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How to Return to Work at Any Age, with Kristin Schuchman

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Most Americans begin work full-time after high school or college and hope to retire at age 65 or older. That doesn’t mean, however, that we remain in the workplace continuously for 40-plus years.

Along the way, many of us will stop working outside the home to care for children, parents, or other family members. You may also choose to take time off for yourself, to explore the world, or get clear on what you want from life.

Whatever the reason for putting your career on hold, one day you will likely be ready to go back to work. Jumping back into the professional world after a prolonged absence can be difficult; and the challenge grows proportionally to the time you’ve been away from the workforce.

This week on Find Your Dream Job, we’re talking about how to return to work at any age. Our guest is Kristin Schuchman, a career coach who works with professionals in transition.  As a mother who returned to school after age 40, she is especially attuned to the needs of midlife professionals in transition.

This Week’s Guest

Kristin Schuchman works with professionals in transition, whether they’re changing careers, starting businesses or relaunching into the work force after an absence raising kids or returning to school. Before focusing on career counseling, Kristin run a branding business and a women’s magazine Nervy Girl.

Resources from this Episode

Transcript

Mac Prichard:

This is Find your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want and make a difference in life. I’m Mac Prichard your host and publisher of Mac’s List. Our show is brought to you by Mac’s List and buy your book, Land your dream job in Portland and Beyond. To learn more about the book and the updated version that we published on February 1st, visit macslist.org\book.

Ben Forstag::

Hey Mac, so, I’ve been involved in this iteration of the book and I know that you had a first edition that was out before I started working at Mac’s List. I’ve always kind of wondered, what inspired you guys to write this book?

Mac Prichard:

It was our readers of our blog that really drove this Ben. We wanted to share our best advice from the blog, especially the insider tips from more than dozen local experts. We had readers tell us they didn’t have time to weigh through three of years of blog post. We as you know, because you added the blog now, there are three to five posts every week. We wanted to make all of our best work available in one easy to read book, and that’s what readers will find, eight chapters, a hundred and twenty pages. They’ll find in the book insider information you won’t find anywhere else.

Most Americans begin work full time after high school or college and hope to retire at age sixty-five or even older. That doesn’t mean however that we remain the workplace continuously for forty plus years. Along the way, many of us will stop working outside the home to care for children, parents or other family members.

Sheryl Sandberg author of Lean In estimates that forty-three percent of highly qualified women with children are leaving careers for a period of time. The Huffington Post says that there are more than ten million Americans older than age fifty who are caring for aging parents.

Whatever your reason for putting your career on hold, one day you will likely be ready to go back to work. This week on Find your Dream Job, we’re talking about how to return to work at any age.

Ben Forstag has a book that shows you how to plan a break from your job and return to employment when you’re ready. Aubrie De Clerck answers a listener’s question about how to explain a gap on your resume when you stay at home to raise your kids, and I talk to this week’s guest expert, a career counselor who helps people return to the workforce after a long absence.

We’re back in the Mac’s List studio, joining me are Ben Forstag, our managing director and our guest co-host this week, Aubrie De Clerck of Coaching for Clarity. All of us are employed full time right now, but I’m wondering have either one of you taken time out from your career either to care for children or other family members or for another reason?

Ben Forstag:

I’ve never taken a prolonged period of time off. I did take a month off when my son was born a few months ago. My wife though, she graduated from law school, worked for one year and has not worked for the last three years as she’s been taking care of our children. Managing that dynamic of a professional taking time off, being home and trying to balance family responsibilities with a desire to do something with her career, that’s something that we face everyday.

Mac Prichard:

That’s a lot to juggle. How about you Aubrie?

Aubrie De Clerck:

I haven’t taken any specific time off. I have had a period of my time in my work life where I used the flexibility from an employer to its maximum amounts. My mum has MS and there is a time where with her illness she needed a lot of support and care, and I was really fortunate to have a company and a manager that supported me in going and coming whenever I needed to, trusting me to get my work done, which I did. I have felt the pull between family needs and also work needs.

