Career planning for the changing employment market

Against a backdrop of an ever evolving labour market and continuous workplace changes, new skills are being demanded of you, as is the requirement to demonstrate a flexible and fluid approach to your career development. Effective career planning now demands that you seek jobs providing you with a wide range of skills and experience, with a focus on enhancing your chances of employability across a diverse number of employers, rather than gathering the skills needed to pursue a traditional career path, in a single organisation.

In turn, there is an increasing need for you to take full responsibility for your career and ensure your skills are kept continuously up-to-date in order to guarantee life-long employability. Positive psychology and solutions focused career coaching can help you to take charge of your own career and make effective career decisions which equip you for this ever changing employment market.

Identifying your five key strengths

Positive Psychology coaching is underpinned by the philosophy that if you identify and use your strengths, whilst at the same time pursue things you are passionate about, you will feel more energised, engaged and success is more likely to follow. Positive Psychology research has identified 24 strengths that you could possibly identify as your assets. However, it is likely that you will have five main strengths you use on a frequent basis. These strengths are linked to your sense of identity and when you use them to the full, you will be more likely to achieve the life and career goals you have set for yourself.

Additionally, through identifying your five key strengths, you are better equipped to chose the job, or career, which provides you with the best job satisfaction, be more motivated and perform at a higher level. Identifying your key strengths will also help you to start to learn more about what makes you stand out from the crowd and what differentiates you from others when competing for a job, or career move.

Stuck in your career?

Solutions focused coaching can also help you to plan your future job, or career, or become ‘unstuck’ from what appears to be an intractable problem, with no obvious solution to you. In my coaching practice, this has often been around career planning, supporting my clients to become ‘unstuck’ in their career. Amongst other solutions focused coaching techniques, I have found the ‘Miracle Question’ helps clients to more readily identify their future dream job, or career and the reasons why.

What is the ‘Miracle Question?’

The Miracle Question can be asked in many different forms and is a simple way of asking you to adopt a visionary and imaginative approach, where you are invited to step out of being stuck in the problem into a context where the perceived problems and barriers to achieving your desired future role have been removed and to imagine your dream job as totally achievable.

Whilst not denying obstacles exist, by temporarily removing them through this form of coaching, you can make a powerful breakthrough in terms of what you believe can be achieved, rather than focusing on what may prevent you from achieving success, providing a new found clarity of purpose and vision for the future.

This question and subsequent follow-up coaching questions are extremely powerful in helping you to free up thinking, especially if you are stuck in indecision about your next job, or career, move.

Outlined below is an example of the ‘Miracle Question’:

I would like you to imagine that whilst you are asleep tonight, a miracle happens. This miracle means that when you wake up tomorrow, you will receive an email from your line manager informing you that you have been offered a new role. This new role will be your dream job. How will you know that the miracle has happened? What will be different?

If you would like to learn more about how positive psychology and solutions focused coaching can help you to take charge of your own career, find your ideal next job, or become unstuck in your present career, please don’t hesitate to contact me.