how to protect yourself today for tomorrow's career move

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From Tech Job Market Zoo to Corporate Goo...

How to Protect What You’ve Built So Far.

How to Protect Yourself Today for Tomorrow’s Career Move

What Is Your Answer to This Market Going to Be?

http://www.ittechexec.com/


Let's face it. Making a career move in today's tech job

market can be uncertain.

It penalizes you for things you often can't control...for being too "old," too experienced, too qualified, too "technical," too

expensive.

It might not reward you for this cert or that title. And many companies struggle with their talent retention efforts, to put it lightly.

By “uncertain,” I don’t mean lack of jobs. I mean, well, uncertain. Career moves are happening every 3 to 4 years. Even if you beat those odds, change is very much part of the market, especially in tech fields.





How much time, money, and other resources have you devoted to getting where you are today?

There's no arguing that an MBA or other grad degree or the latest certification or PMP or PE credential is still a major resume "booster."

In the past, though, just the fact that you had one or two would immediately open doors for you. Grad schools and cert programs knew this, of course. So they convinced us to go into debt to get them (and to keep going into debt to sustain them).

Today, however, the continuous quest for more credentials does not always equate to immediate open doors. The job market is more discerning, and these programs don't do much to prepare you for that market, much less the technical job market that often has its own set of rules. So you can invest quite a bit of your own time and resources only to find out that you still need to know how to position yourself properly. (For more on this, see my own “MBA story”.)

If you're anything like me and my entire team at ITtechExec, you've probably spent thousands on graduate degrees and certifications, countless hours throwing yourself into the latest development project or solutions initiative, and more time than you might care to admit thinking about work.




Right now we are actually seeing people in their early 40s worry about age, level of experience, and salary range...all because "irrelevancy" seems to be on everyone's lips.

This perception has invaded the tech job market in particular...that age and relevancy are tied together, that more experience somehow makes you stale, and that a high salary means you aren't hungry or enthusiastic anymore.

Does the market send signals that it thinks you might be too “old,” experienced, expensive, etc.?




So the question becomes, then, what is your answer to this market going to be?

Hint: 95% of technical professionals will all do the same

thing; the same thing they’ve always done...





They’ll toss out a resume (even maybe a decent one) and then hope for the best.





And they’ll expect their peer-to-peer networking to do what it has always done for them...

Work.





But there isn't much that is conventional about the tech job market at the moment.

Although traditional approaches do still have merit, they are convoluted in the tech job market zoo.

You will find that even with the credentials and the good peer referral, you still need a differentiator to back it all up. Otherwise, you end up with lots of nice interviews and discussions but no offer...even though you are qualified.

Although jobs are opening up, promotions are on the rise, and contract/consulting opportunities are exploding, the fierce competition, the demand for more than just degrees and certifications, and the question of relevancy all make it uncertain...a bit of a "zoo," if you will.




In an ideal world, we’d get all of our jobs through peer-to-peer networking referrals

and a basic resume.In the past, maybe you always have.

Today, though, it doesn’t always work that way. It’s important to come at the market from diverse angles or to have “pipelines,” if you will.

From the Tech Job Market Zoo to the Corporate Goo...


Does today’s job search and social media all just seem like a big game to you? Honestly, it kind of is. Technology, as much as we love it, has taken the traditional job search process and made it more convoluted…and expensive. The good

news, however, is that some tools are opening up opportunities that were much harder to find before.

The challenge is in knowing which game is worth playing for you.

Check out my own career story on the following pages for why I do what I do.


So, How Do You Protect Yourself Today for Tomorrow’s Move?

Protection begins with preparation and continues with maintenance. And that should start today

(well, really, yesterday!).

BTW: It's not really a question of being optimistic or pessimistic. Having good karma or bad karma. About always landing on your feet or swimming with the fishes. It's about recognizing the market for where it is right now and moving forward with it. Not where it used to be 5, 10, 15, years ago.





No Matter Which Type of Career Move You Want to Make…

External Search, Internal Promotion, or Contract Opportunity…

It All Starts With Preparation.





If an opportunity came your way tomorrow, how prepared would you be?





It’s Too Hard to Start From Scratch…and to Get the Timing “Right”

There’s this tendency to overestimate the value of experience and certifications to the market (that 95% think those alone will "sell" them).

They remain stuck in how the job search process used to be or in expecting the next promotion to come because it always has before or because they've worked hard for it and deserve it.

It can be a rude and expensive awakening to find out that what used to work is now not as effective.

Back in the day, you put a basic resume together, worked a few connections or answered a few job ads, and felt pretty certain the right opportunity would come along. Then if you worked hard and didn't burn too many bridges, you most likely had a pretty secure career path ahead of you perhaps even with the same company.




But there is the 5% who are adapting to where the market is now.