Mac Prichard:

Yeah, I’m glad you had that support and you were able to have that time with your mum. Let’s turn to Ben who is always out there doing research every week between shows, he’s looking around the Internet for blogs, podcasts and other tools you can use in your job search. Ben, what have you got for us this week?

Ben Forstag:

This week, I want share a book that I read actually about a half a year ago and it’s called Reboot your Life, Energize your Career and Life by Taking a Break. It’s by Catherine Allen, Nancy Bearg, Rita Foley and Jaye Smith. This book is all about the value of taking time off from work, which I admit is an odd topic for a podcast that’s all about getting a job. I thought there were some really valuable insights in this book that I wanted to share with our listeners.

I think most folks recognize that many professionals if not all professionals today are genuinely overworked. The scope of this problem is probably bigger than we often recognize. Not just corporate big wigs are being overworked, it’s everyone really.
If you think about how we take our work home with us now in ways we didn’t five, ten, fifteen years ago, it’s really clear. The authors write, “Today, we rarely have time for rest, we have lost even our short breaks as technology, pagers, PCs, laptops, the Internet, cell phones, Blackberries and smart phones beckon us to be on 24/7. Even when we’re supposedly off on weekends or in the evenings, we’re on and it’s taking a toll.”

The solution according to the authors is to create more time and space away from work, which gives us not just an opportunity to relax, but also a chance to examine and think about the challenges we face in the workplace.

This last point is really important as one of the underlying premises here is that of all the hours we’re logging in the office each day and all the emails we’re responding to, the truth is we’re really not that productive in our day to day work lives. This is a classic quantity over quality issue where we’re doing more, we’re just not doing it as well as we used to do or could be doing.

The big push by the authors here is to take full sabbaticals, three to six months out of the office. The book is full of testimonials from people who’ve taken those kinds of sabbaticals and about the value it’s brought to their lives. It reduces stress, it encourages creativity, and upon returning to work, these people report dramatic increases in productivity.

The authors provide a fairly comprehensive list of tools to help you prepare for a sabbatical including financial planning and how to manage things like health insurance and retirement savings. Here is the bottom line, not everyone is going to be able to take three to six months off of work. In fact I’d venture to say that most people can’t, I include myself in that. That being said, I think there’s some important lessons in this book that can apply to most people’s work experiences, and that’s really what I want to focus on here. The first lesson is the importance of stepping away from work even for short periods of time. As the authors say, this provides perspective, it reduces tension and it generally improves the contentment you have with your job.

When we operationalize this idea, it doesn’t need to be big prolonged times away from the office, but things like turning off your email when you leave for work at the end of the day, or taking weekends off or stepping away from a project if you have eaten your time line to do so, so you can get some clarity about that project, think about in a way that’s not time line driven or deadline driven. I know I have a problem with this as well. Mac, you’re a great boss and you don’t demand that I’m checking email over the weekends, but I have a hard time not checking email and part of that is just I don’t want to be ambushed by a negative email on Monday morning kind of mentality.

I know that the more I can step away on the weekends, the more fresh I am and the more productive I am on Monday morning coming in and addressing things at a more creative way. The other nugget of information I want to take out of this is that they talk a lot about the gift of time. That we need to give ourselves time to decompress from work, to think differently about work. I actually read this book when I was unemployed and the value I got from it was not taking a sabbatical, I was already kind of on a sabbatical but, treating that unemployment time as the gift of time, that because I didn’t have a job, I could use this opportunity to think differently about what I wanted to do with my career, or think differently about projects or courses or issues or workplace dynamics that were important to me, or new ways to approach the kind of work that I knew I wanted to do.

Taking advantage of that unemployment and that gift of time to reset my professional clock and my way of thinking. It’s a really interesting book and again, I encourage everyone to read it whether you’re working or looking to take time off or maybe you already have time off, there’s a lot of good insights there. Again, the book is called Reboot your Life, Energize your Career and Life by taking a Break, and I’ll include a link in the shout outs.

