But if you are like most people, you will be strongly tempted to rush into the job hunt before you have decided for which jobs you should be hunting and before you have equipped yourself properly for the mission by scouting the territory. You will feel pressured to get another job as soon as possible and may sacrifice thousands of dollars and much happiness in the years to come to make a few hundred dollars very soon.
Or you will have several months of severance or savings to ease your transition to a new job, but you will begin to look for that new job by answering ads and mailing broadcast letters or by consulting headhunters and employment agencies. If you near the end of your severance or savings with no job offer in hand, you will panic and decide that you haven't time for nonsense like experimenting with exercises in self exploration or taking trips to the library for research or composing targeted cover letters to individual firms.
Yet, the tighter the economy, the higher your expectations, and the longer you've been looking without generating any attractive job offers, the more critical it is to make time for systematic self exploration, information gathering, letter writing, and phone calling. You should have a plan for getting your next job rather than waiting for the right job to come to you in the form of a newspaper ad or a call from a headhunter. The longer you've gone without a plan or without a plan that yields results, the more important it is for you to develop a plan or revise your current one.
Unfortunately, there is no magic formula or easy way to find a good job; success depends largely on working hard and working smart. Fortunately, however, in developing a job search plan, you can take advantage of the experiences of job hunters before you and of vocational counselors who work with hundreds of job hunters. You can also employ the results of research on creativity. Getting a job is a creative activity very similar to problem solving, and humans through many ages have studied the conditions that allow creative activities to proceed fruitfully. The first condition for fruitful creative work is to break the journey to the desired outcome into reasonable steps. If you want to travel from New York City to Florida, you must begin by envisioning the trip in stages and defining the requirements for each stage. You might not think of yourself as being engaged in a rigorous mental activity, but you will probably use words and images in several sophisticated ways as you plan your journey.
You will break the trip into stages as you think about how you will get to Florida (by plane, train, car, or other mode of transportation?) and as you realize that you must pick a more specific destination than "Florida" for your trip. You will also be breaking the journey into manageable steps as you think about getting airline tickets (which airline? how far in advance?) and imagine what you'll be doing in Florida to figure out whether you want to rent a car. At some point, you will also picture the weather in Florida while taking a mental inventory of your clothes so that you can decide whether to purchase new ones and pack intelligently. In addition, you may ask yourself who will feed the cat and pick up the mail while you are gone and so on.
These thoughts may pass through your mind quickly and occur in a seemingly chaotic manner, but the process of imagining your trip in manageable steps is often a prerequisite for taking a trip. Unable to imagine a trip in this way, we may lack the courage or ability to begin our travels. And if we begin, we are apt to have a rough trip or end in a place where we don't want to be.
The same is true of a job search, which is a journey from one job to another. The best way to begin the search is to think of it as a journey that you must break into manageable steps: you can't get from one job to another in one giant, magical leap. The seven steps correspond to the steps involved in creative activities such as problem solving; they also reflect the advice of people who have studied vocational choice and people who are familiar with current hiring practices in U.S. organizations.
As an itinerary for your journey to new employment, the seven steps do not describe a straight path from one job to the next. You probably won't move smoothly from one step to the next in the order given, and you are likely to be working on several at once. Any attempt to break a fluid process into discrete, linear steps oversimplifies its reality. Still, breaking the journey into stages, even approximate and tentative ones, will make starting your journey easier and will greatly improve your chances of reaching a desirable destination. Though you may be inclined to panic and want to take a giant leap into your next job, promise yourself to spend at least the next few hours of your job search on planning a strategy for making your next employment a winning career move.