They’re not smarter or have it all together. They’ve just invested differently.

They’ve understood the proper preparation they need because they have a lot to lose, so they’ve maintained that preparation to build in those protections today for the next move.

And no, they aren’t all 25-30 years old, single, and “techie cool”!




This is not just a question of updating your resume or getting another certification.

That’s what everyone else is doing.




The Resume Is Only Part of the StoryThat’s why some technical pros (the 5%) have made a radical adjustment over the past year, to continue to embrace the chronological resume (because it still serves a purpose) but to build in addenda or portfolio pages to go along with the resume that, when used properly, can help build in flexibility and prepare you to face different hiring scenarios.

In addition, they recognize the growing significance of the LinkedIn profile and, even more importantly, the need for it to be optimized for LinkedIn’s search algorithm.

Portfolio pages could include Problem-Solutions-Results, Innovation, Bio, Marketing Brief, Project Highlights Brief, and Testimonials pages, just to name a few. There are so many tools at your disposal in today’s job search, but you don’t need to do (or buy!) all of them. You just need to know what’s right for you and your situation.

For More Information on Portfolio Pages, check out my presentation “What Is a Technical Resume Portfolio, and Why You Need One.”

Although resumes are still important (despite what you may hear), they don’t tell the whole story and they often aren’t even read because they all look and sound the same. Portfolio Pages Can Provide Depth and Versatility

For example, a Problems-Solutions-Results page is a great opportunity to highlight key projects and the business improvements that resulted from your efforts. It enhances the story you started with your resume.



http://www.slideshare.net/StephenVanVreede/what-is-a-technical-resume-portfolioand-why-you-need-one

http://stephenvanvreede.com/2014/01/09/problems-solutions-results-is-psr-the-new-resume-format/


Maybe you can relate….

A lot of times we know what we “should” do, but either we don’t do it or we just wait until we have to because:• We no longer have the ambition we once did• We have kids to raise and focus on• We believe the obstacles we will face in the market

are too overwhelming or exhausting to face• Work no longer matters much• We’re too busy• We always figure something out when we need to• We’re not really sure what we want to do next• We have external concerns that weigh on us• We have other unfulfilled goals and dreams




BUT protecting careers protects families.

Too many times we think of our careers in terms of climbing the ladder of ambition and in having it all “figured out.”

And although there’s nothing wrong with having ambition, there’s much more to our livelihoods than that. There are people depending on us, and no matter where we stand on the corporate ladder, we all have

something to protect.

And that protection requires preparation. (If you want to toss in ambition, great!) It doesn’t necessarily mean you have your whole life mapped out or that the obstacles you face aren’t real. It does mean,

though, that you aren’t going to keep letting corporate whims and job market trends toss you around with no regard for you and your family.



What is the cost of doing nothing?


BUT where do you start?Getting your resume ready is a start, but it's no longer enough.

At the same time, though, you don’t need to do everything (or buy everything!).

You can waste a lot of resources doing that.

To help you get a better feel for where you currently stand in preparing for tomorrow’s career move, I’ve developed a simple self-assessment survey you can take that is quick to do, free, and helps get you

thinking about where you are and where you need to be:

Career Move Preparation Self-Assessment



That’s not the end of the story…

http://ittechexec.polldaddy.com/s/career-move-self-assessment?p=1&r=AF76B318DBAB251E97CE85780CBB59BD&pb=1


Preparation Is Just the Beginning

External Search, Internal Promotion, or Contract Opportunity…

“Protection” Comes With Maintenance.





Don't Get Stuck in the Muck with the 95%

If you just plan for one career move at a time, no matter where you are in your career, you could be making an expensive mistake.

OK, so along with still putting all their eggs in the proverbial “resume” basket, most technical professionals also fail to be “ever ready.”

They know they kind of need to be, but they get stuck in that period of time where work and life take over, and the last thing they want to do is keep their resume, much less a portfolio, updated. But Proper Maintenance Is the Key to the Whole Thing!

With the rapidly shifting market we seem to be in, and career moves happening every 3-4 years or less, technical professionals in particular are being forced to keep their options open, at all times.




Yes, expensive.

Career services and job search support solutions are booming, especially in tech, thanks to growing demand (lots of career moves and lots of competition for positions) and to social recruiting processes

(companies are vetting candidates much more now).

So you can expect prices to double for these services over the next few years.

At the same time, when uncertainty hits, if you are not prepared for the market as it is then, any amount of employment gap hurts your wallet. It’s extremely expensive to be out of work, and employment gaps make

life even tougher, especially with recruiters.



But I get it…being in constant job search mode is tiring.


So why not build your portfolio/LI profile once and then put a little effort into keeping it maintained on a regular basis?

And when I say “maintained,” I don’t just mean adding job descriptions. I am referring to adjusting your materials to the adjusting tech job market.

