Invest in yourself - earn a great career in return

October 6, 2009 11:08 by Admin

When economic times are tough it is the perfect time to invest in yourself and your career. Karen Gray is a leading career expert who set up and runs www.onlinecareermanager.com.  Her company offers a whole range of career packages online from CV auditing to psychometric testing to career coaching.  She believes that to make it through the recession you need to develop career confidence.


With all the media coverage of financial sector crisis, market uncertainty and burgeoning recession, it would be easy to convince yourself that now is not the best time to be reassessing your career direction or out in the recruitment market, and that you’d be best to keep your head down – but you’d be wrong.

Now is a perfect time to sit back and take serious stock of your career situation. Use the time productively to carefully analyse what you offer the market, define your preferred career future and work out a way of getting there. In effect you are taking time to sharpen up your marketing plan, perfect your sales pitch. Most importantly, you are investing in your key shareholder – yourself.

Whilst the talk on the street is generally negative right now, the corporate heart of Ireland is still beating strongly, with companies still looking to fill key organisational roles, at all levels.

The jobs are out there, both through agencies and under direct company advertisement, for which interview candidates still need to be found.

If you are career confident – i.e. you know exactly what you’re after work wise, and have honed your self-marketing skills to perfection, then now is actually an excellent time to be offering your services in the job market.

This is because many talented people prefer to play safe and stay put, rather than venture out into candidate-land - even when they’re in jobs they are sick of, and don’t want to spend another minute in! Their lack of career confidence displays as a high preference for time-dependent job security. For that reason, the level of high-class competition, particularly for high level jobs, can be significantly reduced right now.

If you’re in a work situation where you are worried that redundancy may be around the corner, then you should be making career confidence your best friend.

You can do this by being fully aware of your skills & talents, know how to apply them to best effect in work, and understand their real value. Analyse them alongside your specific work requirements and take time to determine the most personally profitable career future for yourself. Finally, develop your CV into an effective marketing brochure, and start to practice your interview techniques. It is amazing just how much being career confident shows at work, and is actually capable of averting a redundancy situation.

If you are interested in investing in yourself and building career confidence then click here. From the comfort of your own home you can work with a range of professionals, based here in Ireland, who will work with you to help assess and develop your career.

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