure. When I volunteer at Night Strike and we have bumps in the road, we can’t find the keys to the trailer, that’s where it’s like I kind of step up and get animated and I’m like, okay we’re going to problem solve this. You guys go find the peanut butter and jelly and we’ll just focus on that while the leadership figures out the solution. How do we get keys or how do we break the lock to get into the trailer. Small problems that come up and hiccups is when I feel like that’s my strength. I think I learned that when I was a lifeguard when I was like 15. You’re managing a pool and something happens, you have to direct people to different locations to take care of an incident. Mac Prichard: Jenna, do you want to talk a little bit about Night Strike and your work there? Jenna Forstrom: Sure, on top of being a community manager here at Mac’s List, I volunteer every Thursday night with a program called Night Strike. Which is an urban humanitarian group here in Portland, for those of you who don’t know but hopefully you are interested in moving to Portland or you live here. We have a huge homeless crisis so we do immediate felt needs. Mac Prichard: Thanks for sharing that. Jenna Forstrom: Yeah. Mac Prichard: Let’s move onto Ben who every week brings us a resource that you all can use. Ben, I know you’ve been looking diligently around the internet for the last seven days. What have you found? Ben Forstag: In the past, we’ve talked about different ways to help people get clear about what they want. You mentioned Aubrie’s episode earlier, and I believe in that episode, my resource was the strengths finder test. Which is a book you can buy. One of the other well-known tests out there to help you find out what your natural strengths are or what your personality type is, is the Myers Briggs Personality Test, also called the Myers Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI. My resource this week is actually a free version of this test that you can do online and it’s available at www.16personalities.com and that’s 16 with one-six, not written out like a word. The name of this site actually comes from the MBTI itself, which speculates that there are 16 basic personality types out there. The science behind the MBTI is actually pretty old. It originally comes from the work of Karl Jung who is a psychoanalyst back at the turn of the century. It stipulates basically that there are four general preferences that determine your personality type. Those are mind, how you interact with your environment. That’s whether you’re an introvert or extrovert. Energy, which is where you direct you mental energy. That basically is are you guided by intuition or observation. Nature, how you make decisions and cope with emotions. In layman’s terms that’s are you a thinking person or are you a feeling person? Then tactics, how you approach work, planning, and decision making. Are you a prospector or a judger? This test is about 30 different questions and it presents a bunch of questions and you answer across a continuum of strongly agree to strongly disagree about whether the question pertains to you. It’s a lot of interesting questions. Questions that you might not ask yourself on a regular basis. I wrote down a few of the ones that I really like such as, for you is being right more important than being cooperative when it comes to teamwork? Or, do your dreams tend to focus on real world and its events? Or, as a parent would you rather see your child grow up kind or grow up smart? You have to pick one or the other here on a spectrum. I took the test. It takes about twelve minutes. The result I got was that I am an INFP, which means I’m an introverted intuition feeling perceiving person. What the MBTI says is a mediator. I’ll be honest, this doesn’t feel like me. I don’t think that I’m introverted, or a super feeling person. What do you think, Mac? Mac Prichard: That sounds right to me. Ben, I know we’ve only worked together for seven months now but I see you, as somebody who smooth’s the waters. Ben Forstag: Okay, far be it from me to question an online personality test. Mac Prichard: Yeah. Jenna Forstrom: I took the test as well and got ENFP which is extroverted intuition feeling and then perceiving. I think that was a pretty good summary of me because I’m extremely outgoing. Ben Forstag: Yeah, I think the extroverted piece really speaks to you. Jenna Forstrom: I think it does great for our roles because we balance each other out. Ben Forstag: Yeah, and I think that brings up an interesting point here. There’s no normative stance on whether a personality type is good or bad. I think most people who look at these things would say for any organization, you need people who compliment one another. Right? Jenna Forstrom: Yeah. Ben Forstag: My introverted nature compliments your extroverted nature and vice versa. I think what this test really gets at is there are going to be certain types of roles or responsibilities or jobs that your personality type is going to fit into. You might do better at an organization that’s more hierarchical or one that has less organization around it. You want to find a job that fits that type of personality. The one real cool thing about this site is not only is it free but it produces a really comprehensive write up about each personality type and how that personality type might impact your life from relationships to parenthood to your career. It provides situations and strategies for specific roles that fit your personality type. Definitely worth taking a look at. Probably spend an hour doing this, or you can spend just twelve minutes and get the baseline information. Real good site, real great resource. The website is www.16personalities.com. That’s 1-6 personalities dot com. Mac Prichard: Thank you, Ben. If you have an idea for Ben, we’d love to hear from you. You can email him. His address is ben@macslist.org. Now it’s time to hear from you, our listeners. Our community manager Jenna Forstrom joins us to answer one of your questions. Jenna, what do you hear from the community this week? Jenna Forstrom: This week our question is, “My ultimate career goal is to own my own business. I’m not ready to make that jump now so I’ve been interview positions at established firms. Should I share this goal with perspective employers or will this make me look like I’m not dedicated to the job?” I think that’s a great question. I think it also depends a lot on what kind of work you’re looking for. We know that the typical job length is four and half years for any person. Companies know when they hire people that they’re probably not going to stay forever. Also, they want to hire people that will last a little while. Like a year or two. If you’re looking to start a job within the next six months to a year and you just want a job to pay your bills, pay rent, maybe not share that information. I think if you’re looking to really gain a lot of information and grow into an organization, then maybe take that as a springboard platform, sharing that with hiring manager. Or maybe once you’ve gotten the role, find a mentor who’s maybe doing something on the side or something similar. I think that’s super acceptable. Ben Forstag: Most organizations I think when they make a hire know that they’re not hiring you for life and that you have bigger aspirations at some point. I think it’s fair to say, well like down the road in five years I was thinking maybe I’d like to start my own business, to an employer. I think that actually could speak well to you as a candidate, saying that you have an entrepreneurial attitude, that you can take calculated risks, that you want to take responsibility on for things. I think it’s all about timing. Are you looking to cover rent for the next year or are you going into this opportunity at hand with really an intent to see through your commitments and honor those commitments and your bigger picture of creating your own business is down the road some place? Mac Prichard: Good advice. Thank you Jenna and if you have a question for Jenna, you can email her. Her address is jenna@macslist.org. These segments are sponsored by the 2016 edition of Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond. We made our book even better. We added new content and now we’re offering it in the format you told us you wanted. For the first time ever, you can find our book in a paperback edition or download it on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. Our goal is the same, whatever the format. To give you the tools and tips you need to get meaningful work that makes a difference. For more information visit macslist.org/book. Now let’s turn to this week’s guest expert, Chris Guillebeau. Chris Guillebeau is the New York Times best selling author of the Happiness of Pursuit. The $100 start up in other books. During a lifetime of self-employment, he visited every country in the world. 193 in total before his 35th birthday. Every summer in Portland, Oregon he hosts the world domination summit, a gathering of creative remarkable people. Chris, thanks for joining us. Chris Guillebeau: Hey Mac. Thanks so much for having me. Mac Prichard: Yeah, it’s a real pleasure. Chris, you’ve written a book about start ups. You put together an annual event called the world domination summit. I’ve attended and people come out of that event inspired. Many of them to quit their jobs and work for themselves. Now you’ve written a book about job hunting and careers. Tell us about that. Why this topic? Chris Guillebeau: The goal of the book is essentially to help people think entrepreneurially, whether they want to be entrepreneurs or not. Obviously, from my background I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I was a terrible employee. My bias is to help people essentially forge their own destiny, forge their own path. Maybe I’ve learned a little bit along the way that a lot of people can find the work they were meant to do, their dream job in a company or an organization. For example, I talked to a lot of people for this book like I do for all my books and one person in particular … I talked to a woman who 20 years ago became the first female fire fighter in Mississauga, Ontario. I told the story of all the challenges she had to overcome and she’s actually been in that job for more than 20 years now. She believes it’s the work she was meant to do. This is a good example of someone who if you want to be a fire fighter, which is a very noble profession. Saves lives. Does lots of good work. You can’t just be an entrepreneurial fire fighter. You have to go through the structure. You have to be a part of a team. I’m looking at people, helping people find the work they were meant to do, and whatever capacity that is. It may even change over time. It maybe you’re working for yourself. You’re working in a company. You’re doing a little bit of both. It’s all that. Mac Prichard: Now with reading the book, one of the points you made that struck me early on was that we’re all asked what we do for a living. You say the better question we should ask someone is what lead you to do what you do? Why do you think that’s the better question, Chris? Chris Guillebeau: I look at a lot of people who have been successful and they talk about this dream job concept, which I know you’ve done a lot of work with as well. They use phrases like I’ve won the career lottery. I love my job. I would go to work even if I didn’t get paid for it, but fortunately I do get paid for it. What I saw in tracing back their history is most successful people, and again success can be however you define it, but most successful people in careers actually haven’t followed a very linear path. They actually didn’t know necessarily when they were six years old this is what they want to do with their life. They’re going to go to college along this trajectory. Then their first job and their second job is all leading to something. They’ve actually gone down a bunch of different paths. They’ve usually even made some mistakes. They’ve made mistakes because they were willing to take risks and some things don’t work out so they go back and they turn around and eventually they find this thing. The reason I look at the whole process is because it’s not as simple as just saying okay here’s what I want to do. I know what that is. Now I’m going to make that happen. I think there’s always a process of discovery. There’s always this process of exploration along the way. Mac Prichard: I think that’s an important point to make because so many people that I chat with and my colleagues as well about careers, they think that if they try something and it’s not quite what they expected that that was a failure or a dead end. The point you’re making is that, it’s an experience you can learn from and it helps you get closer to where you want to be. Let’s talk about career success. In your book you say that we’re taught these conventions, you actually call them scripts, about what conventional career success looks like. These scripts are just plain wrong. What are these myths, Chris, and why should people ignore them? Chris Guillebeau: I looked at a lot of wisdom that’s traditionally accepted and handed down. You might have touched on something just a moment ago, when you said lots of people who are successful have actually turned back and been willing to do like a 180 and try something different. This is contrary to the traditional Western manifest destiny, never give up, perseverance is the most important quality. A lot of successful people actually are willing