Ask-A-Career-Coach: How Do You Position Yourself for Two Different Careers?

Last week one of my favorite blogs, The Glass Hammer, posted an interesting article by Caroline Ceniza-Levine with advice on how to position yourself for two different careers. Check out a snippet of the in-depth article below, or head on over to The Glass Hammer.com for the full text.

I had a client who had started a business that needed a cash infusion. At the same time, recognizing that cash flow was an issue, he started to explore going back in-house (he had been a successful banker before starting his own shop). He needed to position himself as both an entrepreneur and an employee without diluting either focus or confusing his market. How do you position yourself for two different careers?

I see this conundrum more and more. On the entrepreneur/employee front, more people are starting side businesses or picking up consulting projects. But even when one is committed to traditional employment, jobs are wider in scope and you may find yourself with a role that is a compilation of several different functions. I reconnected with an old hire of mine from my media days, and she was straddling PR and marketing in the same firm. Consequently, she was unsure how to talk about both without diminishing her experience in either.

Positioning is framed by two things: who you are; and what you are targeting. So the above conundrum seems to revolve around the first half – confusion on how to express who you are. But it really is more about the second – describing who you are in the context of your target. If you are sure about your target, you can easily find a way to talk about your two (or more) sides in a way that adds value to your target and therefore makes you the logical choice, not the outlier.

When you have multiple targets (as in my banker client who was targeting investors and prospective employers) this is trickier, but still not impossible. We worked on a story where entrepreneurship was a logical extension of his career but not the only one. He created a message that focused on the current growth stage of his business and how the fork in the road involved either investment or employment and that he embraced both possibilities. Most importantly, everything was framed in a positive and empowered way so that his targets, whether investors or employers, could see that he was proactive about his choices.

Continue reading at The Glass Hammer.com…

10 Reasons You Need a Mentor, Especially Mid-Career

Just before the holiday weekend The Glass Hammer – one of my favorite blogs – posted this interesting article explaining why it is important to have a career mentor, even if you have been working in the field for a few years now. As author Andrea explains, mentoring has been associated with higher job satisfaction, higher promotion rates, higher future income, increased work success, and higher retention rates.

1. Perspective and Experience. A mentor can give you the benefit of his or her perspective and experience. He or she can help you assimilate to a new position and give you an insider’s view on how to get things done.

Bayer agrees, “This was the value to me of working with my first real mentor. She knew all about navigating big, traditional companies and how the structure and promotional system works. She helped me build my ‘personal board of directors,’ people who provided support for me, and how to make a ‘dance card’ whenever I was going to a large corporate event of some type (to make sure I had people to try and talk with and know what I was going to talk about). This mentor gave me the help I needed to advance my career significantly, starting that year.”

2. Think Outside the Box. A mentor can help you look at situations in new ways. He or she can ask hard questions and help you solve problems.

“This was another critical area for me – my mentors helped me to gain a level of self awareness that I wasn’t getting to on my own. My mentor helped me to learn and use emotional intelligence, even helped me craft exercises and offered practice and reviews, so that I could become proficient in understanding myself, my impact on others, and other people’s emotional being and state, and how to use that to work together better. This was a big ‘growth spurt’ for me, both at work and personally,” Bayer said.

3. Define and Reach Long-Term Goals. A mentor can help you define your career path and ensure that you don’t lose focus and continue down that road even when you become distracted by day-to-day pressures.