When Your Career Leaves You

There are times when people are required to make career changes because their career leaves them.

Traditionally, we think of manufacturing jobs going away. We've seen entire manufacturing industries go away. Textiles was an early example. Steel is another good example. More recently it's been computer manufacturing.

As we began to understand that in the U.S. we had moved from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy, guess what? We learned that knowledge careers and jobs can go away as well. A lot of these jobs that have disappeared have been IT jobs, outsourced overseas. But others have just disappeared.

This may be the most difficult career change to navigate. These are typically career positions which have paid well with good benefits and have provided a degree of status. People have been recognized for their expertise and rewarded for it as well. When the need for that expertise goes away, it's really hard to chart a path forward.

Here are some of the obstacles that people whose careers have left them often encounter:

1. Your identity is heavily invested in the career niche you have been well rewarded for. That's who you are. Turning loose of that identity is extremely difficult for any of us. Because you have a hard time letting go, here's what usually happens:

• You continue looking for a position just like the one you had, even though the evidence all tells us that there aren't any.
• You slowly become convinced that you're unemployable. No one wants someone like you to do what you know how to do. Other factors such as age may creep into the equation.
• When you can't be who you are (because you've allowed yourself to be defined by what you do), your self esteem takes a huge blow. The grief cycle, which all of us who lose jobs go through naturally because we have lost something, becomes prolonged and often more severe, particularly the anger and depression stages.
• You reach a point where moving forward seems impossible.

Individuals in this situation also seem to generally choose job search strategies that statistically have low success rates.

• Internet job sites (Monster, Career Builder, etc.)
• Reading and responding to want ads in newspapers and professional journals.
• Mailing out resumes (or submitting resumes online) in a random fashion.
• Using headhunters (retained search firms).

These are all low success-rate strategies. We generally choose these strategies because they are something we can do that doesn't carry much personal risk of rejection. We can just toss information out there and maybe something good will happen. When these strategies don't result in a job, it just adds to our feelings of helplessness.

If this is your situation, there is hope, and there is a way out.

First, you have to recognize that your career has left you. It's not your fault. But it's happened. To move forward, you have to accept the facts.

Second, you need to recognize that you have skills, knowledge, and experience that is transferable to another career area. We all do. Sometimes our employments systems themselves help convince us this is not true. But you do have abilities that can lead you to a new career.

Future posts will provide help in moving forward, but if this is a position you find yourself in now, here are a couple of suggestions to help you get moving forward:

• Read, and more importantly, do what the book What Color is Your Parachute? says. There's a reason it's the best selling book on getting a job ever written.
• Go to your local unemployment agency and do some testing to better understand your potential career options. Many of these are also available on the internet, if you would prefer that option, and most colleges and universities also offer this type of testing.
• Consider hiring a life coach or a career counselor.

Feel free to leave questions or comments on this post, and I'll address them in future posts.