12 Creating Your Strategic Plan

A job or career search without a plan is like a journey without an end.

Chapter Overview

Chapters 1 through 11 give you the information and insight you need to know and do before making a job or career change. You’re now ready to use your skills and knowledge to create your strategic plan in pursuit of your career aspirations.

But wait! What do you do first? How do you keep track of everything you need to do in some sort of a logical order? How do you put all the information you just learned into some sort of a plan—a strategic plan?

Tell me and I’ll forget;

show me and I may remember;

involve me and I’ll understand.

—Chinese proverb

If I approached this book only by communicating the lessons, techniques, and experience I gained, you’d probably finish it, put it on the bookshelf, and perhaps remember and implement some of it. However, I actively involved you in the process, to not only learn how to implement what I suggested, but to also get that “a-ha” and be able to tailor the information to your particular circumstances.

Although there’s no one way to conduct a job or career search that works for everyone, this chapter will help you put together a coherent plan so you can move forward quickly toward your goal: a new job or career. This chapter includes the following sections:

Organize your environment.

Develop your strategic plan.

Special situations: diversity, gender, age.

When you’ve completed this chapter, you’ll be able to prepare a personalized action plan that you can implement immediately.

Organize Your Environment

If you don’t organize your environment and set policies for your home office, you’ll waste time on unproductive details, miss important telephone calls, or come across poorly when you most need to start on the right foot. You may have had administrative support in your last job, but you are now your own administrative support.

The following suggestions will help you organize the administrative side of your search.

Working Environment

View your home workplace as you would any other office environment, minus the hassle of a commute.

If you don’t have a home office, set space aside so you have a regular workplace that’s relatively free of distractions and with convenient access to a telephone, a PC with Internet access, and a printer.

Get supplies (paper clips, stapler, plain white paper, and so forth) so they’re handy when you need them.

Purchase bright white smooth quality paper for your resume and contrasting off-white bond paper and envelopes for letters.

Create a template for your letterhead so you don’t have to re-create it each time you prepare a letter. Make it look different from the font you use in the body of your letter. (See examples in Chapter 9.)

Quiet Business Focus

Situate your workplace away from distractions and noises.

You may be working from home, but you’re at work. You need to set boundaries as to when you’ll be available to your family.

You can’t conduct research efficiently in a noisy environment.

If you try to carry on a conversation with a contact or an interviewer while dogs bark, kids clamor for your attention, or babies cry in the background, you’ll lose a contact or a job opportunity.

Set Rules

Determine between what hours you’ll conduct research, make telephone calls, and manage correspondence.

Set times for making telephone calls, researching on the Internet, and networking. Get into a routine that others, including family, will remember.

Allocate time for the family and make sure they know when you will be available.

Administrative Resources

You’ll be your own administrative support, so you need to know how to prepare and edit your resume and type your letters and envelopes.

Learn word-processing software.

Learn the search methodology of various search engines, such as Google.

Research the Internet to see what’s available and how to find what you need to know.

Get a dictionary and a thesaurus and USE THEM!

Telephone Etiquette

Make sure your family members are clear on who is permitted to answer the telephone and what they should say when you aren’t there.

Give your younger children examples of what to say and how to take accurate messages. (This may be a tough one for teenagers!) A well-behaved child who knows what to do and takes information down correctly makes a positive impact on callers. As a recruiter, I was always impressed when a preteen answered the telephone and knew what to say and do.

Don’t put people on hold to take another call. They’ll think you think that the other caller is more important than they are.

Use your local telephone company’s voice-mail system and record a professional message. Set it so incoming calls automatically go to your voice mail if you’re on the phone. If you or a family member uses the phone a lot and someone returns your call, you don’t want him to get a busy signal.

Illustration by Steven Lait.

Do not attempt to take calls on your cell phone while you are traveling, even if it is hands-free. The other person may not appreciate having to only hear part of the conversation because of a poor connection, diminished voice quality, or a dropped call.