Mac Prichard:

Great. Thank you Ben and kudos to you for during your time of unemployment seeing that period as a gift of time. I certainly struggle myself, I got two long periods of unemployment in my career with just the anxiety that comes with not knowing where your next job is going to be. Intellectually, I think personally I was aware that well, I should take advantage of this time off but, I, myself found it hard to do because I thinking about how do I get that next job.

Ben Forstag:

Don’t sing my praises too highly Mac, I panic just about everyday. It’s this unfortunate reality that you either have time or you have money but rarely do you have both of them together. After a month of actively searching and driving myself nuts during unemployment, I came to this realization that I can use this time not just to find a new job but, to do other things with my life and kind of reframe how I think about things.

Mac Prichard:

Okay. Thanks. Well, do you have a suggestion for Ben? A book or a website or a podcast that has been helpful to you with your career or your job search? Write him at info@macslist.org and you may hear your suggestion on the show. Let’s turn to you our listeners, our guest host this week is Aubrie DeClerck of Coaching for Clarity. She joins here in the studio to answer one of your questions. Aubrie, how are you?

Aubrie De Clerck:

I’m very good. How are you Mac?

Mac Prichard:

Good. What did you hear from our listeners this week?

Aubrie De Clerck:

Well, this is what we have this week. I paused my career for several years to raise my children. How should I explain that gap on my resume? What are the best ways to frame this experience with a potential employer?

This can be a really painful question for a lot of people, that the gap is something where they have a lack of confidence, they put a lot of time and attention on this gap. One of the things I wanted to mention is there’s a great article on Working Mother called Find the On-Ramp. On-Ramping is a phrase that’s used a lot in these scenarios. It talks about speaking about that time regardless of whether you talk about that in terms of volunteer work, in terms of the work that you did at home, but doing that with confidence and not going into a lot of detail.

I love that suggestion because we want to focus on what’s going to open the doors for someone rather than go down this detailed trail around what that time at home was about. I think also looking at what was going on during that time and thinking about relevancy around the skills set and the contribution of the things that did happen, so that’s the time at home or the time during volunteer work or connection around the community or doing part time which a lot of people dismiss, but has a lot of validity during this time. Making sure that the conversation and the threads that pull those things together relate directly to what an employer is asking about.

That’s one way of addressing with an employer let’s say in a verbal context a lot of times, during an interview. When we take a look at the resume, there’s a couple of choices that are there. Some people state they put something in specifically about their time at home that covers that gap so there isn’t that an empty spot. You can fill that in with the things that I was already mentioning like the community involvement, the volunteer work, part time work or connection to the skills. A lot of times if people are home schooling their children, there’s a lot to be said about the skills set that takes to do that in application to a future work.

Mac Prichard:

I think that’s terrific advice Aubrie as a job seeker, when I’ve been unemployed for more than a few weeks, I’ve used my volunteer experience and plugged that into my resume. Then as an employer, when I’m reviewing resumes, I think that volunteer experience is certainly a valid use of time and I’ve also seen applicants talk about spending time at home caring for parents or raising kids and just having an explanation of some kind makes all the difference. Everybody has a parent or many of us have children, we’re all going to sympathize and understand why people take that time away to do it.

Aubrie De Clerck:

Yeah, I think that’s one of the things I’m looking forward to hearing Kristin talk about is what’s an employer reaction to this kind of thing. I think we have a tendency and we are thinking about things that we perceive it’s going to be difficult or challenging to tell a story about what employers response is going to be, “Oh, it’s going to go like this. They’re going to toss my resume out at the very beginning.” I’m not saying that those things don’t happen, I’m just saying that there’s many different stories around the way that employers feel about their kind of experience and the values that they have and the connection like you’re talking about Mac, to their own lives. And the willingness to have conversations about what that means for someone and see those connections between what that person’s life experience has brought them and what that life experience can bring as a value to where they’re working.

Mac Prichard:

Okay, good point. We’ll certainly explore that in the interview Kristin. If you have a question for us, we’d love to hear from you. Please email communitymanager@macslict.org.

