The past few months have been filled with changes. Personally, I moved to a new house, improved my health, lost weight, changed my hair. Professionally, I was laid off the company where I worked for 12 years.
My personal life is going well – except maybe for the extra kgs I’ve gained while on holiday, but I’m working on fixing that. But I’m still in career transitioning mode and searching for a new professional opportunity.
It’s weird to seek a new job after such a long time. I’m ‘rusty’. I also feel like I’ve left my career in the hands of the company where I worked for the past years. The company’s needs dictated what I’d do, study etc. Obviously, I wasn’t doing something I didn’t like, but I didn’t really plan and worked on it. I let them make that plan for me and I just followed it. In the midst of it all I never really stopped to think If I would have chosen that path for myself.
Don’t take me wrong, I’m very grateful to the company for my development there. I grew professionally: I started as a call center representative and left as education manager, working in various areas in there. And I created a large and solid network that I take with me – people I didn’t really expect to support me during this transition, but who generously reached out and made themselves available for a coffee, coaching, talking and who offered to help me in the search for new opportunities. And now it’s time for me to take control of my career.
What exactly do I want to do now? I’m actively looking for a job in another company. I’m still young and I believe the market still has space for me for some more years. But for the first time I stopped to consider doing something on my own, in my own time. Even if it’s just in my spare time. This blog is an exercise, really.
But back to getting a new job, I have a few things in mind:
I want to find a company that has similar values to mine. I don’t want a job at any cost, I don’t want to work for an unethical company or one that has practices I condemn.
I’d like to try a different segment. I want to diversify my career and step out of my comfort zone. Besides, I dedicated the last 12 years to the direct sales of nutrition products. These are two controversial topics. Direct sales, and especially multilevel marketing, still causes discomfort on a lot of people. They still don’t understand the difference between MLM and pyramid schemes. And nutrition is always controversial too, even more so today, when everybody and their dog is an expert on healthy lifestyle, diet, what should and shouldn’t be classed as real food.
I want to work with beauty, cosmetics, fashion and the like. These are all topics I’m personally interested in and study about. Is there anything more gratifying then working with something you love? Imagine working for a company that makes cosmetics, has responsible and sustainable practices and doesn’t test on animals? That would be my dream job!
While going through an outplacement process, one of the ‘homework assignments’ is to elect those target companies where I’d love to work. But that is not all – once elected, the next step is to introduce myself to the people in those companies who could potentially hire me. It’s much more than filing a CV on their website. And this is something I have honestly never done. But, thankfully, I have a rich network of contacts who offered to help me with this task.
What happens now? Well, if everything goes according to plan, I’ll find a new job in the next few months (a transition process in my professional level tends to take between 6 and 12 months, on average). I’ll be working for a company I admire, doing something I love. Given my experience, it is very likely I’ll remain in the direct sales segment, which is fine. I love direct sales and the opportunity it brings to so many people. I even convinced my mother to become a direct seller of some companies. But if I’m in retail, facing different challenges, I’ll be very happy too.
But that might not happen so fast. And I need to be prepared for that reality too. I need to study, learn new skills, improve the ones I already have and gather tools to offer my services to the market as a consultant, a specialist in digital marketing and content, for instance. After all, the important thing is to have work and income, not necessarily a job.
How about you? Have you ever reinvented yourself professionally? Tell me how it was!