It changes and fluctuates. Your brand messaging should move with it.



And that’s another thing the 95% won’t do.

Or better yet, why not have a team who

does it for you, even reminds you , and

watches the market for you?


You don’t have to suddenly turn into the tech job market guru.

You can look for Career Maintenance & Protection Solutions that are designed as a yearly subscription service to keep your materials relevant, up to date, and always ready to go.

This way, you are free to focus on the things that matter more.

It doesn’t have to be tiring. It really can be simple.



To talk more about this, feel free to contact me, Stephen Van Vreede, through my firm ITtechExec.

Let’s Talk Some More

http://www.ittechexec.com/contact2.html


If you don’t do anything more, at least start to consider…



where you currently stand in preparing for tomorrow’s career move. Maybe it seems overwhelming or too time-consuming. But it doesn’t have to be:

Career Move Preparation Self-Assessment

http://ittechexec.polldaddy.com/s/career-move-self-assessment?p=1&r=AF76B318DBAB251E97CE85780CBB59BD&pb=1


Silly me. I thought an MBA mixed with hard work was my ticket…

(A Note from Stephen Van Vreede, Co-Founder of ITtechExec/NoddlePlace)

When I first started my career, generally I didn’t know anyone who actually paid to have their resume (or résumé, for the purists among us) written, much less for “career services.”

Let's be real. It used to be pretty cut-and-dry. You put a basic 1-page (or maybe 2-page) resume (or résumé) together, worked a few connections or answered a few "classifieds," and felt pretty certain the right opportunity would come along. Then if you worked hard (got the right certs) and didn't burn too many bridges, you most likely had a pretty secure career path ahead of you perhaps even with the same company.

And at first, throughout most of the early part of my corporate life, that was generally how things went. I moved from internal position to internal position without the need to invest in resume or other career services, eventually landing a director-level role with a large GE Capital, multi-site inbound call center serving the logistics industry.


But then the job market began to change, my priorities shifted, and job security was, well, less secure.

So I decided to go back for my MBA and obtain some other credentials (sound familiar?), which cost me thousands and thousands (and thousands) of dollars (just ask my lovely bride who helped pay for them!). I even clawed my way through the Six Sigma process to become a Black Belt.

It was a great experience, but after two years of working full time and taking night classes, when I graduated, the job market wasn’t much better, competition for internal promotions was greater, and I wasn’t the only one with an MBA, a Black Belt, etc.


That’s when I was introduced to resume design and career services.

I came to recognize that the time and resources I had already spent on my career were worth protecting. The market was too uncertain and changing too rapidly for me to continue to go it alone.

At this point, I had already invested in someone to handle my retirement,another someone to do my taxes, and another someone to find me the right home. It wasn’t such a stretch to think that my career mattered as much, if not more, than these other things. After all, without it, then I couldn’t afford the retirement or the house (and yes even the taxes).


I began to see where resume/career services could play an integral part…

in not only helping people to secure jobs but also in building in protections to the careers we’ve all worked so hard to achieve.

Eventually, my wife, Sheree, and I began our own firm in 2001 called “No Stone Unturned” in 2001. Initially, we had a small office where we hosted seminars and workshops, wrote resumes, and served a cross section of professionals and backgrounds.

And although writing resumes and teaching some seminars was fine, we wanted to do better. And we knew we could.


ITtechExec was launched…Thanks to my background in IT/telecom management for the supply chain/logistics industry and to Sheree’s experience serving as an editor to the scientific/engineering community in the publishing world, we soon realized that we were best suited to serve the technical professional trying to maneuver through what by that point (2008) had become a complex and exhausting job market. (Let’s face it…it’s a bit of a zoo out there!)

Not only that, we noticed that other resume writers were avoiding technical clients, unsure of how best to position their specialized skills.

Therefore, it wasn’t long before we began to work exclusively with IT and technical or “STEM” clientele, professionals who have devoted themselves to some of the most innovative and rewarding fields in today’s industries, from engineering to healthcare IT to scientific exploration to big data and cloud services to project/program management.

That’s when ITtechExec was born…


Silly me. I thought we could just write resumes…Then, before we knew it, unemployment skyrocketed and the tech market began waging its war for sophisticated tech talent.

And on top of all that, social media recruiting burst onto the scene, and the landscape became pretty messy, pretty fast. Soon, hiring folks were claiming they were no longer reading resumes (even though they continued to ask for them), and the job market became such a zoo that candidates found themselves focused on a document that everyone says they won't look at for more than 6 seconds but it better not have any typos in it!

That’s when we realized that we could no longer just write a resume and send our clients on their way. They needed better preparation and lasting protections. They needed strategies and tools that, well, worked.

We knew then that we had to become a full-service career advancement and protection firm, not just another resume-writing firm.