These segments with Aubrie and Ben are sponsored by the 2016 edition of our book, Land your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond. We’ve made that book even better, we’ve added new content and now we’re offering it in multiple formats, including the paper back and Kindle editions. For the first time, you can download it on your Nook, iPad, Kindle or buy it via us or Amazon as a paperback. Whatever the format, our goal is the same, to give you tools and tips you need to get the meaningful work you want that can make a difference. For more information, visit our website www.macslist.org\book and sign up for our special book newsletter, and get updates not available else where, exclusive book content and special prices.

Let’s turn to this week’s guest expert, Kristin Schuchman. Kristin Schuchman works with professionals in transition, whether they’re changing careers, starting businesses or relaunching into the work force after an absence raising kids or returning to school. Before focusing on career counseling, Kristin run a branding business and a women’s magazine Nervy Girl. As a mother who returned to school after age forty, she’s especially attuned to the needs of mid-life professionals in transition. Kristin, thanks for joining us.

Kristin Schuchman:

You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Mac Prichard:

Yeah, I appreciate you making the trip downtown and coming to the Mac’s List studio. We’re talking today about returning to work at any age.

Kristin Schuchman:

Right.

Mac Prichard:

I think for many of our listeners, that means time spent at home often raising a family or caring for a parent or other family member. What do you find in your work? What do people need to do first when they’re ready to come back to the workplace after a long absence?

Kristin Schuchman:

Besides the obvious things around getting your resume in shape and what not, I think what’s important to remember is to maybe be willing to be a little bit humble about what your expectations might be about going back into the workplace. Maybe take something not entry level but maybe a step behind of where you were before. It’s not always necessary, but it’s just willing to sort of be open to that.

Mac Prichard:

Tell us more about that because I think I’ve certainly been in periods in my career where my pride got the better of me and I thought, “Oh, no, I’d moved beyond that.” Obviously, the show is not about me but I know that some people might think, “No, I’m senior enough,” that I shouldn’t have to take a step back. Why can that help people in the long run Kristin?

Kristin Schuchman:

Because I think it’s important to remember that even if you have to take a step back that a lot of companies are willing to move you up pretty quickly, once they see that you have a drive. I’ve heard that New Season does actually really good about that, that if they know that you have a lot of potential and that you’re really committed to their values and being a part of their family so to speak, that they will move you up within weeks, not just months or years. So, just to be open to that. I hate to say this but I find that it’s harder for men to believe that than women sometimes.

Mac Prichard:

I can see that, yeah.

Kristin Schuchman:

Yeah, that they might have to … I’ve heard that about that when the economy took a hit that it was easier for women to accommodate to that because of that, because women were willing to take less senior positions and yeah.

Mac Prichard:

Yeah, okay, so people have gotten their resume in order, updated their LinkedIn profile and they’re looking for opportunities, they’re ready to go back and they’re mentally prepared to take a position a step or two below where they were when they last stepped out of the work force.

Kristin Schuchman:

Right.

Mac Prichard:

What else should they think about?

Kristin Schuchman:

They should think about strategically volunteering and by strategically volunteering I mean volunteering in a way that is going to put them on the path to their career. A lot of times people when they come back to the work force after taking a break from like you said either parenting or care giving or what have you, an illness sometimes, they want to change because their priorities change, right. Those are the best examples of times when it’s maybe a good opportunity to find an organization, and it doesn’t have to be a non-profit, it can be, those are awesome places to volunteer and to get strategic volunteering experience.

I like people to also think about community projects that they might not think of like if you hear that a farmers’ market is getting started in your neighborhood, jump on board with that and you’ll meet people from all walks of life and you’ll pick up skills from not just the people that maybe are supervising the project but, but all around you. A lot of people join those projects who have given skills but they want to give back, so to be open to that.

Mac Prichard:

I’m a big fan in volunteering that I can imagine some of our listeners, friends and family might say, “Well, you know what you really need to do is start applying for jobs, and sit down and start looking at job boards or for the very old-fashioned, look in the newspaper.”