to give up. They’re willing to give up, not on their dreams, not on their life vision, but on any particular strategy or expression or job or attempt at starting a business. I talked to this one guy for example who had started eight successful businesses in his life. I asked him … it said eight successful business in his bio, so I said, were there any other businesses? It turned out he had a ninth business, which was actually the very first one. The first one was apparently unsuccessful. He had tried it for three years and it just wasn’t working. If you had gone to that guy in the beginning of his entrepreneurial career and said never give up. Keep going. You must make this a success. That would have been the wrong advice for him. The best advice was to give up, turn around, and start over. All these other things came later. I looked at that. I looked at a lot of different things and tried to test them in a real world model to say okay this is like the so-called wisdom of the ages, but does it actually work? How does that actually apply and what can we do to increase the odds in our favor? Mac Prichard: One of your points in the book is that there is one script that we should consider following. There’s more than one way to work. You don’t have to [niche 00:19:55] down or be a CEO or you only have one chance at a job for example. If you say no to this opportunity you’ll never have as good one again. Talk to us, Chris, about that script that you encourage people to follow. That there’s more than one way to work. Chris Guillebeau: I think we put so much pressure on people. Especially young people, but even people of all ages. We have so much pressure that you’re supposed to know what your life purpose is at age 20, or when you choose what to study, or when you go into your first job, or even later. It’s like you’re supposed to have this crystal ball. You have to make all these decisions with limited information. One of the things I saw was when people think about work, when they think about making a change or a career, they always think in terms of profession. They think about being a web developer or a doctor or a designer or whatever it is. What I saw was actually just as important as the work itself was what I called working conditions. Working conditions are things like how you like to spend your time. How much you like to work with other people versus work on your own. How you’re incentivized. How you’re motivated. How you like to be rewarded. You can start to understand this about yourself. You can actually make decisions a lot better. You may not have all the information but we’ll help you as you go forward. There’s more than one path. There may be one thing that you’re born to do but I think there’s more than one way to get there. Mac Prichard: Three things that you identified that you say we all want in our work are joy, money, and flow. Tell us about each of those and why they matter in not only picking your next job but in finding that work overall in a career that we feel like we’re born to do. Chris Guillebeau: I saw that, regardless of what profession people went into and regardless of what working conditions were most optimal for them, most people are happiest when they can create this intersection or convergence between these three qualities that you just named. The first two are pretty self-explanatory. Joy essentially is happiness. It’s something that you take joy in doing. You like your work. I think that’s an important goal. Money also self-explanatory. I’m not talking to people about a hobby. I’m talking to them about their career and your career has to be financially viable. Your work has to be something that you love to do, or at least it should be, that’s the goal. It should be sustainable. It should be viable. Then the third quality was something that I had to learn a little bit more about myself and that’s this quality of flow, which I essentially think of as using your unique skills. Doing something that you’re really good at. It may be something that comes naturally to you but it’s actually really challenging for other people. It’s the kind of work where you can get lost in it. You can have hours go by and you don’t realize because you’re so emerged in this particular work. When you find all three of these qualities … Of course it’s a journey. It’s a process. I think that is the goal. I think that is what we’re essentially working toward in finding the work that we were born to do. Of course, at different times in our life we have to make compromises. We might have to settle in some way. When I was 16, I delivered pizza. That was fine. It was a job. I don’t think it was the work I was born to do. It was something that I did at the time to accomplish a goal and we have to do that at different times in life. If we’re working towards something that if we are interested in self-development, if we do want to advance not just our career but our life, we’re going to make decisions with that model in mind of joy, money, and flow. Mac Prichard: Let’s talk about career development. You identify sub-skills that whatever occupation someone wants to pursue, we all need to have to get the work we want. What are those skills, Chris, and why do they matter? Chris Guillebeau: When people think about skills, most of the time they think about what I call hard skills. Hard skills are technical skills. They’re the skills that you learned in your specific training in your job or your degree. If you’re an engineer, it’s those engineering skills or those programming languages or whatever that is. What I saw was that in career advancement, whether you’re trying to get promoted, whether you’re trying to find your dream job, create your dream job in an organization, or go out on your own, what I call soft skills are actually just as important if not more important. Soft skills are basically areas related to communication essentially. Communication. Being able to facilitate a conversation or a meeting well. Follow up and follow through. Being that person in the room or in the meeting where there’s lots of good ideas being discussed but sometimes you can discuss good ideas and nothing happens … If you become that person who makes things happen and everyone starts to look to you and everyone’s like oh Mac should do this because he’s going to follow up on it. That’s a very very valuable skill regardless of your profession. This is not something that’s really taught. You don’t really take a class on this in college. It’s something that’s very valuable and I think it’s something that anyone can learn to improve and it’ll help them regardless of their specific career. Mac Prichard: Our listeners and I imagine a lot of your readers struggle with getting clear about what they’re good at. What they offer an employer. How do you recommend people do that? Chris Guillebeau: Very good, it’s always a process. The example we just gave a moment ago. We were talking about you’re working in a group and sometimes the members of the group, sometimes other people around you are actually better at identifying your strength or your skills than you are yourself. If you’re ever in one of these situations where tasks are being divvied up and everyone looks to you and says oh so-and-so should do this task. It’s almost like the group is affirming this skill. They’re recognizing it for you. That’s one way. Another way is simply just trial and error and experimentation. We put a lot of pressure on people to know at a young age, this is what I want to do. This is how I’m going to develop myself and advance myself. Very often the initial decisions that we make are incorrect because we don’t have all the information. Again, a key point is if it’s not working, try something else. Over time you are going to figure out, okay this is actually what I enjoy. You can ask yourself at the end of the day, looking back okay what did I do today that gave me energy? What did I do that drained my energy? Just focusing on that day-to-day. How can I do more of those things that I actually enjoy? The things that we enjoy tend to be the things that we’re also good at. Mac Prichard: Many people are reluctant to chase a dream job or career because of risk. What are your suggestions, Chris, about how people can manage career risk? Chris Guillebeau: Risk is a big thing. What do we mean by risk? I feel like risk is a topic like fear. People are like how do you overcome your fear? What sort of fear are we talking about? How does it affect our lives? What are the strategies that we can navigate to help us with that? I think maybe the first thing is a question of defining risk and saying if I’m thinking of making a career change, is this really risky? Maybe it’s actually more risky for me to remain in my current position because the current position isn’t good for me. Even if it’s good for me, I need to somehow create more opportunities for myself because in this day and age I have to create my own security. I wrote about this concept of being a self-employed employee where essentially you’re working in a job but the way you view it is I’m leasing out my talents to this company or organization. I’m going to do a great job for them, of course. I’m also going to continue to develop myself. I’m going to improve myself. That will allow me to go somewhere else or to be more valuable in my current position. When I think of risk, that’s the very first thing I think of. Let’s count the cost. Let’s see what really is risky. Then maybe also as you make changes, your confidence tends to increase. I think this is true with any goal in life. It’s not just a career thing. I had this project of going to every country in the world. I didn’t have that project when I hadn’t traveled anywhere. I went to maybe 30 different countries. I lived in Africa for a while and then I started thinking what could I do with this? Then I had a goal of going to 100 countries. As I got closer to that, I was like let’s raise the stakes. Let’s go to every country in the world. As you get better in making these kinds of decisions and taking what you might call risks, then I think you become much more comfortable in taking more of them and raising the stakes even further. Mac Prichard: We’re kind of the close the interview. Chris, what else would you like to add for the listeners? Chris Guillebeau: We talked about joy, money, flow. I just gave that example of at the end of the day maybe ask yourself where did I get energy? Where is my energy drained? This isn’t meant to be like a woo-woo thing. This is meant to be very practical. This is meant to give you data that you can then base decisions on in the future. Here’s a really simple thing that you can also do. At the end of the day, you get out a little notebook and you answer this question: did today matter? You know the answer to that question. If you think back, you’re going to be able to say okay I actually … Yeah, today was good. I made some progress toward a goal or an objective that I believe in. I invested in the relationships that I value. Whatever those matrix or those goals are. Or you’ll be able to say, actually today wasn’t that great because I got stuck in something. I got sucked in. I spent my whole day responding to things instead of creating things. I want to do a better job. The whole goal is essentially in life, let’s get closer to more and more days that matter. If we have days that aren’t mattering, that we look back and say that wasn’t good, what can we change? Small and big ways. Mac Prichard: Well, terrific. Tell us, Chris, what’s coming up next for you? Obviously, you have the book and I believe you’re starting … Tell us about the launch date and your book tour. Chris Guillebeau: I’m really excited about the tour. The book comes out April 5th. You may be listening to this later, in which case the book is out. I’m doing a 30 city tour across North America. People can find out about that at bornforthisbook.com. Of course, we’ve got world domination summit coming up in the summer but at the moment it’s all book all the time. Mac Prichard: Terrific. To learn more about Chris, visit his Twitter account and his blog as well as the website about his book. We’ll be sure to include links to all of those sites in the show notes. Chris, thanks for joining us. Chris Guillebeau: Awesome, thank you so much Mac. Mac Prichard: We’re back with Ben and Jenna. What do you two think? What were some of the most important points you heard Chris make? Jenna Forstrom: The biggest take away for me is that successful people don’t have linear paths. It’s just a good reminder for people who are thinking about changing their career or are unhappy in their current career and think they are locked into this path in this American dream and how really big successful people all over the world have done 180s in pivots and made really awesome successful life stories out of that. To think about that and meditate on it and make your own changes. Ben Forstag: As Chris pointed out, that runs so counter to this narrative that exists out there. Think of all the kids in college who, you have to go study X so that you can get out of college and get job Y and then you can progress up the ladder to point Z at the end. It really doesn’t work that way. I think about all the stress I put on myself or that all the young people put on themselves to figure out what they want at the age of 18 or at the age of 16 when you first meet with that college counselor who is trying to get you into the right school. It’s a little bit crazy because people’s