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Advice on using CareersinConsultancy.com
What should you consider when looking for your next career move?
Looking for at your career options and seeking out the ideal role for you can be a daunting exercise with seemingly endless choices and difficult comparisons to make. This section of the site outlines some questions you should ask yourself when embarking on this process to guide and focus your search plus a few suggested do's and don'ts.
Questions to ask yourself:
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Q. What is your motivation for looking at a career move?
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 | Faster Career Progression |
| Better salary and conditions |
| Promotion |
| To gain new skills or industry knowledge or International experience |
| Re-location |
| Complete career redirection |
| Career downsizing |
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Do's -
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| Whatever the reason or reasons be clear and honest with yourself about the implications for your search and then build a set of realistic requirements to make the move worthwhile.
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| Research the market rates for roles in new locations or industries, house prices in new locations, travel times and costs.
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| Take a view on the type of company you would like to join - big or small
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| Be clear on what you have to offer to a new employer and try to honestly evaluate and quantify your attributes and abilities.
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| Put yourself in the employer's shoes and try to understand that they are buying your talent based on a valuation of your potential impact in their business.
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| Concentrate on the tangible benefits that you bring to a role and potential employer.
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Don'ts -
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| Be careful not to price yourself out of a role, industry or location that you are attempting to move into.
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| If you are making a promotional move don't undersell yourself but equally don't overstate your case and put yourself in a pressurised situation where targets are unachievable.
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Q. What are your key requirements and are they realistic given your current location, salary, skills and experience
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| Salary expectations - if your motivation is to secure an uplift in salary set a benchmark which you would like to achieve, but be realistic, remember that industry average uplifts range from 8 - 15%. The upper limit of this range is achieved by candidates making a move within their current industry, which exploits the knowledge and skills that they have already developed, the further your move is outside these criteria then the further down the scale you will be.
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| Seeking new skills and experience - if your motivation is to gain new knowledge which will develop your career in a new direction or allow you to make a major career transition then you may need to think in terms of a compromise on salary and grade in the short term to achieve the transition and develop your career over the longer term.
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Do's -
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| If your requirements fall into a number of categories try to assign values or weighting to each area and if possible build a matrix to establish how each requirement maybe traded against another.
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| Establish where you are willing to compromise and where you are not and perform a sanity check on whether your demands are realistic
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| Use an intermediary for the salary negotiations if one is available. This way the middleman takes the brunt of the work and any bad feeling created, it also makes a compromise is easier to reach. Luckily CareersinConsultancy can provide this service free of charge.
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Don'ts -
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| Be careful not to price yourself out of a role, industry or location that you are attempting to move into.
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| Don't make unrealistic demands when negotiating your employment terms and conditions, focus on what you really need, these points are the deal-breakers rather than seeking to win on every point.
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Q. - How should you manage your career search given the pressures of current client demands and deadlines?
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| Should you use a recruitment consultancy or not. Many people go down the route of placing there details with several agencies but then find that competing agents are tugging them in several directions at once. They are never quite sure who their CV has been sent to or what the potential employers think of them.
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| Receiving constant calls on the mobile can raise suspicions
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| Interview arrangements can be an issue
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Do's -
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| Manage the inputs into the process by restricting the number of people and opportunities involved.
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| If possible assign an afternoon in one day each week that you would like to steer interview arrangements towards
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| Obviously the best possible way to manage your search process is to utilise the unique benefits of the CareersinConsultancy website.
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Don'ts -
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| Allow your CV to be punted around the market by a large number of agencies
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| Don't move meetings that have been arranged unnecessarily, this can cause big delays and sometimes derailment of the process.
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| Don't lose focus on the objectives of your reasons for going to the interviews and making the move when the pressure of your current job make it difficult to make time for interviews.
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Q. - How should you organise your CV?
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Do's -
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| Use the template provided on the CareersinConsultancy website as a guide.
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| Do list dates accurately and deal with any continuity errors upfront.
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| Describe the companies you have worked for and the role you undertook in each company
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| Highlight significant projects and achievements.
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| Provide a range of contact details including mobile numbers and addresses.
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| If you have more than one CV type make sure that they are consistent with your actual skills rather than the skills you think the reader wants
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Don'ts -
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| Don't go overboard on colours and fonts its clarity and content that matter
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| Don't include every qualification and experience just the most important and relevant.
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| Don't let the CV get beyond three pages, if you have other appendixes retain them for use later in the process.
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| Don't mislead the reader with wild exaggerations that you can't substantiate
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