E-Mail Etiquette

Use an e-mail address that closely approximates your name, such as cwellenstein@, carlwellenstein@, or carlw@. Don’t use nicknames or other monikers, such as armybrat3@, blondysuzy@, gizmoguy@, or sszzyyxx@. Using your name as part of your e-mail address allows the recipient to know who’s sending the e-mail without having to open it.

Do not use a spam blocker that requires the sender to respond to your ISP’s filter questionnaire, such as by requiring the sender to enter data that matches stylized letters and numbers in a box (commonly used by Earthlink). E-mails acknowledging receipt of your letter or resume cannot handle such a request. We’re all dealing with unwanted e-mail but, if you want others to help you, don’t ask them to take their extra time just so you can minimize the spam you receive.

Review your e-mails before you send them. Grammar and spelling errors in e-mail are just as important to correct as if they were in a letter. Avoid using abbreviations, like thx for taking my call, glad to c u, and don’t end with:-), and don’t use emoticons. many senders of e-mail think capitalization and punctuation are optional. who ever thought that was ok is wrong its difficult and confusing to read.

Make e-mail easy for recipients by including their messages when you reply. Set your e-mail program to include the sender’s message on all replies.

Keep your message brief and to the point. People at work can’t take the time to read lengthy e-mail.

Be careful with the content of your e-mail. Many companies scan incoming e-mail for words like resume and job search, and they may automatically delete any attachments.

Research and Reference Material

Learn what reference material is available at your local library.

Select some companies in your industry or field of interest; see what you can find out about them on the Internet and compare that with what you find at the library.

Get a library card that enables you to access library research data from your home PC.

Prepare a Budget

Using the example in Worksheet 11.1: Calculating Your Salary Requirements, prepare a monthly budget reflecting the line items covering the next 12 months.

Update this budget with actual numbers for the first few months to make sure your estimate reasonably reflects your actual expenditures. Adjust your remaining budget, if necessary.

Determine NOW when you will have a shortfall, and consider how you plan to cover your expenses.

Overcome Procrastination

When you work from home in isolation, you tend to let your thoughts divert you from your new job—which is to find your next job! Particularly in a difficult economy where you feel you’re getting nowhere, you begin to spend less time on your job search and more on distractions.

Minimize procrastination by organizing your workplace, and planning daily and weekly tasks—and sticking to them. The following section will help you do that.

Develop Your Strategic Plan

Your personal strategic plan, like a business plan, is a dynamic document. It will change as circumstances warrant and as you progress in your job search or career change. If you’re searching for a new job, your plan probably won’t change much. If you’re making a career change, however, you should expect your plan to evolve as you go through the Obtain phase and you gather more information about your career objective.

Throughout this book, I’ve attempted to show you what you need to do, explain why you need to do it, and then give you guidelines on how to do it. Your strategic plan will build on the material, exercises, and worksheets you’ve completed and enable you to implement your search in a logical, organized, and productive manner.

Your plan will consist of the following three simple and dynamic documents:

1. The first will be a Task Plan that lists specific objectives that will keep you focused on what you need to do.

2. The second will be a daily To-Do List that will help you manage your time and describe how you will accomplish a specific objective.

3. The third will be a Contact Sheet that will help you to keep track of all your contacts, your conversations with them, and what activities are to happen next with them.

Here is how they work interactively.

1. Task Plan

Your Task Plan is a list of all the key things you need to accomplish over the next several weeks. The information you enter should be generalized, such as “Complete resume.” You don’t need much detail here.

Prepare a Task Plan or Open Items List using a format similar to the following figure. (Because you will be updating this form often, I suggest you prepare it in Microsoft Word as a table so you can insert and delete rows and sort it by column.)

