Successful job hunting rewards some planning, but how much should you do before you get stuck into the face-to-face elements of your work search? It depends on the sort of person you are and how you approach multi-faceted tasks. As a guide to the options available to you, I outline the differences between people who love doing this sort of thing and those who don't.

In this episode of The Vocation Cast I talk about planners and pantsers, the latter being people who do things by the seat of their pants. You'll discover the origin of the term "pantsers" right here! If you're one of them, beware, because I give you six good reasons to change your attitude towards planning of any sort, and certainly with regard to your next job search.

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When you design your career, there are some big decisions you need to make. Broadly speaking, you have three choices about the sort of work you'd like to do. You can have a job, follow a career or forge a vocation.

What are the characteristics of each of these? How about their pros and cons? These are just two of the questions that I answer in this episode of The Vocation Cast.

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If you were given a binary choice between doing good work and doing bad work, you’d almost certainly go for the former.

There can’t be many people who’d willingly accept a bad work situation when a good one was available to them. Of course, things are rarely as simple as that because most work has got good bits and bad bits and you have to take the rough with the smooth, don’t you? Well, perhaps, but let’s unpack this good work/bad work conundrum before you get too resigned to accepting the status quo.

I think that an honest evaluation of the quality of the work you do is an essential first step when it comes to any kind of career planning. Once you’ve done that, your determination to reject bad work and accept good work should come pretty high on your list of priorities in my opinion, and I outline a way of doing this in today’s Vocation Cast.

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Work is getting worse for most of us. This might sound negative or overly-dramatic but I’d ask you to hear me out before you leap to judgement. You see, I firmly believe that most employed people are getting an increasingly bad deal when it comes to work and in this episode I explain why I’ve reached this conclusion, why it matters to you and how to do something about it.

I’m not suggesting that everyone’s work is getting worse. Many people are doing great jobs that are well-paid, secure and completely fulfilling. There are plenty of excellent employers who care deeply for their workers’ welfare and establish employment protocols that ensure the best working conditions.

However, plenty of others are caught in a bad-work trap and countless employers facilitate a variety of dismal working practices. It’s these factors that are testament to work getting worse for a large tranche of the workforce, which might become a major motivation in searching for a better job.

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Doing the wrong work manifests itself in different ways but the root causes essentially boil down to choosing a job that doesn’t align with your core values, practical needs or individual skillsets. Doing the wrong work is bad for you at every level and can easily lead to burn out, one of the most damaging effects of making a poor work choice.

In today’s Vocation Cast episode I think about the nature of burn out, plus the associated ailment of fade away, a lighter version of burn out to put it simply. I assess their effects before drawing some conclusions about the serious problems associated with doing the wrong kind of work which often becomes apparent if burn out or fade away affect you.

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There are all sorts of reasons to look for a different job.

Perhaps you want to earn more money, climb higher up the career ladder or completely change the work direction you’re heading in. These are all quite understandable but I think there’s an even better reason for shaking things up and that’s because you’re getting anxious, stressed-out or sick as a direct result of the job you do.

Finding new employment that immediately improves the quality of your life by eliminating the psychological and physical symptoms of bad work is surely one of the best of all the reasons for starting a job hunt.

In today’s Vocation Cast I talk about workplace disengagement, the underlying cause of some of the most pernicious difficulties that the big majority of employed people experience at some point in their lives. Whether you currently suffer from what I discuss or not, understanding the nature of this problem is crucially important if you want to be successful in your next job search.

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 www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace-2022-report.aspx#ite-393245

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What would a perfect work search look like?

Most of us would welcome a strategy that planted us directly in front of a new employer who matched our preferred working style and allowed us to do a job that was well-paid, secure, fulfilling and exploited our highest-level skillsets.

We’d find a way of becoming the only person who was in the frame for the job, the sole candidate being considered for employment. We’d junk resumes, CVs and other application paraphernalia that actually hold us back. Instead, we’d discover how to get plugged in to a rich seam of contacts who’d help us along the way and give us privileged information and inside knowledge of the organisation we wanted to join. This would allow us to build a compelling pitch that proved we were the best person to handle the work challenges that our skills were ideally suited to.

This summarises my approach to job hunting which I introduce in today’s Vocation Cast.

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There’s a fool-proof method of succeeding at any task. One of the most reliable ways of gaining solid strategic knowledge of a new area is to identify the thoughts and behaviours of people who are at the top of the game you choose to compete in and want to win, and to then put these actions into effect as well as you can.

The reasons that emulating other people’s successes is such a good idea are twofold. First, you can easily remove any doubt about whether you’re heading in the right direction or not. Second, you almost always get to achieve your aims as quickly as possible. For busy people who don’t have time to waste, getting fast results is essential. It gives them energy to devote to other things that are more important in their lives, such as cracking on with doing a high-quality job that they really want to do, for example. Discover the secret of elite job searchers’ success in today’s Vocation Cast.

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Conventional recruitment procedures are terrible in almost every way which is really bad news if you’re looking for a new job. The fact of the matter is that the usual ways of looking for different work are so fundamentally flawed that they’re barely fit for purpose, and I explain why in today’s Vocation Cast.

The overall aim of almost any normal recruitment procedure which is to match the most suitable worker with a specific job that needs to be done. On the face of it, this is a perfectly good objective, but it’s only when you unpack the details of how this process operates that you discover that things aren’t quite as straightforward as they might seem.

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What if you could design the perfect work-search strategy?

In an ideal scenario, you’d discover lucrative employment opportunities that are perfectly suited to your talents, and with high-quality employers of course. You’d eliminate all of the competition from other job hunters and get personally introduced to influential company insiders who urgently need your skills and have the authority to employ you on the spot.

You’d seize the immediate attention of hiring decision makers by taking charge of any kind of job interview. You’d deliver a supremely-effective and highly-persuasive hiring pitch, then negotiate a top salary from a position of true power and strength. You’d be in complete control of every key decision and action you take during the entire job hunt, which would allow you to assert agency over every aspect of your working life.

Well, the perfect job-search strategy is now a reality. Find out how in episode 1 of The Vocation Cast.

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