careers don’t play out in that linear way. The point I liked was near the end. That very simple question of did today matter? There are days with any job, even with this job Mac where some days I walk out of the office and I don’t feel good about things. The day didn’t matter and I wasn’t happy. It’s sometimes things that I had control over. Some things I didn’t. The goal is to get more aware of the things that you can control and try doing things that do make you feel like today mattered. Fortunately, I think at this job, most days do feel like that. Mac Prichard: Well, good. Ben Forstag: That’s good. I think that’s just like an easy check to ask yourself every day to make sure whether you’re on the right path or not. Mac Prichard: I agree with both of you. Something that stood out for me was acknowledging that you can learn from failure. For me, I think I’ve talked about this before. I’ve worked on … I’ve lost count of how many losing political campaigns over the years but from each of them I’d learned something and I got something from the experience. I benefited from it and so did my employers down the line. Thank you both and thank you, our listeners. If you like what you hear on the show, you can help us by leaving a review and rating at iTunes. This helps others discover the show and helps us serve you all better. We’re also celebrating a big milestone this week. Over the weekend, we reached 50,000 downloads since we launched the show on October 17th. That’s more than 10,000 downloads a month. We continue to rank in the top 40 in the iTunes career chart. Thank you all, our listeners, and thank you for letting your friends and colleagues know about the show. We know we’ve grown largely by word of mouth. I also want to share a review we’ve received on iTunes. It’s from Nathan Cole Howard who writes, “Find Your Dream Job is the go-to podcast for millennials in search of their first job or their next job. I’ve recommended it to entire departments at colleges in Oregon and to at least a dozen friends. Definitely subscribe if you’re on the look.” Thank you Nathan, and thanks to the scores of other listeners who’ve left a review. Take a moment and leave your own comments and rating. Just go to www.macslist.org/itunes. Thanks for listening and we’ll be back next Wednesday with more tools and tips you can use to find your dream job. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

College graduation season is just around the corner and departing seniors will find themselves in a strong job market. According to the Wall Street Journal, the class of 2016 may experience the best job market ever for Millennials. A survey cited by the Journal says that this year employers plan to increase hiring of new college graduates by 15%.  That’s good news for this year’s new graduates. But no matter how low the unemployment rate, you still have to interview successfully to get the job... This week on “Find Your Dream Job” we’re talking about what recent college graduates need to know to nail their job interviews. Mac talks to Don Raskin who has written a book aimed at new and recent graduates that shares interview secrets and other tips you can use in a job search no matter where you are in your career. In this 35-minute episode you will learn: Why knowing your key facts (including salary requirements) is key in interviewing How to position yourself in an interview and why you are the best candidate Why knowing your objectives and sticking to them helps focus your job search How to use LinkedIn as part of your pre- and post-interview process How to follow-up after an interview This week’s guest: Don RaskinSenior Partner, MMEAuthor, The Dirty Little Secrets of Getting Your Dream JobNew York, NY Listener question of the week: I graduated college in a couple of months, but have done almost nothing to prepare for what comes next. I’m feeling overwhelmed and don’t even know where to start a job search. What is the one thing I should focus on first? If you have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode, please contact Jenna Forstrom, Mac’s List Community Manager at jenna@macslist.org. Resources from this week’s show: JobScan.co MichelleHynes.com The Dirty Little Secrets of Getting Your Dream Job MME.net Find Your Dream Job, Ep. 024: How to Return to Work at Any Age Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond) If you have a job-hunting or career development resource you’d like to share, please contact Ben Forstag, Mac’s List Managing Director at ben@macslist.org. Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support! Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Image is an important part of a job search--and career management, in general. You always want to present yourself as a competent, talented and, enthusiastic professional. But it's also important that your brand reflects who you are. Ultimately, authenticity matters more than professionalism. Your brand, no matter how polished and practiced, is worthless if it doesn't reflect your genuine personality. On this bonus episode of Find Your Dream Job, Portland-based marketing professional, Brittany Bennet, shares her experience learning the importance of authenticity. She reads "Get Ahead in Portland by Being Unprofessional", her contribution to our book, Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond). While Brittany's comments are specifically about her experience in Portland's casual professional culture, her lesson about being authentic will resonate no matter where you are. Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support! Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is illegal for an employer to discriminate based on age, but many job seekers over the age of 50 will tell you it happens every day. Older workers stay out of work longer and may earn less than in previous jobs when they do return to the workforce. According to AARP the average period of unemployment for people 55 years and older is 54.3 weeks, almost twice as long as the 28.2 weeks younger workers spend job hunting. This week on Find Your Dream Job, we explore the challenges of job hunting when you're 50+. Mac talks with Kerry Hannon, a career and personal finance expert who has written extensively on the subject. Kerry shares practical, actionable tips older jobseekers can use to overcome age bias and find a job they love. In this 34-minute episode you will learn: The reasons employers are hesitant to hire older workers How to overcome age stereotypes when you're looking for a job Simple ways to prove your technology savvy to prospective employers. The importance of networking and volunteering for older job hunters Why an accountability buddy (or support group) can help you maintain optimism while job hunting. This week’s guest: Kerry Hannon (@KerryHannon | LinkedIn)Personal Finance Expert and AuthorWashington, D.C. Listener question of the week:  My current employer assigns “homework” to job applications that make the shortlist. This is a small task that reflects the kind of work they would do on the job. Do many organizations do this? Is it a growing trend? Answering our question this week is our guest co-host, Michelle Hynes of MichelleHynes.com. If you have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode, please contact Jenna Forstrom, Mac’s List Community Manager, at jenna@macslist.org. Resources from this week’s show: iRelaunch.com KerryHannon.com Great Jobs for Everyone 50+: Finding Work That Keeps You Happy and Healthy... and Pays the Bills Getting the Job You Want After 50 For Dummies,Love Your Job: The New Rules for Career Happiness What's Next?: Finding Your Passion and Your Dream Job Michelle Hynes | Michelle Hynes.com Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond) If you have a job-hunting or career development resource you’d like to share, please contact Ben Forstag, Mac’s List Managing Director, at ben@macslist.org. Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support! Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live and work in a foreign country? More people than ever are living and working outside the country where they were born. According to the United Nations, the number of international migrants now stands at a record 232 million people. That’s a significant increase since 1990. For many of these people the move to a new country is permanent; for others, it may be a temporary stay for a year or two. This week on Find Your Dream Job, we talk about how to find work outside the United States. Our guest is Marcelle Yeager a career coach and recruiter with deep experience in international employment. Marcelle shares tips for how to find and land work opportunities throughout the world. In this 35-minute episode you will learn: First steps in looking for a job overseas. Networking tips for overseas opportunities. Cultural challenges you may face when working abroad. The most high-demand jobs for American expats. This week’s guest: Marcelle Yeager (@careervalet | LinkedIn) President, CareerValet Washington, D.C. Listener question of the week:  I want to move across country, but I can’t afford to relocate without first having a job lined up. Do you have any advice on how to “woo” employers from 2,000 miles away? Answering our question this week is our guest co-host, Jenny Foss of jobjenny.com. If you have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode, please contact Jenna Forstrom, Mac’s List Community Manager at jenna@macslist.org. Resources from this week’s show: Find Your Dream Job Podcast: Remote Work, Telecommuting, and Digital Nomads Nomadic Matt's "Working Overseas" JobJenny.com RileyGuide.com InternWeb.com IHIPO.com CareerValet.com Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond) If you have a job-hunting or career development resource resource you’d like to share, please contact Ben Forstag, Mac’s List Managing Director at ben@macslist.org. — Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support! Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In all likelihood you've had at least one negative experience with a past employer or supervisor. Many of us have. Whatever the cause, these experiences can have a lasting impact on your career in the form of a bad professional reference. Any prospective employer will want to talk to your past supervisors. So how do you overcome a potentially negative reference when you're on a job hunt? On this 6-minute bonus episode of Find Your Dream Job, Vicki Lind, career coach and principal of Vicki Lind and Associates, shares a comprehensive strategy for how to minimize the impact of negative feedback from a past employer. She reads "How to Deal With A Bad Reference", her contribution to our book, Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond). Do you need more practical and proven job search tips to find a job you love? Check out Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond). The updated Mac's List guide teaches you everything you need to get where you want to be in your career.    Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

LinkedIn is a vital part of any serious job search or recruitment. Smart job hunters use LinkedIn to tell a compelling professional story, document accomplishments, and show what they can do for others. A vast majority (94-97%) of recruiters and employers use the platform to find candidates who have the right skills, experience, and connections. This week on “Find Your Dream Job,” we talk with Arnie Fertig, a career coach and LinkedIn expert, on how to use this platform to find a job. Arnie knows what recruiters on LinkedIn are looking for. He shares practical tips for building a compelling, eye-catching profile, as well as strategies for building rewarding professional relationships on LinkedIn. In this 35-minute episode you will learn: Tools for making your LinkedIn profile look polished and professional How recruiters use LinkedIn and what they’re looking for in your profile Strategies for attracting recruiters and potential employers with your profile Why you need to be speaking in the first person (using “I”, “me”, and “my” on LinkedIn) What NOT to include in your LinkedIn profile This week’s guest: Arnie Fertig  (@jobhuntercoach | LinkedIn)Principal, JobHunterCoach.comBoston, Mass. Listener question of the week: What should my LinkedIn title be if I’m currently unemployed? Answering our question this week is Dawn Rasmussen, Chief Resume Writer at Portland-based Pathfinder Writing and Career Services. If you have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode, please contact us at communitymanager@macslist.org. Resources from this week’s show: JobHunterCoach.com Find Your Dream Job Ep. 017 - The Social Media Job Hunt World Bad LinkedIn Photo Day | Mathys+Potestio 7 Tips to Make Sure Your LinkedIn Picture Is Helping, Not Hurting, Your Prospects | Entrepreneur.com The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Image Sizes | Social Media Examiner Pathfinder Writing and Career Services Your Career Begins With What You Wear | LinkedIn Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond) If you have a job-hunting or career development resource resource you’d like to share, please contact Ben Forstag, Mac’s List Managing Director at ben@macslist.org. -- Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support! Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com. -- FULL TRANSCRIPT Mac Prichard: This is find your dream job a podcast that helps you get hired and have the career you want and make a difference in life. I am Mac Prichard your host and publisher of Mac’s List. Our show is brought to you by Mac’s List and by our book Land your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond. To learn more about the book and the updated edition that we published on February 1, visit macslist.org/book. Ben Forstag: Hey Mac been here I have a question for you. Mac Prichard: Fire away Ben. Ben Forstag: We have an audience for a podcast that goes across the country and indeed around the world. Mac Prichard: I understand we are huge in China. Ben Forstag: We are big in China and we even have some listeners in Iran and I’m going to put out my call again if you’re listening to us in Iran please send me an e-mail I would like to hear your story. The reason I bring this up if I’ve gotten e-mails from several of our listeners asking whether our book is only appropriate for people looking for a job in Portland. Mac Prichard: That’s a great question we are Portland is our home town and we are very proud of it. Much of the information in the book is aimed at Portlanders it reflects our strength. You’ll find that if you do read the book that it’s valuable to anybody looking for work. There are eight chapters and they take you through what you need to do in any job search whether you’re in New York, Austin, Portland or even Tehran. The questions that you will find that we answer in the book include how do I find a well-paying engaging job. What can I do to stand out from other applicants. How do I learn about jobs that are never publicly posted. What do I need to do to get started in a new field. These are common problems for all job seekers and the advice you will find in our book will help you no matter where you live. LinkedIn is a vital part of any serious job search or recruitment. Smart job hunters use LinkedIn to tell a compelling professional story, document accomplishments and show what they can do for others. Recruiters use LinkedIn to find people who have the skills, experience and connections that employers want. In a recent show episode number 17 with Joshua Waltman who is the author of Job Search and Social Media for Dummies. We touched on the importance of a LinkedIn account and the basic elements your page must have. Now that you’ve taken that first step it’s time to do more. After all of as of last year there was almost 400 million LinkedIn members. What will you do to stand out in such a crowded field? This week on find your dream job we will tell you how to make your LinkedIn profile irresistible especially to recruiters. I speak to our guest expert Arnie Fertig former headhunter who has helped hundreds of people create great LinkedIn profiles. Ben Forstag has seven practical steps you can take now to shine on LinkedIn and our guest co-host Dawn Rasmussen will answer a question from a listener. Joining us again this week is our guest co-host Dawn Rasmussen a pathfinder career and writing services. Dawn thanks for coming into the studio. Dawn Rasmussen: Thanks for having me, it’s good to be here. Mac Prichard: It’s great to see you again. Dawn, Ben when you two think about your LinkedIn profile what’s the one change that you’ve made that has produced the best result for you? Dawn Rasmussen: I would say making your profile as robust as possible. So many people they just do a very cursory just one liner about their work or whatever. You really need to go in with a fine tooth comb and add as much relative content as possible. Making sure that you keep track of those keywords because that’s how people search for you and for me, my clients find me through keywords on LinkedIn. You have to pay attention to those things. Mac Prichard: Okay good tip. Ben? Ben Forstag: For me it’s just updating my profile regularly instead of one big massive edit I try to go in there and tinker with it every couple of weeks or so. The thing that does is it puts you out there in front of your contacts, they see the changes you’re making and it is just a trigger for a conversation with contacts. I remember during my last job search I made some change on my profile and I got two or three people who reached out to me and said oh hey Ben it’s been a while since we talked tell me what’s going on what are you looking for what’s the good word. I think that’s a good habit to get into just so you’re always up there with folks. Dawn Rasmussen: I was going to say one other thing I actually publish articles too and I had one unexpectedly went viral there’s no magic formula for things going viral. It was kind of a controversial thing I said what you wear determines your career. It was talking about how people should dress for interviews and things like that. It really sparked a pretty big conversation on LinkedIn, I think I got over 117,000 views on that article. It’s just interesting because that brought a lot of people to my profile too because they were checking me out. That is a great publishing platform is to Ben’s point is to have some content that’s constantly coming out that’s refreshed about yourself too. Mac Prichard: I remember that post that you wrote Dawn and the attention you got from it, that’s a great point. It’s actually related to my tip which is there’s a status update section and even if you’re not creating original content to publish on LinkedIn you can take blog posts for example that you’ve already written for your company blog or an organization blog and write a little status update about them there and draw people to them blog. It gets to your point Ben about having a dynamic site that engages people and attracts the attention of others. Now let’s turn to Ben Forstag our managing director who is out there every week exploring the Internet and he’s looking for blogs, podcast, books all kinds of tools that you can use in your job search. Ben what do you have for his this week? Ben Forstag: This week we’re talking about LinkedIn and I want to share a couple of resources around one of the most visible aspects of your LinkedIn profile. That’s the photo you use and I know it seems a little silly to be talking about a LinkedIn photo on a podcast, but it’s amazing how many bad LinkedIn photos there are out there and what a turn off this is for prospective employers. Mac Prichard: Are you looking for nominations right now because I have one I could share? Ben Forstag: Well you know lets hear it. Mac Prichard: I got an e-mail from somebody who wanted an informational interview, good guy and I went to his LinkedIn profile and there was a photograph of him with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Dawn Rasmussen: I had an executive client who had a LinkedIn profile that had him in a water ski flotation vest with a woman’s hair cut off at the shoulder. It was pretty bad. Mac Prichard: That’s hard to top I guess if he had been wearing Speedos. Dawn Rasmussen: It was shoulders up thank goodness. Ben Forstag: I know our friends over at Mathis and Potestio which is a recruiting firm here in Portland and we actually had Steve Potestio on an earlier episode of the podcast. They had a bad LinkedIn photo contest where users could submit their own bad LinkedIn photos which is well intentioned and well hearted little contest. I’ll see if I can find the link to that and include it in the show notes. On past shows we talked about the importance of having a professional looking photo on LinkedIn. Our specific advice for those photos has been fairly high level. No spring break photos with a woman’s hair in the background. No photos of your cat etc. I thought I would get a little more into the weeds today and offer some more specific tips for taking the perfect LinkedIn profile pic. I’ll be showing two different blog posts today. The first is from the website entrepreneur.com and is entitled seven tips to make sure your LinkedIn picture is helping not hurting your prospects. These are all quick and dirty rules for having an appropriate LinkedIn photo and I will go over them real quickly. One, appear approachable, friendly, smiling and looking at the camera. Two remember this is about you don’t include other people distracting backgrounds etcetera. Three make sure your photo is up to date and they have a great quote here. “If your professional headshot isn’t old enough to buy a drink in the bar it’s time to get a new one.” Look the part, clothes and grooming matter no wrinkled shirts, shorts et cetera, this speaks to your point earlier Dawn. Five, skip the Facebook esk photos. LinkedIn and Facebook are different platforms with different audiences so you want to get a photo that’s appropriate for the LinkedIn. Six, no selfies allowed this is a big one I think especially for Millennials. Selfies tend to be lower quality and it’s clear that you’re taking a selfie of yourself and the image itself is often pretty hazy. Seven, Photoshop with caution, a little bit is great but too much is bad. Mac Prichard: It’s important to invest in your career and your job search and getting a good quality headshot from a professional photographer might set you back $50 $100. Again it will pay so many dividends down the road. Ben Forstag: Increasingly at professional conferences I noticed the organizer of the conference will bring a photographer as part of your registration you will get a headshot. If you’re at an event and that’s an option certainly take advantage of that because that’s gold for your career. The first part of the equation is taking a good photo. The second part is formatting that image so it looks great on your profile. LinkedIn recommends an optimal image dimension of 400 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall. Meeting those recommendations is important to make sure that your photos are crisp and clear. On LinkedIn you can tell when someone has uploaded a profile photo that is too small because their photo will be highly pix-elated or blurry or sometimes it appears like a little small picture with a blurrier version of a picture behind it. Here’s the rub though, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and all of these other social media platforms all have their own optimal image dimensions. They always seem to be changing those dimensions every 12 to 18 months. For the second resource I want to share today, it’s a cheat sheet for keeping up to date with those optimal image sizes. It comes from a website called Social Media Examiner and it’s titled the Ultimate Guide to Social Media Image Sizes. This is a resource I use on a regular basis when I’m posting articles for Mac’s list, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and so forth. I’m not going to delve into all of the numbers here but I definitely suggest you check it out. Let me add there is a benefit here beyond looking good in your profile photos. When you’re adapting your images to each social media platform you are so showcasing your familiarity with that service. This is a great way to show your employees that you know how social media works. That you know how to connect with different social media audiences and that you have a higher level of attention to detail, all important skills when you’re talking to a prospective employer. Mac Prichard: Thank you Ben, if you have a suggestion for Ben, he would love to hear from you. You can e-mail him his address is Ben@Macslist.org. Now it’s time to hear from you our listeners, we are going to turn to our guest co-host Dawn Rasmussen from Pathfinder Career and Writing Services. She joins us here in the studio to answer one of your questions. Dawn Rasmussen: The question from a reader reads what should my LinkedIn title be if I am currently unemployed. Hint, unemployed is not a job title it is not gold. Unfortunately a lot of people do that. Mac Prichard: The other variation I see of that is currently seeking opportunities in _________. Dawn Rasmussen: Or looking for my next opportunity that’s not helpful. Mac Prichard: Right what do you think of those? Dawn Rasmussen: That’s not helpful, that’s not specific. I always say you don’t want to draw attention to the fact that you’re unemployed. When you’re thinking about your LinkedIn title you want to think about the job title that you eventually want to have and so that’s the first thing anybody is going to see and they’re going to put you in a bucket. What bucket do you want to be put in. You don’t want to be put in the unemployment and you don’t want to be put in the looking for the next opportunity bucket. You need to be aligning yourself with your target and that will help your audience understand you. Mac Prichard: Lets just pause there for moment Dawn, why don’t you want to be in the unemployed or seeking opportunity bucket? Dawn Rasmussen: It raises a lot of questions and it brings up negative before positive in my opinion. I think you should be optimistic and looking forward instead of ruminating about what just happened and so it’s just a bad place to be in my opinion. Mac Prichard: I agree and I would also add that there’s research that shows unfairly employers tend not to hire people that have been unemployed for a long time. Dawn Rasmussen: That is true, that is true. One thing that you do you want to do along this whole process it’s a fine line but you want to come up with a headline that’s accurate and speaks to your experience but also focuses on your next opportunity that you want. For example, if you’re in the field of journalism your title should either include journalist or reporter or whatever your specialist is. To make it clear what types of jobs you are interested in or what you’ve had. That will help