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[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, everyone, and welcome
to this Indeed Job Cast. I'm excited to introduce
our guest speaker today, Emilie Aries. Emilie is a speaker,
podcast host, author, and the founder and
CEO of Bossed Up, an award-winning personal
and professional development community where she helps
women craft happy, healthy, and sustainable career paths. And that's me, Brandy Cohn. I'm a manager on Indeed's
job seeker experience team. We're responsible for creating
helpful resources like this Job Cast for our users, like you. So take it away, Emilie. Thank you so much,
Brandy, and thanks to the entire Indeed team
for making today possible. I am so delighted to spend some
time with y'all today to get very practical and tactical
about how to navigate career transition. That is what I've been thinking
about, working on, and fighting for the better part
of the past decade, but it all started with my
own personal career transition almost-- what-- eight years ago now. I started off in the realm
of campaigns and elections, and rose fairly quickly
as a young leader fighting on behalf of causes and
candidates that I believed in. I became a senior digital
strategist fighting on behalf of major
Senate campaigns across the United
States by the age of 26, and found myself feeling like
I was achieving someone else's dream career. I don't know if you've ever
felt that way, like everything you've been fighting
for or everything you've been pursuing-- you get to the finish line
and look around, and think, is this it? This isn't really
feeling aligned with what I want to
be doing in this world and how I'm going to be
showing up in this world. And so it took me about
two tumultuous, rocky years there to find my way to crafting
a career that I really love. And that started with learning
how to pivot those advocacy skills from advocating
on behalf of others to actually advocating
on behalf of myself. And that's really
what the job search process entails nowadays. You have to be your
own best advocate, and I have had the pleasure
of helping countless others-- men, women, and everyone
across the gender spectrum-- land dream jobs
that they absolutely love by learning how to
persuasively communicate throughout the job
search process. And that's really what we're
going to tackle here today. If you want more
resources, you can always find me online at
emilieairies.org or bossedup.org. And my fantastic colleague,
Ellie, our creative director at Bossed Up, is
also here today, and she's about to share with
you our corresponding handout for today's conversation. If you're the kind of person
who likes to write, or jot down notes, or interact
throughout a workshop, that handout is the
perfect complimentary guide to today's conversation. If you're not able to access
the handout now, don't worry. We'll make sure you get
access to it later as well, and it's just as
relevant later-- full of resources and
interactive components to help you navigate your
job search effectively. Now, if you're hearing
my story and thinking, well, that's well
and nice, Emilie, to achieve a career ambition and
then realize it's not for you, I want you to know that this
is also just as relevant a conversation if you are
finding yourself much more in a tough spot when it comes
to the current economic climate. So this is not
just for folks who have a job it's no
longer serving them and want to change. This is also for the
millions of folks who find ourselves having
to navigate a career transition because the
industry or the career focus that we've had to date
is no longer relevant because of all that's
happening in today's world. The two circumstances are quite
different, and I've-- trust me, I've been in both over
the course of my lifetime, and I've helped countless others
who've navigated both kinds of career transitions. The skill set is very similar. So today we're going to
focus on the following. We're going to make sure that
we understand how COVID-19 has impacted the job search process
and get a high-level look at which industries
have been hit hardest and which are hiring
more so now than ever. We're going to then break
down three concrete skills to help persuasively communicate
throughout the course of your job search process
and advocate for a career transition across industries. These are the
persuasive skills that helped me be a great
campaigner, and we're going to help you
run the campaign that is getting a job as
strategically as possible. So we're going to talk
[INAUDIBLE] audience-- how to balance in both, how
to map your skills from one industry to the next, and
how to practice persuasively communicating what's
transferable about your skills. So again, if you want
access to that handout, the handout can be found
in the Zoom chat function. If you have any questions
or concerns along the way, feel free to weigh in there. So we all know
