Your Communication Strategy
"The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it."
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (1934- )
U.S. Army four-star general
Having a productive and efficient action plan, your Personal Market Plan during career transition, will serve to focus your efforts, reaping the rewards of patience and persistence in your implementation.
The old "round peg in a round role" theory of career planning is dysfunctional. In the typical professional environment today, job descriptions are changing faster than ever before to keep up with the challenges of an economy in transition.By meeting and beating both professional and personal goals during your career transition, you will be propelling future successes and the resultant rewards. Successful implementation of your Plan confers rewards not unlike those in the workplace:
- A sense of accomplishment;
- Pushing oneself beyond expectation, often acquiring new skills or knowledge;
- Identifying developmental goals to assure continued career success;
- Gaining the respect of those around you, colleagues and customers;
- Being requested for future challenging opportunities!
A well conceived Personal Market Plan will help you to manage your time to get the best results for your efforts. In this Career FIT Series you will explore how to effectively position yourself in the marketplace. The alternative of using a "shotgun approach," or papering the world with your generic resume will simply scatter your time and energy... and confuse the marketplace decision-makers.
Companies spend millions of dollars creating and communicating just the right message to ensure that customers will recall, respond favorably to, and buy their products. Your message, continuously delivered to contacts and hiring managers, can be broken down into two parts:
First, a statement of your functional identity (I am a corporate trainer…), followed by several marketable core competencies that you are "selling" (…with substantial experience in leadership development, performance management and team building.) This is referred to as POSITIONING. It comes directly from…
1. Assessment and Research…
A Candidate who is truly managing their own career is constantly aware of their own best "next steps." They research the marketplace, target appropriate opportunity, network effectively to both create personal "visibility" and create avenues to those opportunities that are right for them. Take the time necessary to determine your next right work.2. Setting Your Career Objectives… Knowledge of the process and self-awareness allow you to effectively set your career transition objectives. In order to implement an effective Personal Market Plan, your objectives must be defined by positioning (functional and personal strengths) and targeting (informed industry and geographic goals) your candidacy. Of course the best "FIT" occurs when your objectives are aligned with the needs of the marketplace.
Pre-determination of offer criteria and career objectives are essential cornerstones to the development of a high quality resume, part of the written collaterals of your Personal Market Plan. As your highly personalized, marketing collateral, your resume positions you in the marketplace… qualifies you with your experience, knowledge, skills and credentials… and can target your efforts with appropriate word selection relative to your industries of choice. Take the time necessary to determine your career objectives, and how they best FIT what the market has offer you.
How will you assess FIT when opportunities come to your attention? At the core of your personal marketing strategies is the effective use of the actual words and phrases you use to define the FIT between your motivated competencies and the market's need for services and solutions. They are so much more than the "the right buzz words," or "keywords" as used in technology driven job banks (or the mirrored resume bank queries)... they are the building blocks of your message.
Most of us learned these lessons back in grade school.
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Word selection... Your choice of words can convey very different meanings. For example, as a manager, do you direct the activity of your subordinates... coordinate the efforts of multi-level, interactive teams or peer groups... or actually do certain functions to achieve results?
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Effective phraseology... Often, the soft measure words used to describe what sort of a worker you are or how you perform your work, are discarded as self-serving "fluff." However, when built in to powerful, high impact phrases, they serve to differentiate you from others capable of doing the same work. For example, being a "problem solver" doesn't make you better than your professional competitors... but describing yourself as a tenacious (an adjective) problem solver, or one who solves problems professionally (an adverb), begins to personalize your strengths.
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Whole sentence structure... Build accomplishment statements that demonstrate and prove your abilities and experience. While resumes utilize a truncated syntax that eliminates the repetitive use of the noun "I", correspondence and conversation dictate the more narrative use of nouns. In all cases, however, use an action verb to convey actual behavior, words and phrases to describe the object being acted upon, and, when possible, state actual results of the activity. Constructed effectively, a good accomplishment can trigger all the right questions about your strengths...
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Focused, behavior-laden paragraphs... to provide examples and offer proof of your strengths and experience. A typical resume format doesn't allow for much of this behavior-based proof, but a well constructed message should trigger the questions that allow you to expand a conversation from your actual experiences. Thus your resume and correspondence can create the dialog of your phone calls, personal conversations and, ultimately, actual employment interviews.
Yes, its worth your practice time to focus on words. They can create high impact and convey powerful "word pictures." Your messages will be delivered in three different ways:
- Verbal communication (by telephone or in person)
In marketing, these delivery vehicles are referred to as collaterals. And at their core is a simple collection of words that describe the FIT between your strengths and the market's need. That collection of the right words and phrases, your definition of a good FIT, is the communication strategy of your Personal Market Plan.
The FIT HAPPENS Series...
The Nature of Career FIT | Researching FITness | CAREER FIT Planning
Your Communication Strategy | Closing the Deal
July 16, 2008