make you more searchable and getting back to the keyword thing you always need to have keywords in your profile. It’s important to really kind of think forward like I said not look backwards. Ben Forstag: I have a follow up question here. In previous episodes we talked about the importance of being open about your employment search and letting people know especially your own personal contacts like hey I’m out there I’m looking for a new opportunity. How do you balance your advice about not being upfront with it with earlier advice about also being open and letting people know that you’re available for new opportunities? Dawn Rasmussen: That’s a very good question Ben and my suggestion is to take your summary section use that as a way to talk about your forward thinking and what you bring to the table. Then towards the end of your summary section say if you could benefit from someone who has this type of expertise contact me. Ben Forstag: That’s great. Mac Prichard: Thank you Dawn. If you have a question for us please e-mailcommunitymanager@MacsList.org. These segments are sponsored by the 2016 edition of Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond. We’ve made our book even better we added new contact and we’re offering it in the formats that you want. For the first time ever you can read Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond as a paperback book or you can download on to your Kindle, Nook or your iPad. Whatever the format our goal is the same we want to give you the tools and tips that you need to get meaningful work that makes a difference. For more information visit macslist.org/book and sign up for our special newsletter. You will get updates about the book not available elsewhere as well as exclusive content and special discounts. Now lets turn to this week’s guest expert Arnie Fertig. Arnie Fertig is the founder of JobHuntercoach.com. where he helps people master the nuts and bolts of job hunting to find their personal brand and shorten the time until they are hired. He is a former executive recruiter and a leading expert on LinkedIn. Arnie also writes a weekly column for the on careers blog for US News and World Report. Arnie is a graduate of the University of Vermont, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the Hebrew Union college-Jewish Institute of Religion where he was ordained as a rabbi. Arnie thanks for joining us on the show. Arnie Fertig: My pleasure. Mac Prichard: I know you think long and hard about LinkedIn because you were a recruiter for many years and now you help job seekers. I know our listeners are very interested in hearing about how they can make their LinkedIn profiles most appealing to recruiters and employers. Let’s start Arnie by telling us how recruiters use LinkedIn. Arnie Fertig: I just interviewed a recruiter last week and he told me his entire practice was focused on LinkedIn. He uses it to advertise jobs, he uses it to search in a Google like way within LinkedIn to find candidates based on very complex searches. He looks at what people write in their groups and what their qualifications are and reaches out to those people that he thinks would be good fits for the searches on which he’s working. Mac Prichard: Arnie I know you talk to recruiters all the time and other career counselors as well. In your experience is that uncommon that a recruiter spends all of his or her day on LinkedIn and uses the tool that extensively? Arnie Fertig: The latest I’ve seen is somewhere between 94 and 97% of all recruiters use LinkedIn to source candidates. That’s virtually everyone at this point. More than that, it’s used by HR departments and hiring managers in the sourcing and the vetting of candidates as well. Mac Prichard: It’s interesting that figure of almost 100% is so high and just this week I’ve looked at a report from the Pew Research Center which said that about half of adult Americans are on LinkedIn. Perhaps as much as half of the workforce isn’t where recruiters are. Tell us Arnie when recruiters are trolling LinkedIn profiles what are they looking for? Arnie Fertig: They are were looking for keywords to match critical elements of a job description or a position description that they’re looking to fill. They will look at the requirements of the job. They will look at specific skills. They will look at things that would be relevant to the particular employer for example, distance to the job. They might look for the university training that one has had. Certain employers are fond of hiring people from a certain set of universities. They can search to see who has a particular degree from a particular university in a particular year located in such and such a place. They will get very granular with their searches and so that means that you need to have all of that information filled out so that you can come up as the response to a detailed query when a recruiter makes it. Mac Prichard: Listeners obviously cant control now where they went to school or where they live but they do have the ability to plug in key words, not only in their LinkedIn profile but in the skills section. What advice do you give people in thinking about those keywords and what is the strategy behind choosing them and how many should they choose? Arnie Fertig: I don’t think it’s a question of how many to choose and I don’t think it’s a question of just cramming your profile with keywords at this point because recruiters are more sophisticated than that. What they want to see are accomplishments and what they want to see are accomplishments that match up to the kind of expectations that employers have for the role that is to be filled. I would suggest that somebody take a look at several different job descriptions of positions that they might like to fill. Whether they are local or not whether they’re actually going to apply or not but the kind of position that makes sense for your next job. Plum those job descriptions for the key words for the skills that are called for, for the educational background that’s called for, for the verbs that talk about what you’ll be doing in that job. Make sure that you use those words in the way that you describe what you’ve accomplished in your current and former roles. Mac Prichard: Don’t talk about duties or tasks but about accomplishments and think strategically about the words you use in describing those accomplishments. Arnie Fertig: Exactly right. I think a resume is about telling a story it’s about giving a context or a challenge in which you encountered about the actions that you took to confront that challenge and what the results were in each little resume bullet. But in a LinkedIn profile you want to focus less on the responsibilities and more on the accomplishments. Make it much more personal, active and engaging. Because LinkedIn you have to remember is a social medium and it’s fine to use the word I and it’s fine to talk about what you’re passionate about and what really you’re proud of in terms of what you’ve done in your professional roles. Mac Prichard: That’s an important point you’re making because I think many people reflectively treat their LinkedIn profile like a resume and I think the challenge, it’s challenging for them to use the first person to say I rather than put everything into the third person. Why is that more effective why do recruiters like that? Arnie Fertig: I think it’s a question of being personable and showing that this is a social medium and that you can connect in a social way back and forth and interacting. When I’m interacting with you and your profile it’s you as a person not a resume that speaks about you in the presumed third person. LinkedIn is about ultimately not just looking for jobs and saying I’m out here look at me I want a job. It’s about creating relationships and it’s important to create the relationships with the recruiters even before you’re looking for a job so that you know the kind of people that are looking or the kind of recruiters that are looking for people like you. Mac Prichard: Let’s talk about that Arnie, we often hear from people here at Mac’s list who want to get in touch with recruiters and are uncertain about how to approach them and then once they do make a contact how to manage that relationship. What’s your advice about how to connect with recruiters through LinkedIn and how to keep that relationship going Arnie Fertig: It’s fairly simple to do a search an advanced people search on LinkedIn and look for people who have the title recruiter and do a geographic search based relatively close to where you are in terms of your zip code. Do a sub search on that to see who is recruiting in your industry or for people with your particular skill set. Narrow it down to a relatively small handful of recruiters. Then begin to reach out to them just in a sense of saying hi I’d love to have you know who I am, Id love to be of help to you in the searches that you’re conducting and would it be possible for me to have 10 minutes of your time to talk with you. A lot of people will be more than happy to be approached even if it isn’t in the context account of saying I know you’re looking for so and so now please consider me. Mac Prichard: When you get that appointment what kind of expectation should you have as a job seeker when you sit down with an executive recruiter either in person or perhaps over Skype for 10 minutes. How should you approach that meeting and what kind of results should you expect to get from it? Arnie Fertig: As an internet working meeting it’s about building a relationship and building a relationship isn’t just you’ve got, I need, therefore give me. It’s about what can I do for you. It’s about trying to understand the prospective and the needs of the other person. You want to find out what kind of searches the recruiter does, what kind of people does he or she look for on a regular basis. Offer to make connections for them when you can. At the same time the recruiter will likely ask you that’s great I really appreciate that and tell me also about you. Then you want to be able to succinctly provide in a nutshell, in a sentence or two, your own personal branding statement. Hi I’m a _______ ________ career person and I’m particularly adept at doing such and such and my proudest accomplishments are such and such. Stop let the recruiter then come in and ask more questions and find out more about what it is that he or she is looking to find out for you. Mac Prichard: Think about what you can do for the recruiter and how you can be helpful, be clear about what you can offer in terms of your experience and skills and then listen and engage the recruiter in a conversation about how you might work together. Arnie Fertig: Exactly it’s about building relationships, having conversations not just capturing 10 minutes of somebody’s time and haranguing them with your story and expecting them to help you. Mac Prichard: What’s your best advice Arnie about how to keep that relationship going after you have that conversation? Arnie Fertig: From time to time you might want to introduce somebody to that recruiter. Check out their website and see what they’re looking for and see if you know somebody that could be helpful to them. Either somebody who was a thought leader in the field or somebody who actually might be looking for a job who actually meets the criteria of the recruiter is looking for. Mac Prichard: Let’s bring it back to LinkedIn, we talked about the things that people should do and how to leverage LinkedIn into connecting with recruiters. Thinking about people’s profiles Arnie what do recruiters don’t want to see on your LinkedIn page? Arnie Fertig: They don’t want to see a non professional picture. It’s really critical to present a good headshot of yourself with a contrasting solid background so it doesn’t look like you’ve got a tree coming out of your head. Whatever it might be in the background. You don’t want to see children or pets or you standing on a mountain in a distance. You want a good professional headshot first and foremost. You then want to have a good solid title up at the top of your profile. What it is that you do for example, I see on Dawn’s profile, Dawn Rasmussen’s profile she has labeled herself as a CMP certified resume writer. It tells you in a nutshell who she is and what she does. That’s a very good use of the profile the same way you can say here’s what I am and give a job title or give a description of what it is you do. Mac Prichard: What are some of the biggest missed opportunities that you see that things people should know how to do and just don’t take advantage of? Arnie Fertig: There are few things, number one to recognize what people see and what they don’t see. Many recruiters have a paid recruiting package that enables them to see all kinds of information. But some don’t, some have a free account and you never know who’s who. You want to make sure that if you come up as a third degree connection to somebody else’s search where your name and your contact information will be blocked you want to make yourself find-able. The first thing you want to do in your summary is to give your name and your e-mail address. Not your address, not your phone number, not your social security number, and not your visa number. Just your name and your e-mail address so that somebody if they’re interested in what they see in you will be able to reach out and to contact you directly. You then want to make sure as you go through the rest of the LinkedIn profile that you fill in all of the possible fields, all of the possible