“Following a successful 15-year career in publishing, I experienced a slow and painfully long redundancy in 2006. Redeployment to an internal vacancy propelled me into the new area of volunteering on a temporary contract. At the end of the contract I decided to make the break and follow through with a long held idea for a sabbatical, volunteering for a year in Ghana.
It was a great experience and although I learnt new skills, it was challenging but what was even tougher was returning to the UK a year later. With my 18 months of experience gained in the redeployed role and volunteering overseas, I thought that volunteer management was for me and that I'd get a job within four months.
The reality was totally different. I found the daily grind of job searching extremely time consuming and demoralising and I started to lose focus, especially when it came to trawling through job sites, signing-on, knowing how to write my CV and spinning all the other plates that you need in the search for work. My grand plan to be finished with publishing and have a career change within months became fuzzier and fuzzier and the reality was that I had no idea what to go for, how to target jobs and market myself.
Things took a turn for the better when I attended the Forum 3 charity jobs career fair in September 2009. I went to an interesting seminar run by Steve Preston, Director of SMP Solutions and an expert Career Coach. The seminar ‘Navigate the way to a brighter future’ focused on ‘winning through redundancy and successful career change’. I took up the SMP exhibition offer of a free quick fire career review and was inspired to take the plunge and signed up for the SMP ‘Move your career One Step Beyond’ full day Career Transition Masterclass a couple of weeks later.
The SMP Solutions Career Transition Masterclass was a comprehensive day that provided me with many pointers for how to move forward in my career change and I met a number of like minded talented people who all needed to refocus and get clarity of purpose and build their confidence to achieve successful career change. It was an excellent day but it highlighted for me that I still needed to spend more focused time re-evaluating my situation, skills, prospects, dreams and researching opportunities. Although I had moved forward, it was a journey and I needed more support to get to my final destination.
In addition to the free follow up coaching sessions, Steve and Debbie provided, I decided to invest more time, energy and money to fast track my career transition and get more focus through personal sessions with Steve and Debbie covering my career values & needs, job search strategies, action planning, interview skills, self marketing and personal branding.
It’s been a roller-coaster journey, trying several different avenues, and generally floundering in the work search. However, with Steve’s help, I’ve gained focus, clarified my values and interest areas for work and managed to change my mindset and started to send out all the right signals.
My applications became targeted and focused and, despite the ongoing hard slog to complete mind numbing application forms, things turned round for me and I gained a string of interviews back to back. Although none of them were successful, the feedback was very positive and my self belief returned and felt ready to spring board into action.
The very morning interview number 3 said ‘no’, a friend phoned telling me that he was at a function where he happened to talk to someone needing more support at his charity. He put in the word for me and thinking I’d just go along for a chat to find out if I wanted to apply, the very next day Mission Without Borders phoned to offer me the job! NO application, NO interview just an informal chat!
In terms of all the work I had done with SMP Solutions to establish what I really wanted, the job is a perfect match; a small Christian charity supporting poor communities in Eastern Europe through low key development work. This was all my work values and past work experiences wrapped into one hands on role with scope for growing the job. Just what I wanted!
The reality is that it’s more of a vocation than just another job and that’s exactly what so much of the ground-work that I completed with SMP had led me to aim for. The journey has finished but the job has just started and the good news is that I already feel at home, my confidence has returned and I can already see ways to grow the role and benefit the charity. What I have learnt is that to achieve successful career change it helps to have professional career development support to provide the ongoing motivation and encouragement and act as the catalyst to achieve your career transition.
I wish to thank Steve, Debbie and the SMP Solutions team for the fantastic support they have given me all the way through my challenging journey and I am so pleased that I attended Forum 3 last year!
Anne Montefiore |