that, whenever we're talking about job search
in the middle of 2020, we are not talking about normal
job search circumstances. Things are weird globally. There's no other way to put it. In some industries, like
the airline industry and a bunch of these
industries-- hospitality, events and conventions,
travel industries-- they have been hit harder
than anything or anyone could see coming. It is not a great
time to pivot into any of these areas of growth. These are typically wonderful
opportunities for career progression, but not right now. So unless you're
here because you're preparing for a
job search you want to launch a year from now-- which I highly
doubt this-- is not where we're going to
want to spend our time. Instead, it's maybe
of interest to think about how COVID-19 has
impacted industries that are hiring more so now than ever. If you're less set on
a specific industry and you're open to exploring
lots of opportunities in different
industries, these are some of the industries that are
hiring more so now than ever. And fortunately, for
all of us, Indeed.com has adjusted how they're
sharing job opportunities and you really strategic way so
that employers and job seekers alike can make it
clear whether or not they are urgently hiring. So if you are urgently
in need of a paycheck and urgently looking
to make a career pivot, and it's more about timeliness
than finding the perfect fit, make sure you make note of
those who are urgently hiring on Indeed, which is
an excellent way to sift through your priorities. What I like to say is, if you
have the privilege of time, if you are not facing eviction,
if your worst case scenario is not being unable to put
food on the table for yourself or your family, keep a high
bar and compromise later. If you need to compromise now
because it is not a time to be picky-- it is time to be
practical about getting an income flowing again-- the urgently hiring
feature of Indeed can be a helpful way to just
be realistic about setting your priorities. So here are the three
persuasive components that I want to talk
through to help you pivot, because regardless
of what privileges you have or don't have in
this job search climate, if it's time to pivot,
that means it's time to focus on what skills you
are working with-- because at the end of the day, a pivot
is not an easy thing to stick. Sticking your landing
is not terribly easy, but the moral of the story is
you have transferable skills. The question is, who
can use them right now? A client of mine recently
went from being a therapist to working in occupational
health and safety consulting, which has been
a lifelong passion of hers, but one that she got away
from about 15 years ago when she went into
social work, really. And she was able to make the
case to her new employer, who she was just hired
by, to say, listen, I know that I've been
focusing on my therapy work, and communication
skills, and empathy skills over the past chunk of my
career, but my lifelong focus-- including what I studied
in undergrad and graduate studies-- was really focused more on
occupational safety and health. And in today's
climate, I feel called to go back to what originally
got me into the workforce to begin with, and
to really focus on bringing those
skills to the forefront, because the world needs those
skills now more than ever. And she was able to focus on,
OK, who needs those skills now? And that might mean looking
back throughout the course of your career and
unearthing skills that have been laying
dormant for a little while, or even developing new
skills to make yourself as compelling and
persuasive a job search candidate as possible. So let's talk through three
key principles for how to identify and communicate your
transferable skills, especially when you're making the leap
from one industry to the next. First, one of the
core principles of all persuasive
communication is that you need to know your goals-- which, I would argue
that job seekers are very clear on their
goals-- like, I need a job and here's
what I need in my job to make me happy, or here's
what I need in my pay to make me happy, healthy, and
financially stable. But equally important is to
understand your audience. Your audience, the
employer, is not going to be motivated by
your dire need for a job. That's not going to motivate
them to act, to hire you, to interview you. We need to play to their
concerns, to their worries, to their strategy. We need to think empathically. What is this employer
looking for right now? Because every person who's
hiring, at some level, is trying to solve a problem. I'm hiring a podcast
editor because we needed a podcast
editor on my team who could move a little faster
than the one we've been working with for the past year or so. As he scales up his
business, we were looking to hire podcast editor
in-house to join our team. And that was a problem. The ability to communicate
and get timely service from my podcast
editor was the problem that I was looking to solve when
