The Why and How of Career Management – Jo Attard on 2UE Talking Lifestyle Radio – Podcast

In this podcast Jo Attard speaks with 2UE Talking Lifestyle Radio’s Suzy Yates about The Why and How of Career Management.  

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Shownotes

Managing your career might sound like a daunting task – but it doesn’t have to be. Listen to Jo Attard’s interview with Suzy Yates from 2UE Talking Lifestyle to discover how you can prime yourself for career success in an ever-changing world.

Key topics covered in this podcast interview:

  • Understanding your own abilities and what you want to achieve in your career.
  • Knowing your worth and what you can provide an organisation: Your ‘value proposition’.
  • Being prepared to be adaptable, because research shows that the modern worker will have 4 to 5 different careers in their lifetime.
  • The importance of developing your network when you don’t need it. Even when things are going well, why it’s important to continue to meet new people and connect, that way, when you do need to call on your network they will be engaged.
  • Why giving information to people helps them recognise your value, making them much more likely to endorse your abilities.

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Read the Transcript

Suzy Yates:           

Now coming into the new year, there are people that decide to change jobs, look for new jobs, and a little bit later in the show, we’re going to look at some of those jobs that are available in Antarctica. We couldn’t find our Antarctic job hunter yesterday, but we found him, but what about here, in Australia? Should you change jobs, look for new work?

Jo Attard is the principal consultant of PeopleEdge, and she’s on the line now to give us some pointers. Good morning, Jo.

Jo Attard:             

Good morning, Suzy.

Suzy Yates:           

Thank you for sending us your email, by the way. I saw it pop into my inbox, and I thought, absolutely, what a great idea.  Now Jo, what are some of the mistakes people make when starting in the new year and setting their career goals?

Jo Attard:             

The first mistake, Suzy, is that we don’t tend to have career goals. We often fall into our careers, meander along, taking really what comes along without proactively managing it. This really wasn’t an issue until probably 10 to 15 years ago, where organizations tended to manage our careers for us, but now, there is more of a short-term mentality to jobs rather than organizations taking that control for us.

Suzy Yates:           

You’re right. You can no longer depend on being with the same company for 30, 40, 50 years as our grandparents did.

Jo Attard:             

No. Not at all, not at all. We actually have to really take that control for ourselves.

Suzy Yates:           

When you say setting a career goal, what do you mean? How would you describe that to someone?

Jo Attard:             

Setting a career goal is really, in order to do that, you need to know yourself pretty well, you need to know what you’re good at and what you like and what you don’t like, for a start, and understand what you have to give to an employer. We call that a “value proposition.”

It is, almost in a sales term, the strengths that you have and what you can deliver to somebody else, and then use that to determine what it is that you want to achieve in your career. Whereas in our generation, we tended to have, as you said, one career, the current generations will have four to five careers in their lifetime.

Suzy Yates:

Do you know any millennials, Jo?

Jo Attard:             

I know many millennials myself.

Suzy Yates:           

I know millennials that change jobs every three months because they’re not happy with the hours or they don’t get enough lunch breaks or whatever. They just hop from job to job to job. We would never have dared.

Jo Attard:  

Right.

Suzy Yates: 

We got a job and we hung on for dear life, didn’t we?

Jo Attard:   

Exactly, exactly. I have a niece who, at the age of 28, has had three careers already, which, I admire the adaptability.

Suzy Yates: 

Yeah, I agree with you.

Jo Attard: 

It’s something that we can learn a lot from.

Suzy Yates:  

I think, to me, that shows a lot of confidence, whereas, I’m not sure what area you started, I started in radio at the age of 18 and I was so desperate to be in radio that it wouldn’t have mattered what I did or where I went.

Jo Attard:     

That’s right.

Suzy Yates:    

That’s what I wanted to do. You follow a particular path. It wasn’t until later in life that I had a variety of different career changes. I think it was more to do with circumstance rather than actual courage or confidence, but I look at a lot of younger people today and go, “Wow, you guys, you’ve got so much belief in yourself,” and that’s a good thing.

Jo Attard:             

It is. I think, as I said, we can learn a lot from it, but it’s also something that we need to be very much aware of, where our foibles are as well, and make sure that we don’t fall into the trap of living in the past and holding on to what we consider to be right in our careers then, because the world has changed.

Suzy Yates:  

Yeah, and the biggest complaint that you hear from older people trying to get a job, Jo, is that nobody responds to them. They might send off 100 emails, because that’s the other thing now, to apply for a lot of positions, you have to send an email, and you don’t know whether your email has ever been received. I think that that could make you a little despondent, so how do we overcome that?

Jo Attard:

Only about 20% to 30% of jobs are ever actually advertised, anyway, so it’s really, really important-

Suzy Yates:   

It’s that low, is it?

Jo Attard:  

Yep. It’s really important to call on your network and have a very strong network at your disposal. It’s always easier to develop a network when you don’t need it, so that when you do need it, it’s there. That’s something I very much work with clients in delivering.  It’s not about calling up someone and asking for a job and that’s the network. It’s really a reciprocal arrangement about what you can provide for them in the way of information or whatever.

Suzy Yates:     

Can you give me a couple of examples of what good networks would be? I always go back to the sporting analogy where, if you’re part of a team, you tend to meet new people and new opportunities come up. Is that what you mean?

Jo Attard:      

Yes. It’s really about talking to a lot of people, working at using it very much as a research tool, finding out what it is that you need to know and contacting people who can provide you with that information, and also who can open some doors for you.

Generally, it’s not the people that you know directly but the people that they refer you to who can provide you with that little bit of gold and who can provide you with that little bit of information that might open a door. By giving people information and using it as a reciprocal arrangement, people will see the value in you and, as a result of that, will be more happy to refer you to people who might be able to provide you that opportunity.

Suzy Yates:   

Referrals and recommendations certainly make a difference.

Jo Attard: 

Yes. They do.

Suzy Yates:

The times in my life when I had a business and somebody was referred to me, I would always meet with them and have a listen to what they had to say and look at their abilities, and 9 out of 10 times, they were the person that got the job.

Jo Attard:  

Absolutely.

Suzy Yates:   

Because if someone’s giving you a recommendation, they usually know you well. They know your business quite well.  Jo, sounds really interesting. Now how do we find out more about PeopleEdge?

Jo Attard:        

I have a website, PeopleEdge.com.au, or Google PeopleEdge Coaching and Consulting.

Suzy Yates:  

Are you working with older workers? What sort of people would come to you for some advice and help?

Jo Attard: 

I tend to work with professionals who are looking to proactively manage their career, or they may have recently moved out of a role through retrenchment or some other reason, and then I’ll work with them in the capacity of finding them a new role, or also in an executive coaching leadership stint.

Suzy Yates:     

Great. Once again, thanks for being on the show.

Jo Attard:     

Thanks, very much.

Suzy Yates:  

That’s PeopleEdge.com.au. That’s the website where we find you. We’ll talk to Jo again on the show. We might go through some of those retrenchments, how to cope and all that sort of stuff, because that’s a whole other topic, isn’t it? For anybody that’s been through retrenchment, you’ll know that it’s difficult.

ENDS