Kristin Schuchman:

Sure.

Mac Prichard:

Why shouldn’t that be the logical first step? Why can volunteering help you more perhaps when you’re coming back into the workforce?

Kristin Schuchman:

If you’re ready to jump back in, I think that’s great. I think sometimes when you’re in a period of transition where you’re not sure if what you’re next step is, stepping back and volunteering for a while can be great because it can give you the opportunity to not only explore the realms that you might not have explored before and see what that’s like, and why not take advantage of that. Also, it can give you a chance to grow skills that may not be open to you in the workplace or like maybe grant writing might be a good example of that. You can’t just go out and necessarily and go ahead and say, “I’m going to be a grant writer.” Even if you’ve taken a couple of classes. In most cases, you’re going to have to write a grant for someone to prove that you can win some grants or at least have some writing samples to prepare to other employers. That’s what I would say to that.

Mac Prichard:

Okay, that makes perfect sense. What about people who say, “Well, gosh, I want to return to that professional I was pursuing, and I’ve got ten, fifteen, twenty years experience before I stepped out of the work force.” Why does volunteering make sense for me now?

Kristin Schuchman:

It’s not as competitive as it has been for the last several years but it’s still competitive and you just going to want to show up those resources and get those recommendations, references that you’re going to need when you go back into the work force. It doesn’t mean you can’t take a two pronged approach, apply for jobs by all means but also think about places where you might volunteer to get that experience that are going to put you on the right path.

Mac Prichard:

Not only the experience but the relationships …

Kristin Schuchman:

The relationships, the networking exactly, growing your network and yeah.

Mac Prichard:

And the recommendations.

Kristin Schuchman:

Right.

Mac Prichard:

You talked about expectations, Kristin about perhaps thinking about applying for a position a little more junior than the one you might have last had.

Kristin Schuchman:

Right.

Mac Prichard:

What other expectations should people have when they’re getting ready to go back to the workplace after a long absence?

Kristin Schuchman:

Things change and things seem to be changing more now than even with technology and things like social media that some people have different feelings about, let’s put it that way. At the same time, there’s sort of these things that are changing and there’s [agism 00:21:14] and what not. Remember that you do have a lot to offer, you have years of experience that you can bring to the table and not to forget that and that can be, it can be really easy to feel kind of minimized in a youthful centric culture that we have. Remember that you do have experience and a lot to offer. I encourage people to remember that.

Mac Prichard:

Good. We were talking earlier in the show, we had a question from a listener about how to describe a period like this when you’re out of the work force for some years, how to best describe it on you resume. The three of us were saying that we think that employers generally understand, they’re just looking for an explanation.

Kristin Schuchman:

Right.

Mac Prichard:

What’s your best advice about how to not only talk about in your resume but in interviews about an absence from the workplace.

Kristin Schuchman:

Kind of what you just said, it’s realizing that people do understand but, then also being ready to talk about it, being ready to maybe role play before your interview and talk about your absence and why it happened, and not to get plastered. We can often feel if we’re taking care of kids for years at a time or parents or we’re like ill and spending time doing things in coffee shops so we feel like our brain is rotting or what not. If you’re able to speak about it succinctly and actually talk about the skills that that experience taught you, that being a mother taught me to multitask and taught me to prioritize, taught to make decisions quickly. Those things have value.

Not every employer is going to get that and that’s okay. The right employer for you, the one’s that going to understand your lifestyle because it’s probably pretty likely that you still have kids in the household if you’re going back to work, or that your illness to recur, it’s an illness that took you out of the work force. You’re going to need a workplace that’s going to understand that and be accommodating for you, so you’re going to want to work for somebody who’s not too hard nosed about it, if that makes sense.

Mac Prichard:

That makes perfect sense. I know you work with a lot of people who are making this transition back into the workplace. What are some of the most common concerns you hear?