hiring a podcast editor, which we just did recently. So when I'm applying for a
job, my goal is to think, how can I write the most
persuasive cover letter, or mission statement, or
personal value statement, or resume to say, I am the
solution to your problem? Really empathizing with your
employer, with your audience, your prospective next boss
is going to make you-- is really going to help you
have that super power of using empathy to be
audience-centric and be as persuasive as possible. Now, you can get to know
your audience better right here at Indeed on the
career path site-- career pages, rather-- where you
can browse by different careers and get to know what kinds of
people are in those careers so you can better understand
how COVID-19 is impacting that space right now,
and what problems they might be looking to solve
so you can position yourself as the solution
to their problems, as the gap that they're
looking to fill. So a critical way
to think about that isn't just starting with
empathizing with your audience, but also to understand, what
skills do I actually have that this next employer
of mine really needs? Now, there's a lot of talk in
the career development space and right here at Indeed
about the difference between hard skills
and soft skills. Keep in mind,
first and foremost, that none is better
than the other. Hard skills and soft skills
are both really important. In recent decades, soft skills
have become an area of focus, because that's
what sets us apart as human beings from our
artificial intelligence counterparts. If there is a software
program that can do your job, what makes you better than
that software program? It's your human ability to
bring soft skills to the table. It also speaks more
to your character. So while it's super
important to emphasize the hard tactical skills,
the areas of expertise you've developed, the hardware
and software that how to use, the proficiencies that you've
developed when it comes to chemical engineering or email
campaign writing-- whatever those hard skills are, those
are certainly important. But your soft skills
speak to who you are and how you do what you do. Are you reliable? Are you dependable? Are you loyal? Are you a team
player, or are you someone who thrives
independently? There's no right or wrong way
to describe your soft skills, but really think
about, how can I best describe how I do what
I do, not just what I do? In a competitive
job landscape, it's important to emphasize
both, to really balance how you have hard skills that
you're bringing to the table, but also that you're
the kind of person that other people
want to work with. That matters, so
don't sell yourself short by forgetting to
identify what character traits and soft skills
you're bringing to the table, because they can make
a big difference. In the first page of today's
corresponding worksheet-- which, again, you can find
here in Zoom's chat feature-- I want to challenge you to
take inventory of your skills. The best way to think about
doing that is to think about, what are the skills that you
currently perform at your day job-- or if you're not
currently employed, did you most recently used
in your last or most recent employment situation? What are all the skills
that you could describe you used on a regular basis there? Was it fundraising skills? Was it customer service skills? Was it problem solving? Identify, what are those
hard skills and soft skills that you brought to
your last employer? Then let's go back
a little further. Even if you're a
recent graduate, I want you to think about
any past internships, or even part-time jobs. I know I, for one, waited tables
and babysat throughout most of my college years, and it's
easy to brush those experiences to the side, saying,
yeah, well, that doesn't relate to the degree I have
now that I want to use. But I would caution
you against doing so. Instead, think about, what
skills were prominently required of me when I was
waiting tables and babysitting? And the skills of multitasking,
of providing excellent customer service, of diffusing sticky
situations or tense situations and having assertive
conversations-- that was all a big
part of those jobs. So don't discredit the
job based on the fact that it might not align with
what you want to do next. Instead, try to mine
that job for the skills that are transferable. And sometimes I see folks
in their resume, when you start describing
a past experience, the first bullet point tends
to start with the skills that you performed the most. A recent client of mine who was
actually a recent graduate-- Hannah-- she just landed
a job of her dreams on a political
campaign this cycle, and when she was describing
some of her past internships, she said, well, most of what
I did in that internship was answer phones and
write correspondence on behalf of the member of
Congress I was interning for. And that was the first. And I said, Hannah, does that
