You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Working as a career coach, one thing that becomes glaringly obvious is that a lot of people don’t know how to look for work in the new economy.  By new economy, I mean the post-credit crunch, tough labour market.  The job market where positions are hard to come by and there is fierce competition for any opportunities that are advertised.  But I’ve lost count of the number of times that people prefer to go it alone in their job hunt.  They keep on using the job hunting methods that worked for them in the old boom times, but which nowadays don’t get them very far.  But they blame the bad job market, rather than looking at how they are looking for opportunities.

I totally understand that position as well.  In my previous career working in legal admin, I used to use 2 routes for finding work.  The first was to send off my CV in response to a job advert.  The CV was written by myself of course, and didn’t really sell me that well.  But it didn’t matter too much because jobs were easy to come by so if I didn’t get the position I was going for at the moment, then another one would come along fairly soon.  The other method was to use recruitment agencies.  There were 3 agencies that specialised in Trade Mark work, the area that I used to work in.  I had good relationships with people at the agencies and they wouldn’t take too long to find me the kind of work that I was looking for.  So generally there was little stress in finding something new that I was a good fit for.

But I was using them during the boom times.  However the game has changed now.  Work is not so easy to come by and the average job seeker has to be that little bit smarter to get the position they want.  There is so much competition for places that sending off your CV in response to job adverts is going to put you up against a vast number of other qualified candidates.  And if you haven’t got help with writing your CV then your task will be even harder.  If you spend the rest of your time using recruitment agencies or using job websites, then, again, there will be an awful lot of competition.  You’ll just be one of the herd struggling to stand out.  Have you every stood in a crowd at a concert or a sports fixture?  How difficult would it be for someone to pick you out?  Well that’s how hard it is to stand out in a congested job market if you’re using the same routes as everyone else.

But the good news is, it’s not impossible to find work.  With a little bit of know how and application, the work opportunities will come.  For them to come though, you need to know what you’re doing.  If you’re spending the vast majority of your job hunting time using the methods described above, then I’ve got news for you.  It’s not the job market that’s to blame for your inability to find work. It’s your overreliance on old fashioned ways of finding work.  A career coach can help you with the strategies that will work in the current job market.  But you probably won’t know what help they can give you yet.  As you don’t know what you don’t know when it comes to job hunting.