sections of your profile. You can list up to 50 skills you should do that. You can list your publications and your certifications and your experience and when you come to talk about the positions that you currently have and you had in the past you want to focus on giving people a sense of the size and scope and scale of what it is you’ve done and the accomplishments that you’ve made. You want to feel it in you don’t want to just leave your company and job title, otherwise nobody knows what you do or how you compare to anybody else who works in a similar company or has a similar job title. I think it’s very important for people to understand that using LinkedIn isn’t just about putting out a profile. It’s also about being active on it. Using it as a networking tool online to create relationships. It’s about interacting with the people that you’re already connected to and continuing to build your network. It’s important to understand that there are multiple ways to find jobs on LinkedIn. Not only on jobs tab which is essentially a paid job board but also in your home page on your scroll on the homepage as you’re connected to a lot of people especially recruiters and people who tend to do hiring. HR folks you’ll see that they will often just put a a simple post up that they’re looking for so and so or such and such and those come scrolling by so it’s important to check that. It’s important to check out the jobs that are listed in the various groups that you might belong to. Again you can be in 50 groups you should be in what I think of as a basket of basket of groups. There’s groups based on your locality, groups based on your title or your industry. Groups based on your skill set, groups based on your outside interests or your alumni groups from colleges and universities that you’ve attended. There is all different kinds of groups and you should be in some of each of those kinds of groups. Within each group there is a job tab to look at that and see what jobs are posted there. Those jobs are not necessarily going to be found on the large job tab at the top of the LinkedIn portal. Those jobs are just to be seen by the people in the group and often it’s a way that recruiters and HR people have of finding just a very small talent pool of highly qualified individuals for the specific search that they’re doing. They don’t want to be bothered by having to go through 500 resumes that everybody else is sending in. Mac Prichard: There is a whole universe of niche job boards out there at LinkedIn that are just hiding in plain sight and they are not that hard to find but you do have to know where to look. Arnie Fertig: Right. Mac Prichard: Well thank Arnie, tell us what’s coming up next for you. Arnie Fertig: I’m putting out an eBook, it’s available actually to people who are listening to this podcast on how to booster interviewing skills to get a job. I’m going to be publishing that soon but as an advance to that anybody who is listening to this podcast can get that free and immediately. Mac Prichard: Great and the URL for that which you were kind enough to send me before the show is info.jobhuntercoach.com/dreamjob. We will be sure to include that in the show notes. To learn more about Arnie visit jobhuntercoach.com, you can also connect with him on LinkedIn. You accept LinkedIn connections you told me Arnie. Arnie Fertig: Absolutely. Mac Prichard: We will include those links in the show notes. Thank you Arnie for joining us. Arnie Fertig: It’s been my pleasure thank you Mac for inviting me. Mac Prichard: Welcome back to the Mac’s List studio. Dawn, Ben what were some of the key takeaways for you from my conversation with Arnie? Ben Forstag: I think Arnie had a lot of good points, the one that I thought that was really astute was including your name and your e-mail address in the first line of your summary. I know I use LinkedIn a lot to find people and to reach out and if you can find that e-mail address especially if you’re not already a contact with that person it’s so valuable and it makes reaching out so much easier. Mac Prichard: I agree, I’ve been frustrated so many times trying to reach people who have a public LinkedIn profile and there’s no way to contact them other than through LinkedIn and many people don’t check their LinkedIn mail accounts regularly. It can be weeks even months before you hear back from them. Ben Forstag: We’ve all played the game of trying to reverse engineer an e-mail address based on the company URL and maybe it’s their last name, maybe it’s the first initial and last name. If you can avoid that frustration and just make it very clear how to reach out to you that’s the best. Mac Prichard: Make it easy for people to find you. How about you Dawn, what were some of the key points you heard? Dawn Rasmussen: He hit it right on the head this is a social media forum and you have to write and compel the audience, make them want to pick up the phone or type out a special e-mail to you. Make them want to reach out making it personal is the biggest thing. It really also just craving a constant stream of meaningful content and you can use that to connect to recruiters. I think Arnie mentioned that once you make that connection to the recruiter you can send them people, why not send them articles that might be helpful. You could become a helpful resource to the recruiters but then also show traction within your own profile that makes people want to reach out to you. Mac Prichard: I agree and for me the key point is one I keep running across again and again, people still think of LinkedIn as some kind of online resume book as if it’s an electronic binder and you put your resume inside it and magic things will happen you just have to sit and wait. That’s not how it works and there’s so much more as you say Dawn that you can get out of that platform. Dawn Rasmussen: I use the euphemism that this is a garden and you reap what you sow, if you only plant one or two seeds then you only get that amount back. You have to look at LinkedIn as sort of a garden that keeps … it needs nurturing, it needs to be watered, it needs to be tended to, then you reap and sow what you put into it. Mac Prichard: Good advice, thank you Dawn and thank you Ben and thank you our listeners. If you like what you hear on the show you can help us by leaving a review and a rating at iTunes. It just takes a moment and it helps others discover our show and that helps us serve other job seekers. Here is an excerpt from one of the reviews we received recently. It’s from wildiris2008, that’s her iTunes name and she writes, really impressed with the quality and relevance of this podcast series particularly the guest speakers. I’ve listened to several shows and episode two about staying marketable in the absence of job security stands out. I’ve fallen into that trap of slacking off on professional development and networking when I get comfortable on the job and Dawn Rasmussen who is with here today offers concrete practical suggestions for how to stay focused on the long-term journey, says wildiris2008. Highly recommended for novice and seasoned job seekers alike. Thank you wildires2008 and thank you to the scores of other listeners who have left a review. Please take a moment to leave your own comments and ratings just go to www.macslist.org/iTunes. Thanks again for listening and we will back next week with more tools and tips that you can use to find your dream job. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

These days none of us need to be told that change is the one constant in the workplace. Our job responsibilities change regularly--and so do our careers. The old model of climbing the corporate ladder or sticking with one profession for life is giving way to more fluid, transient, and cross-sector careers. Just 27% of college graduate have a career related to their major. And the average American worker switches jobs--if not entire careers--every 4.4 years. So how do you create career stability in a constantly changing job market? By pivoting. This week on “Find Your Dream Job,” we talk about career pivots with with Jenny Blake, a coach for professionals and organizations looking navigate change. Jenny defines a career pivot as “a methodical shift in a new related area, based on what’s already working” and encourages job seekers to continually refocus on their strengths and passions. In this 31-minute episode you will learn: Why changing jobs every few years is the new normal Why you should be doubling down on your professional strengths How to manage your pivot in four phases: plant, scan, pilot, and launch How to avoid professional stagnation and career crises Why even unsuccessful career pivots lead to unexpected, positive rewards This week’s guest: Jenny Blake (@jenny_blake | LinkedIn)Principal, Jenny Blake EnterprisesAuthor of Pivot: The Only Move that Matters Is Your Next and Life After College: The Complete Guide to Getting What You WantNew York, N.Y. Listener question of the week: I've recently had an interview with a prospective employer but after several weeks, I haven't heard back from them. How do I appropriately follow-up with the company? Answering our question this week is Dawn Rasmussen, Chief Resume Writer at Portland-based Pathfinder Writing and Career Services. If you have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode, please contact us at communitymanager@macslist.org. Resources referenced on this week’s show: 14 Ways to Tell if It’s Time To Quit Your Job | Forbes.com Pivot: The Only Move that Matters Is Your Next Life After College: The Complete Guide to Getting What You Want JennyBlake.me Strengths Finder 2.0 Pathfinder Writing and Career Services Pivot Podcast Mindset: The New Psychology of Success If you have a job-hunting or career development resource resource you’d like to share, please contact Ben Forstag, Mac’s List Managing Director at ben@macslist.org. Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support! Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com. -- Transcript Mac Prichard: This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life. I'm Mac Prichard, your host and publisher of Mac's List. Our show is brought to you by Mac's list and by our book, "Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond." To learn more about the book and the updated edition that we published on February 1st, visit MacsList.org/book. Ben Forstag: Hey, Mac. Mac Prichard: Hey, Ben. How are you? Ben Forstag: I'm doing great. As our listeners might now, the book comes in 3 editions. We've got a paperback, a digital version for your Kindle, iPad, or Nook, and we've got a PDF version that you can view online. I'd mentioned before that the paperback version is our best seller, but the PDF version is really popular, too. Mac Prichard: What I hear from our readers who buy the PDF is they not only enjoy the book, but they get with it a set of videos, an audio interview, and tips sheets and checklists that you can use to turbocharge your job hunt. You can find a complete list of all the extra resources that come with the PDF on the website, but they include things like a salary negotiation checklist, 10 steps to success, or a fact sheet about how to work with recruiting agencies as well as video and audio interviews with career experts. Again, these are available only to people who buy the PDF version of the book. You can learn more by going to the website. These days, none of us need to be told that change is the one constant in the work place. Our job responsibilities and the skills required change regularly and so do our careers. One estimate says Americans now average 4.4 years in a job. Just 27% of college graduates have a career related to their major. The old model of climbing a corporate ladder or sticking with one profession for life is giving way to the career pivot. Today, we're talking about career pivots, what they are, and how you can make them. Ben Forstag has a website that will help you figure out whether it's time to leave your job. Dawn Rasmussen, our guest co-host, answers a question about how to follow up on an interview once you start pursuing your next career. I talk to this week's guest expert, Jenny Blake, author of the forthcoming book, "Pivot: The Only Move that Matters is Your Next One." We're in the Mac's List studio, and joining us this week as our special guest host is Dawn Rasmussen of Pathfinder Career and Writing Services. Dawn, it's great to have you back. Dawn Rasmussen: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Mac. Mac Prichard: Yeah. You were one of our first guests here on the show. I have to give you a shout out. Your episode remains one of our most popular in downloads. Dawn Rasmussen: Wonderful. That's great to hear. Mac Prichard: Yeah. Let me ask you 2, Dawn and Ben, have you ever made a career pivot? Dawn Rasmussen: Boy, have I ever! Mac Prichard: Tell me about that, Dawn. Dawn Rasmussen: Oh, gosh. Well, let's see here. How many? I started out in television actually. I switched over to the hospitality industry. Then, I switched over into education and teaching. Then, I switched over into sales and marketing. Then, I switched over to owning my own business, so which one would you like to talk about? Just kidding. We don't have 5 hours. Ben? Ben Forstag: I've done a couple, as well. I started off in outdoor education, which is a pretty niche field, and then got into nonprofit management, and recently made the move from nonprofit to the for-profit space, working here at Mac's List. Mac Prichard: I've