Problem
At some point in your career (definitely at the beginning) you are looking for a job. How people typically do? Well, they jump on job announcements websites and they look on which one they find it more suitable for them and apply. (Of course, many of them are applying randomly but that’s another subject. Others are relying on recruitment agencies which IMHO is totally wrong but again that’s another subject).
The approach described above is not going to give you much chances finding a good job, much less your dream job.
Solution
Always be looking for a job regardless the context.
The solution is much more simple than the problem, so let’s take a closer look by enumerating three main reasons.
1. A will to get a new job may occur unexpectedly
You can get fired. The company that you work for might fail. You cannot get paid due some budged issues.
Let’s take a happy scenario — you are very happy with your current job. So far so good. Have you heard about this word change? What happens if your supervisor resigns and it is replaced by someone that you don’t like? What happens if there are hired a lot of people that you don’t get along with? What happens if the project that you’ve been working has been finished successfully, and no opportunity seems to come ahead?
As you can see, even a happy scenario can turn into a drama. Sometimes, dreams have have their habit of becoming nightmares. It will not be tragedy, and you will quickly wake up, if you have a good “market pack”. This involves:
- active relationships with your connections from your professional network (which is not just LinkedIn).
- knowledge of companies reputation. Web apps like Glassdoor might be useful, your network previously mentioned is more likely to help — remember: “Your network is your net worth”.
- you need to know all companies that usually hires people with your skills, not just the ones that are listed on a specific time on a bunch of websites.
2. You need to know the market
As already said above, you need to know all companies that are looking for people like you. Sometimes they don’t post job announcements, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need you. Knowing them, you can send them an email … you do know the email address, don’t you? I said that you need to know the company, right? You do have an evidence/register where you store the companies information that interests you in a format that you like. So you should have a their contact details as well! Also you can have the names of people that might help.
You could use an excel file and store all this data. A note book is a solution as well. I have my own app where I am storing and managing such information, but this app is not part of this post. It is part of my portfolio, as a software developer :-)
3. You need to know (and to predict) the required skills
By viewing job announcements regularly, you will see the most required skills. You will know what you miss and you must have. You will know what is becoming obsolete and you can make room into your brain for something new … and usually fun.
Knowing what a company want to achieve with their projects, you will figure it out what you need to learn further. That’s what I mean by predicting. And the good part is that very few are interested on their careers (or even their own lives) so you will be by far an outstanding candidate … so the good offer is yours.
Conclusion
I don’t really have a conclusion, it is the same as the title of the article. You can also read again the enumerated reasons if you are not convinced.
Side notes:
- you should not feel bad if people from work (your boss included) knows that you are always looking for a job as long as it is not during the working hours. Actually, it makes you a better employee since you are not just learning new skills, you are learning new required skills.
- this post is only for responsible people. This note didn’t fit at the beginning. I am aware that some readers might say “A track of job announcements? A guy that build his own app for this?! Give me a break, I have something else to do!” Well, if you find wired this approach, I am happy to hear how do keep informed about local job market. I refuse to believe that you keep in mind all the information.
Thanks for reading, and as I said above, I am happy to receive your input.