relate to exactly the kind of role you want next? And she said, no, it doesn't. The role I'm looking for is more
about digital communications, social media management, website
management for campaigns. And I said, did you do any
of that in that position? She said, sure, but it
just was a little bit. I said, it doesn't matter
how much of the job you performed using
that skill set. Put your most
relevant skill sets at the top of the
bullet point list, if you have one, beneath
each resume experience. And finally, once you've
mined your past experiences-- either your current job or
most recent job, and the jobs prior for the hard
skills and soft skills that you developed there,
I would also give yourself the freedom to think
about what skills you'd like to develop further. Where could you
go with this next? If given the opportunity,
what are the skills that you would like to focus on? And maybe, just maybe,
that's an opportunity for extracurricular
skill building right now to make you even more of
an attractive candidate. Once you've done an inventory in
that handout of all the skills that you bring to
the table, I want you to look at that
from the perspective of your ideal next employer. Which of all of your skills
matter most to the kind of job that you're looking for? So to borrow Hannah's
example again, if Hannah was looking for
a digital strategist role, the skills that
matter most had more to do with the social media
management and rapid response email campaign writing
that she was doing. And those are the
skills to emphasize. That's an example of keeping
your entire job search strategy not just goal-oriented,
but audience-centric. Now, if you're at a loss
and not sure quite how to describe all the different
skills you bring to the table, you might want to find keywords
in the job descriptions that appeal to you the most and
think critically about how you're describing your skills. For instance, a
client of mine is going from being in an
accounting office to serving as a data scientist,
which is what she's been studying her whole life. She's been kind of
stuck in accounting, when she really wants to
be doing data science work. And so we were looking
at how the data science job descriptions that she
was most excited about described the skills
they were looking for, and it turns out they
were using really different words,
different verbiage to describe what she had been
describing as Microsoft Excel competencies and data
software proficiencies. We needed to match how she
was describing her skill set with exactly the key words
that were found in the job descriptions
related to the field that she wanted to go into next. Now, this is a really
hard thing to do, because some industries
use the exact same verbiage for totally different things. One of my job search
clients is in fundraising, and when she would be
writing fundraising appeals-- and then she wanted to get
into the world of tech and VC funding-- she wanted to go from being
a non-profit fundraiser to a startup fundraiser-- she had to be very careful
about how she described her development work,
because development in the world of
non-profit fundraising needs something very
different than being a developer in
the world of tech. So you want to be very mindful
about how your past experiences are being described, and how
that relates to your future job opportunities. The best way to catch those
lost in translation moments is to have someone in
your target industry give you personalized
feedback on your resume and say, do the words I'm using
here match up to the words that you're hearing
in your industry? If not, it's time to
do some more research. To finally close out the second
skill set for persuasively communicating your
transferable skills, I want you to be
honest with yourself. If you take an inventory
of your skill set and you find that there's
a gap between the skills you have and the skills that
your next employer is really looking for, don't shy away from
that or feel shame about it. Lean into that and
honestly take stock of how you can develop
those skills further. So if there is a graduate
degree standing between you and the career you want,
or if there is social media management experience standing
between you and the job that you want next, where
can you go learn more? Where can you go right now
to develop those skills? I'm a big fan of
LinkedIn Learning. I'm a LinkedIn Learning author,
and I teach a ton of courses there. You can find a ton of different
hard skills and soft skills that you can develop there. There's a million
different places online where we can be
skilling up right now and capitalizing on this
opportunity to focus inwardly and how we can best
prepare ourselves to be an outstanding candidate. And even if you're
in the midst of one of those programs to
skill up right now, you can add that to your resume
and just put in parentheses, in progress-- course in progress--
just to show that you are