done the same. I stared out working for human rights organizations in Washington D.C. and Boston, and made the switch to politics, government, and political communications. Then, went to work at a university, and then eventually started my own businesses almost a decade ago, now, so a lot of change. We're going to be talking more about those changes and how people can make them with our guest expert, Jenny Blake, later in the show. First, let's turn to Ben, who is always out there on the internet looking for tools you can use, blogs, podcasts, books, and other resources that can be helpful in your job search. Ben, what have you uncovered for us this week? Ben Forstag: On today's show, we're talking about making a change in careers. I'm sure our guest, Jenny Blake, will provide a lot of insights on how to make that specific career pivot. For my resource this week, though, I want to focus on one of the first steps that we have to think about when you're making that change, which is deciding to leave the job or the career that you've already got. Quitting your job is a scary thing, especially if you don't have a clear picture of what you're going to do next. I know there have been times in my life where I've been generally unhappy in my job, but I didn't leave either because my unhappiness wasn't acute enough or because I was too afraid to move. I think the big thing for me when I was a younger person was I was just really passive about my career. I know in one specific job, I got stuck in a pattern where I would reach a breaking point with my position, and then they would offer me a pay raise. That would buy me off for a couple months, and I'd be happy. Then, 2 months later, I'd be right back at that same breaking point. Instead of leaving that job, they would just offer me another raise, and I would stay there. I probably stayed there a couple years too long because I got stuck in that cycle. Mac and Dawn, have you ever had a job where you weren't entirely happy, but you also weren't sure it was time to move on? Dawn Rasmussen: Yeah, I have. It was a difficult situation because the job that I was in, I had just started it actually. I realized that they hadn't really told me all the details about what the job involved. I don't tell this to many people. Why not tell it to 10 thousand people? Anyway, there was one aspect of job I had no idea how to do, and I'm a pretty resourceful and smart person. I remember going to a conference that was discussing about how to actually execute that portion of my job, and I broke down and started crying. I don't like giving up, but I just knew at that point that was not the right job for me because one half of my job, no problem. It was done. I was making changes. The second part I had not a clue, and it hadn't been really told to me in the interview about that emphasis. I had to make a change because I realized I just could not do it. It was hard. It was scary, too. Mac Prichard: For me, I think of an organization where I work that was getting off the ground and growing. It was experiencing dysfunction. It was not a place that worked well. Because of that, there was a lot of conflict, and it was not a happy place to go to work. I had only been there a number of months, and I just thought, "I need to stick this out." I hung on for almost 2 years before I found another opportunity. It did get better, but the lesson I took from that experience was if it's not working after 3 to 6 months, you probably should move on. Ben Forstag: Yeah, I think one of the themes that you hear in each one of our stories is that sometimes, there's a virtue to quitting. Oftentimes, we're told, "You never want to quit. Quitters never win. Winners never quit." Sometimes, it isn't the right fit for you personally, or it isn't making you happy. There's a virtue in quitting. My resource this week is a cheat sheet to provide you some perspective on when you migth want to consider leaving your job, when it would be a virtue. It's a post from Forbes.com, and it's titled "14 Ways to Tell if its Time to Quit your Job." It's a real long article, and they go into depth with each one of these points. I'm just going to read the kind of top lines here. Here are the 14 things you might want to think about: 1. If you're miserable every morning. I've been there. That's a tough one. 2. If your company is sinking, like Mac's experience. 3. If you really dislike the people you work with and/or your boss. 4. You're constantly stressed, negative, and/or unhappy at work. 5. Your work-related stress is affecting your physical health. 6. You don't fit in with the company culture and/or you don't believe in the company anymore. 7. Your work performance is suffering. 8. You no longer have good work/life balance. 9. Your skills are not being tapped. 10. Your job duties have changed, increased, but the pay hasn't. 11. Your ideas are not being heard or used. 12. You're bored and stagnating at your job. 13. You are experiencing verbal abuse, sexual harassment, or are aware of any other illegal type of behavior. 14. You're just generally not happy. I think all of these are good points to think about. The one caveat I would throw in here is that there are times in every job where you might feel like this for a little bit, and it's about differentiating whether this is a temporary feeling or it's been going on for 3 to 6 months, as you pointed out. Mac Prichard: It's important for people to remember that they do have choices. Sometimes, you have to stay with a job because you have bills to pay, and the pay check is important. You do have to do that, but that doesn't stop you from also thinking about what your next move is going to be and where you might go, and taking steps to do that while you continue to work in a job that, frankly, isn't meeting your needs anymore. You do have choices. Ben Forstag: Yeah. Obviously, some of these are a bit more of a deal-breaker than others, right? If you're being sexually harassed, verbal abuse, or there's something illegal going on, it's probably best to leave as soon as possible. Others, where your work/life balance is suffering, that's one of these things where you might look for a long-term trend. Is it trending towards getting worse or getting better? You've got to make those decisions, and like you said, you've got some flexibility in how you direct your career. Mac Prichard: Well, thank you, Ben. If you have a suggestion for Ben, please write him. His email address is Ben@MacsList.org, and he may share your idea on the show. Now, let's turn to you, our listeners. Our guest co-host this week is Dawn Rasmussen of Pathfinder Career and Writing Services. She joins us here in the Mac's List studio to answer one of your questions. Dawn, what are you hearing from our listeners this week? Dawn Rasmussen: Well, this week, we have a question from listener BJ [Roshanich 00:10:13]. BJ writes in and says, "I've recently had an interview with a prospective employer, but after several weeks, I haven't heard back from them. How do I appropriately follow up with the company?" Well, that's a toughy. You have to try to get ahead of this situation. Probably the key thing you need to do is during the interview, before it concludes, is you need to actually ask and set the stage for a follow up process, instead of just leaving it dangling. First of all, if you can proactively say, "What's the next step? When are you making a decision," that kind of thing. Then, if you do forget, sometimes people get a little nervous in interviews, so you should be following up. When you have a sense, maybe a week or so after they are done interviewing people, it's good to send an email. You should send a thank you right away, either by email or by snail mail. That's always a good business process to follow, but really, it's getting ahead of the 8 ball and understanding how their process operates so that you can actually respond accordingly. Mac Prichard: Yeah. Excellent advice, Dawn. This is a question we get a lot, and the best way to answer it is to do exactly what you recommended, which is to ask at the end of the interview, "What's the next step? How's your process going? How can I follow up?" They'll tell you. Thank you, Dawn. If you have a question for us, please email us at communitymanager@MacsList.org. These segments are sponsored by the 2016 edition of "Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond." We've made our book even better by adding new content and offering it in the formats that you want. For the first time ever, you can read "Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond" as a paperback book, or you can download it onto your Kindle, Nook, or iPad. Whatever the format, our goal is the same: We want to give you the tools and tips you need to get meaningful work that makes a difference. For more information, visit MacsList.org/book and sign up for our special book newsletter. You'll get updates there that aren't available elsewhere, including exclusive book content and special discounts. Now, let's turn to this week's guest expert, Jenny Blake. Jenny Blake is a author, career and business strategist, and international speaker. She helps her clients through big transitions, often to pivot their career or business. Jenny is also the author of 2 books, "Life After College," which is based on her blog of the same name, and "Pivot: The Only Move that Matters is your Next One," which will be published in September. Jenny, welcome to the show. Jenny Blake: Mac, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor. Mac Prichard: Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you. What is a pivot, and why does it matter? Jenny Blake: I define a career pivot as a methodical shift in a new related area based on what's already working. What I noticed was that in my own career, I kept bumping up on this really confusing question of what's next, every few years. I thought, "There must be something wrong with me. I'm only supposed to have a mid-life crisis and a quarter-life crisis. Why is this happening every 2 years?" For a while, and we see a lot of shame and blame around millennials. We call them job-hoppers and entitled. I had been working at Google, and I thought, "I must be one of those because every few years, I'm feeling really confused about what's next." It wasn't until I realized 2 things: One, this is accelerating for all of us. It wasn't just me. As I started to talk to more people, I realized we're all experiencing this shift more often. Then, two, the thing that really got me out of it, because I thought, "This is so inefficient. I can't go through a life crisis every time I need to shift my career." I realized that it wasn't until I looked at what was already working and doubled down on it that I was able to move more seamlessly in the next direction. Rather than thinking about big leaps, I started to examine what was already right underneath my feet. That's where I got the idea of a pivot, like a basketball player who has one foot firmly grounded. That's your strengths and what's already working. Then, they scan the horizon for opportunity with their pivot food. Mac Prichard: I think that will be very reassuring to many of our listeners because a lot of people believe that changing jobs every few years is a problem, and there must be something wrong with them if they're doing that. What I'm hearing you say, Jenny, is that's the new normal. Jenny Blake: Absolutely. In fact, research shows that the average employee tenure is 4 to 5 years. Among people 25 to 35, it's now about 2 to 3 years. What I noticed in writing the book over the last 3 years was almost none of the people I interviewed at the beginning were doing the same thing by the time I went to fact check. Even what I had seen in the research, I thought, "Okay. People are shifting every 3 years or so, maybe 3, 4, or 5." That was not even the case with the people I interviewed. I couldn't keep up. Even now, as I'm getting ready to send the book off to press, I cannot keep the stories current. I'm going to put something on the website with what people are up to, but it was shocking to me. Not all of this is by choice. It's not all people who are saying, "I'm bored. I want something new." In many cases, they were laid off. Their company was acquired. Maybe their company was acquired, and then they got laid off. They started their own business, realized it wasn't for them, and went back to employment. There were so many reasons for these career pivots that I think for everyone listening, the message is just don't beat yourself up. If you're at a pivot point, it's totally normal and has to be expected, whatever the reason. Mac Prichard: Recognize that change is normal. It will come every few years. It's not only about changing jobs. It's about changing careers. Let's talk about how people manage that process. What are some basic tips that you give people who are considering a career pivot? Jenny Blake: I do want to add that some people pivot within their role, so it's not always about pivoting career. Sometimes, it's just about defining, "I'm hitting a plateau in my role." A lot of these people who I interviewed are really high achievers. They just want to make sure that they're learning, growing, and ultimately, making an impact. In that case, it can be a good exercise no matter where someone is who's listening right now to say, "Okay, what's my one next move? What would be really exciting?" That's where I recommend people start is I have this 4 stage process: plant, scan, pilot, launch. Plant