Looking for a job and giving a
thought to your so-called career planning you can’t but come across tons of
information. Tips and tricks, dos and don’ts, best practices, top-something lists
and how-to from those who have made it to the top are things you’ll probably
find yourself reading if your ambition is not to miss the boat here. At least
that’s what I’ve been doing a lot for the last 3 months and even decided to
share my knowledge with those who might be interested by means of this blog.
As far as I understand it, all it
comes to, all the effort you make in relation to your career can be perfectly
summarized by the comprehensive term ‘employability’ (unless, of course, you
consider a business of your own and couldn’t care less). Let’s have a look at
this concept. According to my favorite source of knowledge Wikipedia (which,
unfortunately, was not good enough to refer to in my college papers, but is
just great for giving a general idea and is therefore worth donating to) employability refers to a person's capability for gaining and
maintaining employment that depends on the knowledge, skills and abilities
individuals possess, the way they present those assets to employers, and the
context (e. g. personal circumstances and labour market environment) within
which they seek work.
So if something of a career belongs to your life’s
objectives – and it does certainly belong to mine – you’ve got to stay employable,
no matter what. And if we can believe the career gurus, in the periods one doesn’t
have a permanent (paid) job or other kind of activity that might qualify as a
CV builder (like a business of your own or freelancing), one should at least
make sure he/she does one of the following:
-
Travelling the world so that you can
later tell your potential employer you’ve explored some places and yourself
within the different settings and cultures and that it made you better, broader
oriented and more flexible
-
Volunteer for something you stand
for, so you can prove – and in due course demonstrate it to your future
employer – that you can be a highly effective individual who doesn’t need money
for something he/she does with a lot of pleasure
-
Enroll in a course to enhance your
skills of project management, a foreign language, a computer program or the
like, so that you can provide evidence (preferably in the form of some kind of
recognized certificate) that you’ve done your best to use your unemployed time
wisely in order to excel and be prepared to go even harder the moment you get
hold of the job of your dreams
The list can be continued. This actually means that the
contrary is also true: if you don’t do any of these, if you take some time off
to, say, raise your little children or try to find out more about yourself and
your aspirations, if you give yourself the space to explore what it is you like
and what makes your heart beat faster (without having a paid job next to it),
you can say with certainty that you’ll have to explain yourself to your future
boss. Your employability will then presumably
go down with a considerable number of imaginary employability ‘units’ per month
or year of being unemployed. A gap in a resume is therefore a notoriously
disliked and for some even scary subject to discuss in a job interview, which is
– employability-wise – quite understandable.
On the other hand, you can always give a twist to your in
between jobs’ activities which would seem to contribute to your employability this
way or another. You can ‘frame’ your story so that your potential employer sees
the value of your time off without you having to lie – even if you didn’t do
much to improve your CV. Moreover, your future employer would also appreciate
your honesty. A sabbatical – an expensive word you could use – is after all supposed
to serve a function of changing the way your are, helping your on the way to
your better self, which your potential employer might also benefit from.
As to my sabbatical, it’s going to end pretty soon as I’m
getting back to my old job, while intending to stay looking for a new one in
the meantime. Do I do it for the sake of my employability? Not primarily, it
just feels like the right thing to do at the moment, but that this might also do
good to my employability is just a positive side-effect.
