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Career Management - To/do’s After You Land A Job
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Introduction
OK, so you finally landed a new job opportunity. The natural responses are:
- It’s over!
- I don’t have to look for a job anymore!
Yes, you have been on a steep learning curve, doing things that were difficult, developing new skills such as networking, writing cover letters and emails, plus lots of meetings and phone calls. After a few days, however, you may have some additional thoughts and decide to develop a game plan to leverage all of your hard work to land that opportunity. Let’s first establish what your job search "investment" looks like, making estimates as needed:
Time
- How many months were you actively looking?
- How many hours per month did you spend on the search?
- What’s the total time investment?
Process
- How many networking group sessions did you attend?
- How many phone calls did you make?
- How many emails/letters did you send?
People
- How many people did you meet at networking sessions?
- How many people did you talk to or email?
- How many people did you help?
- How many people helped you?
By any standard, you have made a major investment in your search for a new opportunity. And you are well-positioned to assist someone else. So the issue to resolve is: What do I do with my learning curve now that I don’t need it?
Here are some recommendations to maintain your connection with the job market:
Job Search Process
- Update your resume and re-post it on Workministry.com, perhaps a few other sites that were helpful to your search, using the confidential option.
- Make plans to attend one or two networking events every month or two to stay in touch, assist other job seekers and share the resources that you developed for your search process. Keeping your contacts in use through other people makes many of those contacts available to you when needed.
- Stay in touch with one or more of the yahoo groups that you used for contacting other job seekers and send along job opportunities within your new company or other sources.
Personal Development
- What skills or aptitudes did you identify during your search as strengths?
- What development needs did you identify as issues to address to improve your marketability?
- For your areas of strengths, develop an action plan for building upon those strengths in your new position, either within the company or through additional training.
- For your development needs, define methods for addressing the needs both within the context of your new assignment and external to the job through formal training or additional education.
Summary
Career management is a process, not an event. If faced with a choice of:
A. Maintaining the continuity of your network and job search resources or
B. Filing away all the contacts and resources
What makes more sense? There would seem to be less work and time required to maintain one’s job search resources versus building the resources back up if you need them a year or two from now. Needless to say, friends, family, others may be able to benefit from your relationships as well. Now that you are up the learning curve, don’t give up the hard-won ground. Stay in touch with the job market at some level and help others along the way.
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