progress-oriented person who is developing their skill set. You can also check out
the skills listed directly on the career pages
here at Indeed. All right, my final,
and I would argue, most important skill
set to develop here is how to tell a compelling
story in every single bullet point on your resume. This is what's known
as the CAR method, and it really has to do with
persuasively communicating your most transferable skills. Now, CAR in this instance stands
for challenge, action, results. 90% of my job search clients
who come to me, whether it's for a resume consultation
or for our job search accelerator [INAUDIBLE],, they
have existing resumes and cover letters that usually say,
here's all the things I did. I wrote 500 campaign
fundraising emails. I managed a team of 20 interns. I started a new initiative. And that's it. We just list off our skills. And even though I just had
to list off your skills, that is just step one. By the time it makes
to your resume, you need to give me more of
the story, because people aren't just compelled
by what you did-- they are compelled
by why you did it. So here's what it looks like
to flesh out that bullet point from just saying, I
developed and implemented a new proposal and we are
tracking system, to something much more persuasive. You start by sharing
the challenge you faced. I transformed the
sales close rate. That means the sales close
rate was the thing that I was facing as a challenge. That's what was not
quite good enough. Then we share here,
from 38% to 74%-- the results you got-- by developing and implementing
a new proposal and lead-tracking system. Now we know why I developed
a lead-tracking system, and we know how
it all turned out. Give me a little conclusion. So what if you wrote
500 fundraising emails? If you don't tell me what
those 500 emails yielded, how am I supposed
to be impressed? Give me the results. Show me the money. Tell me exactly what
your hard work led to. Now, most of your
thinking right now, I don't have hard
numbers like this. I don't have a percentage
increase that I can point to. And that's true. For a lot of us, it is
hard to do the detective work of figuring
out, OK, what exactly did my hard work actually yield? So here's another example. This person-- I actually
broke this down with her in a live webinar once on
this very subject matter, because I do a lot of
seeking virtually right now. And she said,
well, what I really did in this role was I left
meetings, I managed logistics, and I served as the
main point of contact. And I said, well, why did you
have to step up in that way? And she said, well, the most
impressive part of what I did was the fact that I stepped
up after the sudden departure of my boss. I just took over my
boss's responsibilities. And I said, wow,
that's the story. We can't leave out the
challenge, because that's the real heart of the story. That tells me so much more
not only of her hard skills, but about her soft
skills, her willingness to fill in, her willingness
to step up, her willingness to lead, her commitment
to the cause. We can do so much more when we
know the challenge she faced. And then I said,
well, what happened when you stepped up in this
way and led a $40 million architecture project? I think it was a
developer she worked for a commercial
real estate company. And she said, well, I
just finished the project. I said, did it finish well? Did it go OK? And I was like, was it late? She said, no, we
finished on time. I said, was it over budget? No, we finished right on budget. Now, to you, that
might be obvious. You're like, yeah, I just
did my job, big whoop. But in this instance,
saying that I faced this challenge
of the sudden departure of a senior project
manager, then I stepped up and did
all of these things, these hard skills,
and it resulted in a completed new national
museum on budget and on time is noteworthy. So when you are describing
your transferable skills, it doesn't actually matter
the order of the CAR method that you use. Just make sure you're telling
me more than just what you did. Tell me why you did it,
the challenge you faced. And then tell me how
it all worked out. How did it come to close? Did it work out successfully? If so, brag of
your bad self here. Don't leave it up
to the conclusions to be drawn by the
audience on their own. Be explicit about this. Now, in today's handout that
corresponds with our workshop today, I challenge you
to try applying the CAR method to your top three
most impressive achievements. Go ahead, write out your
three past achievements that you think your next boss
would be most impressed by and want to hear more about. And then apply that CAR method-- not just telling us what
you did, but tell us what you were up against-- what were the odds, what
were the high stakes like-- and how it all worked out. What was the result? After every single
line that you write on your resume like this-- and mind you, it also can be
applied to interview prep, and how you talk about yourself,