is about look at what's already working. What are you enjoying most, even if it's only 10% of your current day-to-day work? What's the 10% that you love? When do you feel most in the zone? What are your biggest strengths? What did you love to do as a kid? One year from now, what does success look like? A lot of people get overwhelmed by that question because they don't know. They don't know the exact job, company, or even industry or location. Start broad. Just say, "How do you want to feel a year from now?" What kind of environments energize you? About how much do you want to be earning? If you can even start to paint a broad picture, it's like putting a pin in your maps app. Now, you know a little bit of where you're going, and you can scan for people, skills, and opportunity that will help you get there. Then, the third stage, pilot, is about running small experiments. Take the pressure off to solve your whole career conundrum in one fell swoop and instead look for tiny experiments that you can run. At Google, we had 10 and 20% projects. Anyone in their career can think of it the same way. My blog started as a 10% project on nights and weekends and later became the foundation of my business, but I had no idea that's what it was going to become at the time. Mac Prichard: Last stage is launch, so people have gone through those first 3 steps: the plant, the scan, and the pilot. How do you see people launch? Jenny Blake: You can cycle through plant, scan, pilot continuously, over and over, until you feel ready to launch. The first 3 stages are a cycle. It's about reducing risk, seeing what's out there, getting more comfortable, and someone could plant, scan, pilot, and be doing that for years. There's no time crunch. I've worked through this entire model with someone in 10 minutes. With my coaching clients, maybe it's 3 or 4 months, but if someone's generally happy, plant, scan, pilot, they may not need to launch. Launch is typically when we see the all-in moment. If someone is going to quit a job, start their own business, or move to a new city, the launch moment is when they really pull the trigger and move in the new direction, fully in the new direction. With launches, there's not a guarantee that it's going to work exactly as you have planned, but by reducing risk through piloting, experimenting, and grounding in your strengths, the launch becomes less panic-inducing. That's really the goal. Mac Prichard: Let's talk about risk for a moment because many people, while they recognize that change is a constant, they're uncomfortable with change and the risks involved. What are some of the ways that you see people manage risk as they go through this process or make a pivot. Jenny Blake: One of the diagrams in my book is called The Risk-ometer. It's taking the temperature of where you currently are on an inner feeling of risk. Someone could either be in their comfort zone, everything's fine. Their stagnation zone, that's where they're hitting a plateau, actively bored, or sometimes manifesting as physical symptoms. Then, in the other direction, we have a stretch zone. Something feels edgy and exciting. A panic zone, downright terror. When a lot of people think about risk as it relates to career, career change can be very scary because it seems to threaten our most fundamental needs on Maslow's hierarchy of food, clothing, and shelter. This is how we earn a living and pay for our life, so the thought of rocking the boat can be panic-inducing. The goal in the pivot process is look for activities that put you in your stretch zone but not your panic zone. That's up to each individual to assess moment-by-moment. If they're getting overwhelmed, and they're kind of paralyzed, that's usually a sign that they're thinking too big and that the next steps they're considering are in their panic zone. Try and chunk it down smaller and smaller until you're squarely in your stretch zone. Similarly, to have some awareness around are you comfortable right now, or is it approaching stagnation? The idea about pivoting is that it's really a mindset. It doesn't have to be these huge crisis points in our lives the way that it was for me for a long time because by monitoring and noticing when we start to fall into this stagnation zone, we can then take the steps to come out of it. The first step is that awareness. Mac Prichard: One of the points you made earlier was about the importance of playing to your strengths. Can you talk about the advantages of doing that because sometimes I think people think that they have to take risks or put themselves in places where they're constantly uncomfortable. Why do you recommend that people start by playing to their strengths, Jenny? Jenny Blake: When I reverse engineered what factors led to my most successful career pivots and then I started to study this for dozens if not hundreds of other people, I noticed that there was always a connecting factor. That was either their strengths, so ways in which they had become an expert or things that they really were good at, or people that they knew. Your network can be part of your strengths, as well. Usually, it's both. People you know are not going to offer you a job unless they know that you're really good at something. It was never looking at their weaknesses and trying to fix them that led to the next opportunity, and I'm not saying that's not a good thing to do. I'd recommend, if those of you listening haven't already, to check out the book "Strengths Finder 2.0," either as an assessment, so you can get your top 5 strengths. In the introduction to that book, Tom Rath talks about how much more effective we are when we emphasize and invest in our strengths rather than trying to fix our weaknesses. Particularly when pivoting, one of the biggest pitfalls is people tend to obsess over what they don't like, what they don't have, and what they don't know because of the fear factor. A lot of times in career change, I'll even say to a coaching client, "What does success look like a year from now?" They'll say, "Ah. I don't want to be so stressed out every day. I don't want to be bored. I don't want to dread going to work." "Okay, that's kind of a start, but it doesn't put fuel in the gas tank." That's going to keep the car spinning its wheels in mud. By looking at strengths and what's already working, now the person can figure out how to double down on those and shift methodically in the new direction, whereas just minimizing weaknesses doesn't really propel someone forward. Mac Prichard: One of the things that you wrote about in your blog about pivots is that sometimes, people go down this road, they make a pivot, and they unexpected results. Can you tell us more about that, and how people should manage that? Jenny Blake: Well, unexpected results could be one of 2 things. One, the results surpass your wildest dreams. I've seen so many people who once they were clear that they were ready to make a change, and they started taking those first courageous steps, the universe, whatever someone's kind of spiritual beliefs are met them halfway. Opportunities seem to fall out of the sky. Part of that is I call it the universe rolling out the red carpet. For every courageous step they took forward, another roll unfurled on the carpet, meaning a person showed up, an opportunity, one next clue on their path. The other side of a pivot unexpected is things might not work out exactly as you planned. Nobody I talk to, and there are many people, Mac, who came to me when I was fact checking. They would say, "Oh, don't bother putting my story in the book. I pivoted again." Almost as if they were discouraged that their first pivot didn't work. Nobody regretted making their launch decision. Even, I had 2 friends who quit their job, very high earners on the stock, the open outcry pits on Wall Street, they quit to start an urban farming business, and a year later, they folded it. They both went and found other work, but they don't see it as a failure. They felt so alive. That time really taught them a ton about themselves and about business. Even though they pivoted again, it still all was in a positive direction, which I call up and to the right, like a revenue chart. Most of these experience, we learn from then. Even if what seems like a quote "failure" from the outside is still up and to the right in terms of our fit and what's best for us. We're never really done. Anybody who loves learning, growth, and making an impact, there's always this sense of exploration and risk. Part of it is just learning to embrace that uncertainty and not take it personally, like it's some kind of shortcoming. Mac Prichard: Good. That seems like a good place to stop. Jenny, tell us about what's coming up next for you. Jenny Blake: Right now, I'm finishing up the very last edits on the book, which is exciting. That's my big pivot, is the book will come out in September, which I'm thrilled about. In the meantime, I'm having a lot of fun with the pivot podcast, trying to interview experts on how to be agile in this economy. If change is the only constant, how do we get better at it? Mac Prichard: Great. We'll be sure to include links to the podcast and to your blog, which I know has information about your book, "Pivot: The Only Move that Matters is Your Next One," coming out from Portfolio Penguin Press in September. Jenny Blake: That is correct. Yep, you got it. Mac Prichard: Well, thank you for joining us, and you can learn more about Jenny, her work, and her books at JennyBlake.me. We'll include links to all of those sites in the show notes. Thank you, Jenny. Jenny Blake: Thank you so much, and a big thanks to everybody for listening. Mac Prichard: We're back in the Mac's List studios with Ben and Dawn. Ben, Dawn, what were the most important points you heard Jenny make? Ben Forstag: I really like the central pieces of her book, which is that you can make small changes throughout your career regularly. Back in my grad school days, when I was studying political theory, there was this idea of path dependency, that if you went too far in one direction, you were stuck there, and you couldn't make choices anymore. I think some job seekers think that way, as well. "I studied accounting in college, so I can never do anything else besides accounting for the rest of my life." I like the idea that she has that you can gradually transition to other things, no matter where you are in your career. It might take a little bit of time to go from your accounting background to becoming a professional actor, but you can gradually make that transition if you make the right steps. Mac Prichard: There's a book I think we've mentioned before on the podcast called "Mindset" by Carol Dweck, who is a professor at Stanford. She talks about how people often get stuck thinking they're only good at one thing, and that many people who enjoy early success are afraid to take risks because they worry that if they try something that they don't excel at, they'll jeopardize their success. They just don't continue to grow in their careers. They get stuck in one place. I think what I heard Jenny say was how important it is to have a mindset where you're not only open to change, but you learn how to navigate it because it's coming. It's coming early and often throughout your career. Dawn, what were your reactions? Dawn Rasmussen: I had sort of a interesting thought while she was talking. I think her idea of taking it one digestible chunk at a time is a great one, but there's also the problem of analysis paralysis. Because there are so many choices out there, there's, number 1, the fear of failure, number 1, but then number 2 is like, "Well, there's so many choices. What do I figure out what to do?" Many years ago, there was a company based here in Portland that let people try out or test drive their dream job. It was an opportunity for you to see if you like it and get sort of the inside scoop on what does this job really involve so you know if you want to move in that direction or not. I'm just looking it up on the internet, too, and it seems like there's been a proliferation of other organizations starting to offer the same thing. I think it's a brilliant stroke of genius, really, to come up with these test drive opportunities really to see, "Okay, is this something I want to do?" It helps with the comfort level too because if you don't know quite exactly what it entails, there's a lot of unknowns. If you actually get in there and get a taste of it, you have a better sense of what you're getting yourself into, whether it's going to feel right or not. Mac Prichard: That's a great point. I think experimenting and trying new roles is always helpful, and it gives you a change to try something before you commit. Dawn Rasmussen: Before you buy. Mac Prichard: Yes, exactly. Well, thank you, Dawn. Thank you, Ben, and thank you, our listeners. If you like what you hear on the show, you can help us by leaving a review and rating at iTunes. This helps others discover our show and helps us serve you all, our listeners, better. One of the reviews we received recently is from Spring Rocks, who writes, "I find the very perspective of the hosts interesting. Their advice is actionable, and the tone is encouraging. Also, they stay on topic, and the show title's and notes make it easy to decide which episodes to focus on." Thank you, Spring Rocks, and we do our best to stay on task. If you haven't discovered our show notes yet, please go to the Mac's List website. 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