Plus ça change

The dream scenario is a series of well-timed and advantageous career moves that build a coherently upward path, adding achievement and versatility that takes you towards whatever objectives you happen to have in a changing world. You step on no toes, encounter no redundancies, never leave a sour taste with your colleagues and always get on great with the boss.

For most of us, however, the transition from one job to the next entails a degree of uncertainty, a fair amount of work and an element of courage. This is not an arena where top notch advice is freely available from people who actually engineer change on the candidate's side. Having helped over 3000 people, I have some opinions and intuitions to share.

The clear cut case

A reasonable percentage of the people I deal with are clearly underpaid and underused and can easily improve their situation by looking around and promoting themselves effectively. There may be a few lingering doubts and it pays to collect advice and information before leaping, but in this scenario it is obvious that other employers are offering better deals.

The pitfalls this group faces are mostly about fearing the process of change, not being sure how to accomplish what they want, not knowing if the right move is out there, staying in a nice job but accepting mediocre rewards. Sooner or later these people know they're going to jump, but some like to put it off forever . . .

The movers and groovers

The group whose time keeps coming are the obviously successful types with big achievements to parade, in-demand skills to offer, lots of customer contacts to pirate, superb business models to share… people that one employer might immediately want to poach from another.

Once in a while this type makes a greedy move and comes unstuck, say with a directorship of a start-up that goes sour, but generally speaking there is a kind of fast track out there and it moves you along swiftly if you can get on to it and justify being there. In fact there is more than one faster track and the process of career change often depends on you being able to believe that you merit a better job.

Change for the rest of us

Most people have complex lives in which different priorities must be weighed and the times and tides of opportunity and destiny play their own unfathomable part. Alongside this article we have appraisal tools that take you through the issues in a structured way. On a general note, I believe that our lives contain patterns and it may be useful to look back at the last major change you made, or previous changes before that, asking:

Your patterns of change

• are you the kind of person who initiates change or waits to be pushed?
• does change for you come from your own action or from given opportunities?
• is there any sense of having wasted possibilities for change in the past?
• has change been a straightforward process or a complex process with many steps?
• has change been decision-led or has it just fallen in your lap?
• would the change have been easier if things had been different in some way?

Nobody has the definitive formula to offer on these questions and most people will find examples in their lives of pushing in the wrong direction and nothing happening, then suddenly finding the right buttons to press and everything being easy.

You will probably have an opinion on whether or not it is possible to change your approach to change. Mine is that we can evolve and mature; we can put ourselves more in harmony with reality and we can acquire skills and methods, attitudes and approaches that gradually improve the way we deal with the world. That makes me a cautious optimist !

Whatever your reason for wanting to move

It will be far more powerful if you plan the operation at least as well as you would plan a project for your employer. Rushed, desperate and ill informed scatterings of half baked CVs aimed at target jobs where you don't match the requirements, will be doomed to failure.

Elsewhere at ABC we go into detail about planning major career change. Briefly, though, your chances dramatically improve if you are well-informed, suitably skilled, able to demonstrate that the shift is coherent and clearly able to offer at least as much as employers might be looking for in terms of abilities, vision, track record and those elusive qualities of presence that determine the level at which your can convincingly pitch yourself.

The hardest person to convince is usually yourself ! After that, other people are more likely to accept you at your own valuation of your worth.

These topics are covered in greater depth in CV Sage with examples and exercises. Take a look!