how you write about yourself in your cover letter-- but
after every one of these achievements, ask
yourself this-- so what? Why am I telling you this? If you don't have a good
answer or if it's not already obvious why
I'm telling you this, you have more work to do. And honestly, I know
that job searching can feel like you have 75 different
versions of your resume, and you can hardly
keep track of them all, and you're writing,
and rewriting, and writing. And you can edit
yourself forever. I get that. But if you feel like you've
been at it for a while, you've been trying to
apply the CAR method, you think you're done, sit back. Read it over. Read it out loud
and say, so what? Why am I telling you this? And then, if it's not obvious-- if that answer is not clear
in your CAR method statement-- make it more clear. Make sure you're not
missing the point. I want you to know that,
even though there's so much uncertainty in
the world right now, I have seen with
my own two eyes, through the work I do with
job seekers across industries, that people are still
hiring right now. Do we have to be a little more
nimble, a little more creative, a little more persuasive
than a year ago? Yeah. It's going to take work. It's going to take time. Before the pandemic
hit, Randstad found that, on average, it
takes job seekers five months to get their next job. Now, averages are just that. They're just averages. You could be well above average,
and well below it as well. But I want you to know that
there's an element here of faith involved. And I'm not a very
faith-oriented person, but it's about making
that leap of faith. It's about getting up every
day, and betting on yourself, and saying, I don't
know when, but I know I will get my next job. It is easy to feel hopeless. It is easy to feel like it's
just not going to happen, and I guarantee you,
it absolutely will. It's just a matter
of time, and it's a matter of putting in the
work and job searching smarter, not just harder. That's why you're
all here today. And those are the
resources that we have to help you become
smarter at your job search-- not just taking the buckshot
approach of really coming together in communities like
this one right here at Indeed, or at bossedup.com, to
get the resources you need to be one of the
millions of Americans who is getting hired right now. So keep at it. Keep the faith. And I can tell you, from my
experience with the first nine clients I worked with in my
new job search accelerator, in the last three months,
five of those nine-- actually, I just got an
email from one today-- six of those nine have landed
job offers in just three months. So it's happening. You will get a job. Hold out hope. Keep at it. Keep working hard. I know that it'll happen,
if you put in the work and keep the faith. I'm so excited to be here
to answer your questions. Brandy, thanks again for
making today possible. And I'm happy to pause
for a Q&A at this point. Thank you, Emilie. So let's get to some of those
top questions that were voted. And you can keep voting
on the questions, and we'll try to get to
as many as we can here. So the first one we have you,
Emilie, is as a career changer, how do you get past
the HR screening where they're looking
for people that have done the role before-- especially if they're using
an algorithmic program to search resumes for keywords? Great question-- so AI screeners
and applicant tracking systems, or ATS systems, are very much
a virtual gatekeeper, which is why it is so important
that you find a way to include those keywords in your resume. If you are going from
accounting to data science, you need to take the
classes on the side to get those keywords on
your resume in an honest way and say, yes, I have
SQL competencies. I have proficiency in all
these different languages that I can't rattle
off the top of my head, because I'm not
a data scientist. Those keywords have to
be there on your resume for you to even get
seen by a recruiter, or to even be seen
by a human being. We actually have some great
resources at Bossed Up. I think I just did a podcast
two weeks ago on how to format your resume for both
the AI screeners-- the robots reading them-- and the human
being who hopefully will read them after you get
through that first screen. Now, I would argue
that not all recruiters are looking for people
with the exact experience of your last job. In fact, some of my clients
tend to run into a barrier-- especially mid-career or
more senior level people-- run into a roadblock of
applying to jobs that they are 1,000% qualified, and
recruiters look at that person and say, you've already
done this job before. In fact, you might
be overqualified, so you're not right for this. People like a
narrative of growth. We are inspired to
hire people who have what it takes, but also
have the opportunity to grow in this role. I don't think it's 100%
sure all of the time to assume that
recruiters are looking for people with the