The headers should include:

No.	(Number). A priority group number rather than a sequential row number. For example, you might identify all the tasks you need to complete first as 1s. Those that need to be done next would be 2s and so on.
Objective.	A description of what you want to accomplish. For example, you might have “Complete resume” or “Review resume with John Bloggs.”
Resp.	(Responsibility). Identifies who is responsible for completing each task. Usually it’s you, but it could be someone you’ve asked to review your resume and give you comments or someone who is to get back to you after they talk to a referral.
ECD	(Estimated Completion Date). The date you expect that task to be completed. This could be a completion date or a required follow-up date.

Start by reviewing the Milestones section for each chapter and listing all the open items on your task plan. Enter who is responsible for completing it and a tentative ECD. Do NOT enter a priority number yet.

Next, add personal- and business-related (job or career search) tasks that will require your time and insert a tentative ECD. Don’t include daily recurring tasks, such as going to the gym, and don’t forecast too far into the future (for example, three months) because you’ll be updating the list often.

Now, review your Task Plan and enter a priority number in the left column. I’d suggest limiting your priorities to no more than 5. If they are farther down the list than that, they probably don’t need to be on it until they get closer to needing to be done. Sort your list by priority number and/or by date so you know what needs to be accomplished first and by when.

2. To-Do List

Review your Task Plan for the next week and prepare a To-Do List for each day listing what you plan to do every day to accomplish the general tasks on your Task Plan for that week. If you do it for a week at a time, you can anticipate schedule conflicts and be able to see your plan taking shape going forward.

Using a PDA or a small notepad titled To Do (with the day and date), list your objectives each day for the next week (using a separate sheet for each day if using a notepad) that will lead you to completing the key tasks on your prioritized Task Plan. Include the personal things, such as going to the gym or the post office, so you can keep track of all your goals for that day. Refer to your To-Do List daily (keeping it on top of your desk if on a notepad) as a constant reminder and check off the ones you complete.

Indicate the priority by day for each task or group them by 1s, 2s, 3s, and so forth. Don’t fall into the trap of listing the easiest ones as your highest priorities. Choose those that are most important for that day as the highest priority.

Try to keep track of how much time you spent on each objective for each day of the first week. It will help you to make more realistic time commitments in the future. You’ll probably begin by having too many tasks each day and not allocating enough time for each.

Pick the times of day that you’ll make telephone calls, research on the Internet, and so on, and adjust your schedule over the first few weeks so you’re able to stick to those times. Don’t make all your telephone calls or prepare letters in one day because you won’t be able to follow up with them effectively if you have too many commitments. When you do follow-up, try to make all your calls together so you don’t tie up your telephone throughout the day.

At the end of each day, revise the next day’s To-Do List.

At the end of each week, update your Task Plan, and prepare tentative To-Do Lists for each day of the following week.

3. Contact Sheet

You now need a way to keep all the information about your contacts in one place where you can also keep track of your conversations with them and have a way of making sure you follow up with them on a timely basis.

If you already use a contact-management system, such as Microsoft Business Contact Manager, ACT, or GoldMine, and are experienced with it, consider using it. If not, don’t spend time now buying and learning a new software program. Instead, use Worksheet 12.1: Contact Sheet (available online in its entirety, along with instructions).

On the top part of your Contact Sheet, enter the contact information that you’ve been accumulating for each person in your network. Start with summarized information about that person, including conversations, referrals, leads, and so forth. Enter a follow-up date on the last line of text, and file the Contact Sheets alphabetically in a three-ring binder. Enter the follow-up date in your personal diary, such as a Day-Timer, a PDA, or one of the software programs described previously.

When you have further conversations with a contact, start a new line with the date and enter a summary of the discussion, followed by any actions you or he are to take, and the next contact date.

Create scripts (examples of what you want to say) and keep them handy when you call. Determine your objectives before you make the call, using keywords. Don’t write out sentences. If you don’t make a list before you call, you’ll remember after you hang up all the things you forgot to ask!