95% of technical leaders obsess over the resume even though they don't believe it has much value.

So we asked ourselves, if you know the market is a zoo, that resumes aren't likely to be read, and that obstacles like age or experience are more pronounced than ever, why would you (a) keep approaching it from the same angle over and over or (b) sit back and do nothing? Why wouldn't you instead focus on where the real value lies?

With tech professionals changing jobs every 3 to 4 years, consulting/contracting on the rise, and fierce competition for promotions, it's time to try something that is based on how the market is actually working now, not 10, 15, even 5 years ago.

It's why we've made a radical shift to a more portfolio-driven approach instead of just a resume-based one.


Yes, the resume is part of it, but let’s get more from your investment.You still need a solid chronological resume (no matter what you may hear) geared toward a very specific audience, but when done properly, having addenda to go along with the resume can be much more effective (and much more likely to be read!), not to mention the significance of the LinkedIn profile, which will continue to grow over the next few years.

Portfolios can help build in flexibility and prepare you to face different hiring scenarios. But you need to know which tools are best for your situation. Although there is a lot out there you can do (or buy), you don't need to do everything (that's the good news!).

So whether you are an external job seeker looking for a new full-time role, a consultant going for the next contract, or an internal leader seeking promotion or just retention (such as during an acquisition), because we are following the tech job market closely, the real investment is in knowing which tools are right for you and how to properly use them. (To learn more about why we recommend a portfolio-driven approach, check out our presentations: http://ow.ly/viT6C and http://ow.ly/vM9UH.)

No one can predict for certain what the market will do, but we can make sure that you are prepared for whatever comes.

http://ow.ly/viT6C

http://ow.ly/vM9UH


Building the messaging AND the strategic vision for your job search that lead to solutions.

The portfolio is great, the branding is wonderful, but now what are you going to do with it? Is it going to give you experience you don't have, turn you into something you're not, take away the gray in your hair? Of course not. But when done right, it can do something that the 95% of technical professionals keep missing: It can speak to the needs of your target audience ONCE you get it into their hands.

And that is ultimately why we do what we do. We equip you to face obstacles in the market, and we position you for the best chances of success.

We began developing this approach in late 2011 when we started to realize that our client “members” needed more than just a resume and basic messaging; they needed a strategic vision.


That’s how NoddlePlace came to be…To best provide this strategic visioning, we needed to differentiate our solutions even further! This meant tailoring some to meet the needs of the more experienced tech pro, the leader with 15+ years of experience who was now wondering how to face this market that seemed to penalize them often for things they can’t control, like age, experience, and high salaries. For them, it isn’t so much about climbing ladders as it is about protecting what they’ve built so far and staying relevant to the marketplace.

So we customized ITtechExec to meet the needs of this type of client.

Then we introduced NoddlePlace in 2013. Here we focus on the “emerging” technical professional with 5 to 15 years of experience who knows another 25 years or more in the tech job market means 8+ more career moves, statistically speaking, and wants to keep advancing in the market but now has a lot of other demands on his or her time.

In either case, though, they are both looking for real solutions…


Maybe you can relate….

A lot of times we know what we “should” do, but either we don’t do it or we just wait until we have to because:• We no longer have the ambition we once did• We have kids to raise and focus on• We believe the obstacles we will face in the market

are too overwhelming or exhausting to face• Work no longer matters much• We’re too busy• We always figure something out when we need to• We’re not really sure what we want to do next• We have external concerns that weigh on us• We have other unfulfilled goals and dreams


BUT protecting careers protects families.

Too many times we think of our careers in terms of climbing the ladder of ambition and in having it all “figured out.”

And although there’s nothing wrong with having ambition, there’s much more to our livelihoods than that. There are people depending on us, and no matter where we stand on the corporate ladder, we all have

something to protect.

And that protection requires preparation. (If you want to toss in ambition, great!) It doesn’t necessarily mean you have your whole life mapped out or that the obstacles you face aren’t real. It does mean,

though, that you aren’t going to keep letting corporate whims and job market trends toss you around with no regard for you and your family.

What is the cost of doing nothing?


So we’ve developed our solutions, not to be so much an investment in a “resume” as an investment in proper positioning and solutions to the market.

Call it holistic. Call it different. We like to think of it in terms of allowing us to track results and ROI.

There are good resume writers out there. But they can’t/don’t/won’t do anything more than write the resume and send you on your way. And the resume alone isn’t really addressing the main issue: your age, lack of experience (too much experience), family or geographic restrictions, job hopping, you name it.

Having the right messaging is good; having the right messaging with the right strategic vision is better.

But the story doesn’t end there…or it shouldn’t…


To learn more about ITtechExec or our other solutions:

Check Us Out

Or call Stephen toll-free at 1-866-755-9800; email at [email protected].



http://www.ittechexec.com/contact2.html