exact experience of being in the past. So as someone who's coming
in from another industry, you bring a different and
valuable outside perspective, so play into that. Don't try to hide it. The other thing I'll leave
you with-- one last tip-- a lot of my industry
switching clients ditch chronological order when
it comes to their resumes. Do not feel bound by
chronological order. If you, like my
client Holly, are going into occupational
health and safety, and the last job you
held was a therapy job, you don't need to leave your
resume off with therapy. She led her resume off with a
job that she held 10 years ago. So I like to think of it as a
selective resume format or just ditching chronological
order, and instead saying, here's my health and safety
experiences-- boom, boom, boom-- the job I had 10 years ago
plus this volunteer thing I do plus this
internship I once had. And then here's my interpersonal
communication experience. And under that section, she
put her therapeutic practice. So you don't need to lead with
that which is most recent. Lead with that which is
most relevant to the job you're applying to. Thanks, Emilie. The next question
here is, I have a ton of skills for
my current career, but I'm not sure how
to find out if or how those skills translate
to another industry-- how can I do that? How can I see if my skills
translate, then sell them during the interview process? So it sounds like this is where
the CAR method comes in, right? Yeah. It sounds like it's a
two-part question, which is-- actually, almost three--
one, she doesn't know or he doesn't know what
industry they're looking for. So that's a pretty
wide net to be casting. If you stand for everything,
you stand for nothing. So we need to define
industries that at least pique your curiosity. What are the industries
that you'd like to go into? It cannot be, please
hire me, please hire me, please hire me-- I'll do anything. That doesn't work. I know that's hard to hear,
if that's how you feel. But if you don't have
a compelling story as to why you care about
getting into health care or why you are able to
transfer your skills into food and safety, it's
not going to work. It can't feel too
random to the employer. So figure out a direction
to start heading in. Even if you're not sure
100% of where you're going, as my friend Maxie
McCoy, who wrote a book called You're
Not Lost, wrote, you don't need to know
the final destination to take the first step,
so take the first step in the direction of at least
what piques your curiosity. Once you've defined an industry
or industries that you have your eye on, then it's about
talking to those people who work in those industries--
friends, family, former colleagues,
friends of friends, dogs-- dogs? Not dogs-- dog walkers,
cousins, sisters-- whoever you can get a hold
of, talk to them and ask them, tell me about the day-to-day
realities of your job. What skill sets is your
industry hiring for looking for? And then match up
your skills and what you have from the past with
what they're looking for. Is it a match? Are there gaps? How can you fill those gaps? So identifying the
transferability of your skill sets cannot be
done in isolation. I'd also argue that we talked
about a few different ways that Indeed has helped make that
clear on their career pages. Check those career pages out
to explore and shop around. And then finally,
communicating persuasively on how they're
transferable absolutely takes first having
clarity yourself on how they're transferable. So you need to do some internal
reflection and thinking, OK, how can I make this skill
valuable to that industry? And ask yourself
honestly or talk it out with a friend who can give
you honest feedback about it, and then make that case
publicly using something like the CAR method. But there's a lot
of introspection that needs to be
done here first. And my final tip
for if you really have no idea what
you want to do, and you're feeling
quite lost, is to think about leaning
into negative emotions. We spend so much time,
especially in America, the smiliest nation
in the world, promoting something that's
almost on the verge of toxic positivity of saying,
no, no, no, no-- don't have any
negative emotions-- when, in fact, feeling envious
of someone else's career is a really helpful
emotion to listen to. Who are you jealous of? Who do you find yourself on
Instagram rage quitting the app because you just can't handle
their [INAUDIBLE] right now? Ask yourself, who are your
biggest career crushes? Whose careers do
you have a crush on, and what about them
is attractive to you? And that can be a
helpful way to get you moving in the
direction of your desire. I write a lot about this
in my book, Bossed Up, so if you want more
on just how to go from being kind of a hot mess--
which I will honestly admit to being in an earlier part
of my life-- to feeling more in the driver's
seat of your career, definitely check that book out. You can find it
wherever books are sold. Thanks, Emilie. And we'll do one
more question here that I know a lot of
people are interested in. What are your thoughts
on accepting a pay cut to gain new skills? Very personal question,
because it all depends on what that
pay cut means to you-- in economics, they have
something that's really helpful known as opportunity cost. So I want you to
really think about, what are the opportunities
you would be giving up on to take a pay cut? If you are taking home more
money than you need right now and you have golden handcuffs
keeping you in the world of finance, or law, or
wherever you find yourself-- which a lot of my clients do-- what does that
money doing for you? Is it just sitting in your
bank account growing-- which is great-- there's
an element to that. Having a retirement
fund is great. But what would the
cost be to give that up versus
taking a pay cut that means you are no longer able to
meet your standard of living, or that your standard of
living would have to change? So are you giving up
a vacation every year, or you giving up health care? Those two calculations are
fundamentally different. So again, it's never
just about the money. It's about, what's the
money doing for you, and your loved ones,
and your family? Now, that being
said, don't presume that you have to take a pay
cut to transition careers. There are a lot of different
presumptions there. Oftentimes, people think,
in order to do work I love, I have to sacrifice
my well-being. In the book, I call that
the martyrdom mindset, and it's a very prevalent
theory or value here in America in particular, where
our nation was founded by the-- with the
Protestant work ethic underscoring how we
think about ourselves, meaning the work you do in this
world is your worth as a human being. And it gets complex very
quickly in calculating, if I were to take a
pay cut, does that make me less worthy
of a human being? How does that relate to my
own self-image and self-worth? But I would caution you against
jumping to those conclusions. Let's say you see a job
as posted for $10,000 less than what you're
making right now. That is the initial offer. That is not your final
negotiated offer. I'm a big believer in
the power of negotiation. So perhaps you get to three
or four interviews in, and they are loving you. You are the perfect
person for this job. They would love
to work with you. And they say, well, here's
what we have to offer. That is just the beginning of
the negotiation conversation. So believe in your capacity to
ask for more, and then do it. We have a whole
free comprehensive-- I think it's like
70 pages long-- negotiation guide on
Bossed Up's website at bossedup.org/negotiation. And that is my step-by-step
series of strategies for how to ask for more. And then, if the opportunity
cost of taking less pay is not going to work
for you, are there other negotiables that can
make it worth your while, like summer Fridays-- which my team and I
have, which is basically, every Friday for the
summer, we are not working? So there's lots of different
ways for an employer to make it worth your while. If you connect, if they
want you and you want them, don't assume that salary
is not negotiable. It almost always is. So definitely a
personal question to ask yourself-- really
helpful to get personal feedback from a negotiation coach
or someone who can help you walk through that decision. But try not to stress out
about a choice that is not yet yours to make. So wait until there's
an offer on the table to really start sweating it. So I know we're out of
time, but just a reminder-- if you didn't get your
question answered today, please post it to
the community at go.indeed.com/-changing-careers. And if you found
this to be helpful, check out our other Job Casts. Our next one is on
showcasing your skills, so that'll build on some of
what we discussed here today. And you can register for
that, if you're interested, and watch recordings from past
webinars on the Job Cast page at go.indeed.com/jobcast. And finally, we've curated
relevant tips and information about addressing the impacts
of COVID-19 on your job at indeed.com/heretohelp. It's important that you're not
alone, and we're here for you. And last, but not
least, thank you to Emilie Aries and
everyone from Boston Up for joining us and
sharing their wisdom today. Emilie, can you
tell your audience a bit about how they
can hear more from you? Yes. Thanks so much, Brandy. So if you want our comprehensive
step-by-step job search guide, which my team and I wrote and
produced as soon as possible, as soon as the pandemic hit,
head to bossedup.org/jobsearch, where you can download a
comprehensive step-by-step guide that goes into even
more detail on the CAR method and all of these different
elements to navigating the job search process with
courage and with community. Thanks so much, Brandy. Thank you. Thanks for watching. Be sure to like and subscribe
for more videos like these.