Conducting a job or a career search is probably new to you, and you’ll be doing many things you aren’t comfortable or confident about. If you don’t have a clear strategic plan for the near term and look at it on a daily basis, you can easily become overwhelmed and find that you’ll be distracted into doing things that don’t help you achieve your ultimate goal of getting a new job or career.

Your Contact Sheets will prove extremely helpful to you after several weeks of conversations with many people as it will help to highlight and remind you about those who know each other and could become your Power Contacts. (See “Expand Your Network” in Chapter 8 on page 163.)

Special Situations: Diversity, Gender, Age

There’s much concern about discrimination in recruitment. From my years in executive search, I wasn’t aware of any of our search consultants ever showing bias against candidates based purely on race, gender, or national origin, and, to my knowledge, none of our clients ever asked us to exclude candidates or not offer them candidates based solely on these characteristics.

You’ll notice I didn’t include age in the previous examples. Although we did encounter an occasional instance of overt age discrimination, we typically encountered it more covertly. I’ll explain the reasons for discrimination in each of these three areas and suggest how you can deal with them.

Diversity

I’ll define diversity as race, religion, and country of origin. It’s important to remember that companies employ people who have the skills and experience they need and can fit in and adapt to the company’s “culture.”

If you don’t fit the profile of the existing employees at a potential employer, you’re probably going to experience discrimination, unless that employer is making a determined effort to broaden the diversity within their organization. If you consider your diversity a disadvantage, you’ll probably find that to be true. It can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Instead, look for reasons why a company should consider you for your diversity, and focus on what you bring to the table that someone without that diversity can’t.

For example, if you’re Hispanic, you’re probably multi-lingual, and, not only do you speak Spanish, but you bring a comprehensive understanding of Hispanic culture. A non-Hispanic may have learned the language in school, but doesn’t understand the subtleties and nuances that a native speaker might. Your strength is that you’re able to be sensitive to different regional dialects, and other Hispanics are more likely to have more confidence in you and prefer to deal with you. You’ll need to look inward and identify what makes you different, and why that should give you an advantage over other candidates.

On the other hand, you might not find any advantage to your diversity. For example, if you’re black or Native American and can’t find an advantage because of your race, there may not really be any. Forget about your diversity, and focus on the skills and experience you have that an employer needs.

We never encountered discrimination against blacks, and none of my clients ever expressed a desire to discriminate based on race. I’m sure there are situations where there is covert discrimination. If that happens, it’s probably not a company you would want to work at anyway.

I’ve seen discrimination against diversity candidates, but it tends to relate to their inability to speak English clearly. I suspect that, if Arnold Schwarzenegger weren’t a movie star and governor of California, he would encounter employment discrimination just based on his accent.

Here are some suggestions if you’re in this category:

Focus on the skills and experience you have that an employer needs; diversity from your perspective isn’t an important issue to an employer.

Identify if your diversity gives you an advantage over others without that diversity. If so, diversity from your perspective should be an important issue to an employer.

If you’re targeting larger companies, they will probably be more open and receptive to candidates of diversity because governmental initiatives require them to be more open to candidates of diversity.

If you’re targeting smaller companies, focus on the uniqueness of what you can do for them that someone who doesn’t have that diversity can’t do as well. Consider the first two points in this list.

If you think a strong foreign accent is holding you back, rather than focusing on that diversity, work with someone who can help you overcome that issue.

Gender

Gender issues typically relate to women. In my experience, I never encountered discrimination either overtly or covertly against women. I have been involved in situations where the client thought a man or a woman would be better for a particular situation based on the position profile.

For example, one client needed a merchandising executive for a company that was going to focus on upscale outdoor entertaining. The client felt the ideal candidate would probably come from a women’s fashion retail environment, a belief we shared. Naturally, we focused our search on women.

There are some unfortunate issues, however, that do affect women in their job search. If you’re a woman, you probably already know this, and you may not find this subject covered in other career books.

Issue 1

Men who are determined, aggressive, and risk-takers are often admired and promoted to higher levels of management, whereas women with the same characteristics generally are not. If they are, they’re often criticized for doing what a man would be praised for doing. Trying to get others to change their attitude is a waste of time.

If you bear these characteristics and have been criticized for them, try to find a more subtle way of accomplishing the same thing. Women are often considered to have higher levels of EQ (see Chapter 3) than men, and should be able to recognize the impact they’re having on others more easily than men. It may not be fair that women need to be more subtle than men, but in some situations, they just do. It’s reality.

Issue 2

Men get more distinguished as they get older, whereas women … well, they just get older—that’s the perception by many. How does this affect your job search? Because the first assessment of you will be visual (see Chapter 9 and Chapter 10), there will be a much stronger need for you as a woman to keep up your appearance. Again, it may not be fair, but it’s reality.

If you’re in your 40s and you see a woman who appears much older than that when you look in a mirror, you need to pay careful attention to your appearance. This doesn’t mean you need to rush out for a facelift or Botox treatments. It means you need to make sure you present a professional appearance. Look for younger-looking styles of clothing and choose colors that don’t accentuate your age.

Issue 3

Being overweight affects both men and women. Unfortunately, from my experience, it negatively affects women more than it does men during a job search.

I’m not trying to initiate a debate on the unfairness of hiring decisions for women versus men. I want to point out that they do exist, and you need to consider these issues seriously, even though virtually no one will tell you to your face—and certainly not in writing—the real reason you didn’t make it to the shortlist or get the job.

Age

Age discrimination is alive and flourishing! Despite laws attempting to eradicate this, age discrimination is ingrained in the employment process. Sometimes it’s covert; other times it’s flagrantly overt.

I remember one VP of HR, who was in his early 40s, tell me, “Don’t bring me any candidates in their 40s. They’re too old.” He explained they had too many “older” employees who were close to retirement. If they didn’t start recruiting younger people, they were concerned they wouldn’t be able to adapt to new technology as quickly as they needed to survive for the long term. Although I didn’t think it fair, it certainly made strategic sense for the organization!

If you’re in your late 40s or older, prepare your strategic plan with the following in mind, regardless of whether you’re male or female:

Contacting recruiters will be less effective for you, unless you have the name recognition and track record of a Jack Welch. Recruiters are looking for younger candidates because that’s who their clients want to employ. Exceptions to this would be when a company needs someone older to do something a younger person wouldn’t have the experience to do. An example would be in a turnaround situation where a seasoned person with the experience and industry contacts could be critical to the company’s success.

You’ll need to make a compelling case as to why an employer would want to choose an older person for more money over a younger person for less money.

Your resume should reflect the activities you’re involved in outside of work, which demonstrate you’re not a couch potato.

Your skills and experience need to show you are techno-savvy. Many executives tell me they don’t know how to use e-mail. At work, their support person prints their incoming e-mail and sends replies for them. When they’re in transition, they often use their spouse’s e-mail address and have her handle e-mail. This clearly sends the wrong message to prospective employers: that you’re not up to speed technically and not able to adapt to or embrace change. If we suspected you weren’t adept in this area, we would probe your use of the Internet. If it sounded as if you didn’t know how to use it proficiently, you weren’t likely to land on a shortlist.

You’ll need to place more reliance on building your network and using it for referrals. A recommendation from someone whom the potential employer already knows can often overcome the age issue.

Consider targeting smaller companies if you have a large-company background. You bring a wealth of experience that someone can gain only from a larger, more sophisticated company. Smaller companies may need that experience and won’t be able to find it in younger candidates who would be less motivated to move to a smaller company.

You’ll need to overcome an initial perception that you won’t be able to make the transition from a big company atmosphere, where you had a lot of support, to a smaller company, where that won’t be the case. Your responsibilities in a smaller company are typically much broader. Your strategic plan would need to address what you will say that will overcome that perception by potential employers.