Kristin Schuchman:

Just the idea that their priorities have changed, whether it’s because they got divorced or because they experienced having kids and that changes you or this illness, an illness can be a life changing thing, taking care of a parent, all those things can make you reassess your earlier priorities. Often, I just hear people, “I just can’t go back to that. I can’t go back to managing data,” or whatever it is and they want something that’s going to be sort of more life affirming.

Mac Prichard:

As people go through that process Kristin of discovery, how do you see them get clear about what they want to do next and what steps do they take?

Kristin Schuchman:

We do a lot of self-exploration so we do things around looking at our values, a values assessment sort of sorts that we do with cards actually, and we look at skills in the same way, like what do you want to do for fifty percent of your day, what do you want to do for twenty-five percent of your day? What do you want to be a minor role in your day? That has a way of sort of just helping people to clarify. Things like the Myers Briggs is another tool we use to help people get some self-understanding. You might have heard of the strong inventory, we do that as well. Sometimes I have some other exercises I have people do. This one’s a little bit more person specific, if they tell me they’re a writer or they like to write, I like them to write their own obituary. It sounds a little morbid but it’s a great exercise for determining what do I want to be written on my tomb stone, what do I want to have achieved in my life.

Mac Prichard:

I think that’s a great exercise and it’s actually the one I’m doing myself.

Kristin Schuchman:

Have you?

Mac Prichard:

Yeah, so it is very illuminating when you think about what you want to be remembered for.

Kristin Schuchman:

Right, and vision boarding is another thing that I’ve added recently that is really fun for people to do, yeah.

Mac Prichard:

Yeah, so what I’m hearing you say is that it’s common for people to think about a different goals when they come back to the work force because …

Kristin Schuchman:

That’s right.

Mac Prichard:

… Of an experience they’ve had with family or an illness or a parent.

Kristin Schuchman:

Right.

Mac Prichard:

They need to be prepared to address that and get clear about what those goals are.

Kristin Schuchman:

Right. Part of that self-exploration is also determining what do you want your workplace to look like, do you want it to be a small startup? Do you want to go back into like a fast paced busy environment? Some people like that. Determining what you want that to look like.

Mac Prichard:

What are some other points you like to make when people are returning to the work force after a long absence? Things they should think about.

Kristin Schuchman:

They should be patient that it might take some time and to really not under emphasize the aspect of networking and a lot of introverts really get kind of freaked about that. What I say is I go back to that the never eat alone guy.

Mac Prichard:

Oh, Keith Ferrazzi.

Kristin Schuchman:

Yeah, I know it’s an Italian name.

Mac Prichard:

Yeah, I think it’s Keith Ferrazzi. I’ve actually got that book on my book shelf.

Kristin Schuchman:

Yeah.

Mac Prichard:

Never eat lunch alone again.

Kristin Schuchman:

Yeah, and just the idea that you … Don’t necessarily go to sort of dry, boring networking events that leave you feeling like standing in the corner. Go do things that like to do, go kayaking and network with your book group and also let people know even your friends that you’re looking and you’re exploring and people want good things for you so they want you to be linked up with opportunities.

Mac Prichard:

Good. What are some mistakes you’ve seen people make that our listeners should avoid?

Kristin Schuchman:

I think maybe the high expectations too soon. Being wanting that great job that they had before they left, again that $130,000 job, they want to get back into that right away and they might have to be patient and wait. Or wanting the great pay but they don’t want a long commute, they don’t want to work long hours. If you’re working for a six figure job, you’re probably going to be working long hours.

Mac Prichard:

Yeah. We need to start wrapping up Kristin, anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?

Kristin Schuchman:

Just, that I want to maybe add that I am really prepared to help people with more the solopreneur aspect of things too. A lot of people come to me and they end up at the end of it, particularly if they’ve been out of the workforce for a while, deciding that they want to start a business, so that’s something that’s … I like people to just really think of that too, that it is an option and there’s a solopreneur boom going on right now and to not dismiss that instinct that you might have to start a business.

