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After a fairly “normal” career starting life as an accountant, then going into the retail industry for a number of years, I made a very bad career decision and changed into an industry that was totally wrong for me.

Fast forward 3 years and two jobs later and I was made redundant.

No job

No career to go back into

And on the face of it few prospects.

At this point I decided to reach out for help.

I went to talk to a career coaching company. Despite being sceptical at first, I embarked on a career development programme with them.

They showed me how a good career must be built on three pillars and the result I achieved and ticked all the boxes.

Those three pillars are the foundation of any good career and this is what this article is all about.

So if you have decided that now is the time to really find that dream career I’ll explain in this article how it worked for me and how it can work for you.

But first, let me dispel a couple of myths about how you find the right career. Myths that can so easily lead you to making wrong decisions, as indeed happened to me many years ago before I was shown how to really build my career.

Myth One

Forget the dream job!

Think instead of the dream career.

This may surprise you, because the idea of the dream job is bandied around so much.

But any job, dream or otherwise has a finite life. During that time both you and the company will change. Even if you are working for yourself, your aspirations, needs, motivation etc will change.

On the other hand the dream career as I call it lasts as long as you wish it to. It is always progressing and there is always a next move as you develop one opportunity after another.

Myth Two

The only way to find a new job is to apply for advertised positions whether they be in the media or the company’s website, or to contact recruitment agencies, or to do some form of basic networking amongst friends and colleagues.

Finding the right career roles (and I stress you should be aiming for more than one) is a result of a properly developed and carried through marketing plan.

There are several more misunderstandings about how to build the dream career that is right for you, and I will talk about how you can identify those at the end of the article.

Now let me explain how I was shown how to build my dream career on those three pillars and how you can do it too.

Pillar One

You have to have a very clear understanding of what it is that you do particularly well and what your unique combination of abilities skills and experience is.

Why is this so important?

It is important for a number of reasons: –

• Firstly, if you don’t know what is the ideal role to match your particular talents, how do you know what to look for?
• Secondly, what most people do well, they take for granted because they do it unconsciously and very rarely fully identify it.
• Thirdly, because once your unique combination of abilities skills and experience are clearly identified, it results in a huge boost to self-confidence and sense of purpose.

We take clients through an in-depth five-step process to begin with.

This process, developed many years ago as never been bettered even by the most advanced psychometric tests.

Pillar Two

From our 20+ years of experience, we together work out the new career direction for you. We take into account everything, from your personality, your interests, your lifestyle.

In other words everything that makes up the unique you and where your new career direction should be.

However this is not just a case of simply pointing you in the right direction.

Far from it.

Instead we formulate a plan identifying short medium and long term career options. As I have said careers are dynamic, always progressing and there is always a next move.

The reason that we can do this is because of our many years experience in this business of helping people find new opportunities and dream careers.

We say that the decisions people face for the first time in re-orientating their careers and their lives, we deal with pretty much every day of the week.

Which leads us on to the third and very important stage.

Pillar Three

Not only giving you the in-depth knowledge of how the job market really works but the preparation of the detailed and easy to follow plan on how to navigate your way through it to identify and obtain those roles that few if any other people have access to.

But firstly, let’s have a look at how this unadvertised or informal job market, shown in a previous diagram works in the way it does.

If you look on the right you will see that the period between the company publicising their need and making an appointment is actually much shorter than the time-frame between a problem or indeed an opportunity occurring and the company going into the market to find somebody.

This happens through a number of reasons, which again I can show you how to get access to the end of the article.

Suffice to say that this “window of opportunity” exists in 90%+ of cases were a company goes through a recruitment process.

A note of caution here.

Social media platforms are now very much a part of daily life and the opportunities that present for job finding has completely revolutionised the marketplace.

Recruiters now use this as a first port of call in recruiting candidates.

However because of the relative newness of this method of “job acquisition” there are many systems out there being presented as the sure-fire way to acquire your next “ideal” is career position.

My “take” on it based on experience is that yes it can make finding a new job but easier, but in terms of identifying, finding and developing the right career opportunities it is a case of using short term tactics instead of a well developed and robust strategy.

There are so many factors that are going to affect your career, wherever you are in your career cycle, over the next few years.

These factors include: –

• Artificial intelligence
• Outsourcing
• Disruptive technology
• Climate change
• Online learning
• The ever increasing development of the Internet

To name just a few.

Just take one of those factors, we recently commissioned our own survey on the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs over the next few years.

The report came to a number of major conclusions, but one of the most striking for me was the fact that many of the jobs are children will be doing have not been invented yet.

We do a great deal of study not only on what factors affect our clients careers now, but also what is going to have a major influence on them in the future so that we can better advise them not just for now but for the future as well.

Having read thus far it may well be thinking however.

“While this all sounds like good stuff, but I really want to do my own thing”

Whether that is becoming self-employed or starting your own business.

That is something we cover in depth in one of our programmes, especially in the area of marketing which is something of a passion of mine, both as a partner in an e-commerce business as well as consultancy roles in other areas.

But this is about you and your career development.

So to do a quick recap.

These are the three pillars on which you build your dream career.

Each stage is as important as the other and I hope you can see that the career is built on those three pillars with our help takes you through to find that dream career.

To let me help you not just talk about the job market in general but how I can help you build that dream career, simply use This Contact Form with the words “call with Peter”in the subject line.

On that call we will explore in-depth your current situation, your aspirations, where you want to be and how we can help.

One thing I must stress is that if I feel it is not right for you at this time or we not a good fit I will say so.

However I do promise that you will either call with a completely new perspective on how to take your career forward.

I look forward to speaking to you.