How to Customize Your Career

Given the number of hours, the amount of energy, and the level of commitment we give to our work, we deserve to find fulfillment in our careers. Scott Anthony Barlow, host of the Happen to Your Career podcast, is here with some candid and actionable advice to serve you on your own journey. 

Barlow is a career coach having helped nearly 40,000 people define and discover their professional happiness. Below are some of the pointers he offered.

Listen to the full conversation on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform, or just click the audio player above.

Seize the opportunity for change

Barlow has been getting calls from people wanting a change…yet paralyzed by fear. There is a pervasive worry that the traditional channels for resume submissions are overcrowded with applicants. So why bother?

Here’s why.

“The pandemic has created huge, huge, huge opportunities because the companies and organizations that have…adapted are now so much more open to different types of roles…There's a massive opportunity to not just respond to off-the-shelf type job ads, but instead to find the right organization, build a relationship with them, and have them create a role for you."

The pandemic has made us crafty and scrappy. So let's lean into that.

“The pandemic has created huge, huge, huge opportunities because companies and organizations...are now so much more open to different types of roles."

Begin with your ideal career profile

Barlow tells the story of his client, Laura, who had achieved great success in her career. She’d been promoted three times within a short window, and leadership at her company seemed invested in growing her further.

But, “it turned from a great situation to [one] where she found herself leading 20 people who were passionate about their work and she wasn't at all.” She was missing out on time with her daughter and had decided it just wasn’t worth the sacrifice.

So, the first step in Barlow's process for the next career step was to identify Laura's ideal career profile. You can do he same. Here's how:

• • Build a list of 20–30 potential organizations that might better suit you.
• • Make a detailed list of what you believe would create an ideal work situation for you – a set of hypotheses to test.
• • Have informal conversations with people in or near these organizations – to test your hypotheses.
• • These conversations will lead to building relationships, narrowing the field as you go (not all hypotheses prove true!)

Ultimately...

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