Mac Prichard:

Yeah, self-employment isn’t for everybody but I think the point you’re making is a really important one which is that there are more opportunities to do that I think than there ever have been in the past.

Kristin Schuchman:

Right.

Mac Prichard:

Depending on your goals, especially if they have changed, can make it be a very smart option.

Kristin Schuchman:

Right.

Mac Prichard:

Great, well, Kristin, thanks so much for joining us. Tell us, what’s coming up next for you?

Kristin Schuchman:

Well, I’m getting in the spirit of entrepreneurship. I’m getting some groups started in the next month. One is going to be for people starting a business, and it will be about five people kind of a sounding board for people to come and put a bounce ideas of each other and work through their concepts. In some cases, a few people will be welcomed who don’t quite know what they want to do. If they do know what they want to do, they would get started on getting a business plan started for them. Another group is more for creative people who have a business who have been doing it for a while but also want that sounding board, wanting that group of people to work with that will give them feedback and keep them motivated.

Mac Prichard:

I imagine people can find out more about that on your website.

Kristin Schuchman:

They can.

Mac Prichard:

Okay, terrific. You can find Kristin Schuchman online at www.aportlandcareer.com.

Kristin Schuchman:

That’s right.

Mac Prichard:

All right.

Kristin Schuchman:

Thank you Mac.

Mac Prichard:

All right, thank you Kristin, thanks for joining us.

Kristin Schuchman:

Okay.

Mac Prichard:

We’re back in Mac’s List studio, Aubrie, Ben, what were some of the most important points you heard Kristin make?

Aubrie De Clerck:

The point that resonated with me most and I know will resonate with the listeners is this notion of when you take some time off that priority shift and change, and allow yourself sometime to re-evaluate what that might mean for your career. I think a lot of times we’re in a rush to move from one thing to the next and transitions have their own natural flow and their own natural unfolding and so I appreciated the space that Kristin talked about, in creating one’s own desires around what they want their work to look like and also patience with what happens after that.

Mac Prichard:

People for all the right reasons want to rush immediately to the application process and they start applying to job boards and positions they hear about online and if they’re not clear about their goals and what they want, there could be a lot of ways to differ. Ben, how about you?

Ben Forstag:

Well, Kristin hit on one of our recurring themes on this podcast which is networking, networking, networking and how important networking is to finding a job. I liked her point about not just the formal go to industry events or mixers kind of networking, but the just putting yourself out there and letting your friends and your colleagues and your Facebook acquaintances and your kayaking club know that you are looking for work, because you don’t know the kind of connections those people have and I know many, many people who found work through those kinds of connections.

Mac Prichard:

Yeah, word of mouth is a powerful to learn about job openings and you do that through networking. It doesn’t have to mean going to an event where business cards are exchanged, it can be as simple as just chatting with your neighbors and friends or people you meet while walking your dog.

Ben Forstag:

Yeah, the key is just putting yourself out there and being open about what you’re looking for and why you’re looking for it and people are happy to help.

Mac Prichard:

Well, thank you both and thank you our listeners for joining us. We hope that you’ll come back next week. In the mean time, visit us at macslist.org, where you’ll find hundreds of jobs. You can read our blog and learn more about our new book, as well as get show notes and transcripts for this and other podcast shows.

If you like what you hear on the show, you can help us by leaving a review and a rating at iTunes. This helps us discover our show and helps us serve you and other job seekers betters. One of the reviews recently we received is from Pap RV who writes on our iTunes pages.

“The folks at Mac’s List are offering information, guidance and support for efficiently finding the right work in this economy. The traditional popularized approach is a dysfunctional game of chance says Pap RV. Spraying resumes and cover letters and praying for results works well only for the very few. These folks know what works and share it.”

Great contributions to the community, thank you. Thank Pap RV and thanks to the scores of other listeners who’ve left a review. We hope that you will take a moment and leave your own comments and ratings, just go to www.macslist.org\iTunes. Thanks for listening and we’ll be back next Wednesday with more tips and tools you can used to find your dream job.