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How to make the right career move

Rachelle Canter, also known as Shelley Canter, has a doctorate in psychology and is President of RJC Associates, a consulting firm that provides career, executive, and team development services to corporations, professional service firms, and other organizations.

Her clients include some of the best known and most respected companies in the world, such as American Express, Apple, CNET and Deloitte & Touche, to name a few.

Rachelle, when would someone know it’s the right time for them to make a career move/change?

Timing career moves depends on your career plan. A clear view of where you are headed and what you need to learn or do to get you there is a huge help in timing your next move. In a down economy, it is easy to think, I have to hang onto my job, no matter how miserable I might be. But the right time to make a career move is when you have ceased learning and growing.

Don’t be scared off by the idea of a strategic plan for your career. It can be as simple as four sentences on a piece of paper –

Don’t quit your job, but do identify the next small step(s) for this week, like starting to update your resume. Identify another step for next week to create momentum toward your next career move and in control of your career instead of feeling the victim of a boring job, a bad boss, or a less than robust economy.

Why is it important to synergize one’s time and attention spend on Resume, Competitive Advantages, and Interview Skills?

The key to successful career moves is doing the right things well. Since the three most important career tools are the resume, competitive advantages, and interview skills, you must focus on all three to compete for your ideal job:

The resume creates your first impression in the marketplace and can open doors and get you noticed and interviewed. Now more than ever, employers look for someone who can produce results.

Write an accomplishment-oriented resume that emphasizes what you’ve contributed and quantifies the impact of your contributions. This will make you stand out from the competition by giving employers a concrete idea of your capabilities based on your prior achievements.

Competitive advantages allow you to tailor the case you’ve built in your resume to a particular job and company, making your strongest case for yourself as a serious contender in a cover letter and ultimately in an interview.

Simply claiming you have relevant experience and skills does not have the power of, for example, mentioning that you have spent more than 50% of your career working for key competitors of your prospective employer and have done five successful product rollouts of the type this new employer is contemplating.

Interview skills are essential because even a great resume and competitive advantages won’t get you the job if you can’t deliver in an interview.

Long, rambling answers, focusing too much on what you want rather than what an employer needs, offering negative information, providing little in the way of specific examples and anecdotes to show relevant experience, asking poor questions, and failing to make a strong case for your candidacy through competitive advantages are all ways that most candidates fail the interview, even if they could succeed in the job.

Your interview skills help you convincingly close the deal in an interview.

Does an ideal job exist? What are some tips to land an ideal job?

I don’t believe that there is only one ideal job for any of us, but I also don’t believe that any of us will get one of our ideal jobs without focus and effort. Ideal jobs don’t drop from trees; they require a clear focus on your target and then building your strongest case for why you deserve them.

You need the “wow” factor. You don’t need to be a superstar to get a great job, but you MUST build a compelling case for why you are the best hire for that job.

Even in this recession, my clients are landing great jobs and it isn’t taking them a year to do so. What’s the secret to their success? It’s not really a secret, but here are the two common themes their searches exemplify in landing an ideal job in a bad market: