Are you at career crossroads? Help is at hand with Talent & Careers for Alumni

We’ve asked two of our favorite executive career coaches, Ana Herranz and Dr.Veronica Azua to decrypt types of profiles and solutions at hand for IE Alumni finding themselves at a career crossroads.

“In our work with MBAs and Executive MBAs, there are typically three key career-crossroad scenarios that we often see in our coaching practice; career explorers, career advancers, and radical career changers. Are you at a career crossroads? If so, it’s likely you would fall in one of these three career scenarios.”

The career explorers are those who are trying to find a career in which they can combine their strongest skills, life interests and motivations. Individuals in this group are seeking existential meaning and fulfillment in their careers. However, they haven’t really found out what they want yet, or they often have unrealistic expectations about how a career can fulfill all these requirements.

The career advancers generally enjoy what they do and want to progress upwards in their careers. Typically, they aspire to promotion to more senior roles within their functional or organizational ladder (e.g. from financial director to CFO).

The radical career changers are clear that they want to make a career change and have a fairly good sense of where they want to go. However, the career change they’re seeking implies too many changes at once.

Each career scenario has its own challenges, and they are:

Career Explorers challenge—career-searching paralysis trap

For career explorers, the difficulty is finding a compass. They wonder how on Earth they’ll discover what will make them thrive. In this group, people tend to get into the analysis-paralysis trap, where they believe that coming to a conclusion is the result of a heavy thinking process, when in fact, curious engagement is the key to purposeful work—and might even lead to passion—but passion doesn’t usually come first.

Career advancers challenge—unawareness of their career derailers

Career advancers may seem like the easiest group to help, and most companies have talent development programs and numerous resources that will facilitate the career advancement process. However, the situation is often more complex than just wanting to get promoted. For example, career advancers are usually unaware of how to manage key stakeholders correctly, get company visibility in the right areas, engage in cross-departmental projects, and so on. They are so blinded by their wish for advancement that they may miss key factors involved in promotion.

Career changers challenge—multiple changes at once

Career changers are the ones we struggle with the most, especially those looking for a quadruple jump: role, function, industry and geography changes all at once, which is often unrealistic. The career move may imply losing their competitive advantage because they enter into a market where others are not career changers. In the eyes of recruiters, other candidates are a better fit for the vacancies they need to fill. Here, the challenge is firstly patience, and secondly knowing how to leverage their transferable skills, but doing this is easier said than done.

Help is at hand, whatever your profile

Whichever career scenario you find yourself in, whether career explorer, advancer or changer, being aware of where you stand is the first step in making real change happen.

“To overcome the challenges you’re facing, take advantage of the resources and support available to you. IE Talent & Careers for Alumni provide a wide range of resources, events, workshops and networking opportunities to help our global alumni community.”

By signing up to our Talent & Careers for Alumni group on IE Connects, former IE students are able to take part in the specific courses designed to address the profiles we’ve talked about; the “Highly Effective job search” course will help all job seekers find the role that’s right for them. Meanwhile, “Designing your life” course offers targeted advice for career explorers, while the “Highly Effective Promotion” course will keep advancers moving on upwards. You’re a career changer? Regional info sessions, hosted by colleagues from our international offices, include exclusive webinars and many other events tackling specific themes such as personal branding, or women returning to work.

It’s all there at the click of a mouse—build your profile and get started now!

By Ana Herranz and Dr. Veronica Azua