Welcome to ProCareerSearch
Doing a Career Search? Become an Animal Caretaker.
Welcome!
ProCareerSearch is an online site about mounting a professional career search. It’s also about changing your mind about careers and doing what you like to do.
The ideas I’m going to share with you came initially from a blog post I wrote in 2009 called “Professional Career Search in 16 Steps.”
If you want to get a fast start, feel free to start your career search using the 16 steps. However, you’ll get further ideas and strategies by reading upcoming blog posts on ProCareerSearch.
That’s the purpose of ProCareerSeach: creating a professional career search that uncovers what you love to do, find your greatest strengths, then continually discover a stream of careers that make you happy in life while earning a living.
For most of us, finding work, jobs and a career in the past followed a straight line from birth to retirement. The persistent, ongoing recession and high unemployment rate, however, have changed many peoples’ minds about career search and the meaning of “work.” It’s no longer a straight line from childhood to the perfect job or career. Maybe it never was. Perhaps we’ve been kidding ourselves thinking that “finding a career” was a one-time thing.
You don’t have to be an unemployed auto worker to know that the world of work and careers has changed. Not only do we job-hop more frequently; it’s quite likely that most of us will have several careers in our lives, as the world’s economy adjusts to new market demands.
How does that affect you? Are you prepared to change careers multiple times in your life? How will you do it? What career search strategies will you use? What will you be doing ten years from now?
These are challenging questions to ponder, but that’s my quest at ProCareerSearch, a blog about discovering what you like doing, finding careers, companies and jobs that match you and launching career searches using an innovative strategy I think you’ll like.
Whether you’re starting your first career search, finding a new or better career or happily employed but “always looking,” the strategy is a combination of personal discovery and “touching the market.” It may change the way you search for jobs and careers.
First, you explore what you love doing, identify your skills, knowledge and aptitudes. I’ll then share a powerful tool that will help you identify market pains and needs and how to turn them into benefits, features and advantages. Finally, I’ll discuss how to approach companies and hiring managers to get the job and career you want, employing social media and personal networking.
Does that sound like a smart career search strategy? Instead of fitting a round peg (you) into a square hole (an employer), you turn it around 180 degrees. First, you clearly know what you love to do in your work life; then you find how to do what you like doing.
And I don’t mean, necessarily, working for someone else or working in a traditional job. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in its excellent 2010-1011 Occupational Outlook Handbook, for example, identified animal care and service worker employment growing 21% through 2018. Apparently the baby boomer generation has created a demand for non-farm animal caregivers, groomers, zoo keepers and tons of folks working in amusement parks.
Want to become an animal trainer? According to the BLS, there’s a strong demand for commercial dog and horse trainers, 54% of whom are self-employed. Not into animal training? No problem. Perhaps you’d like building boats or taking care of the elderly or becoming a tour guide on a cruise ship. Yes?
But how do you know that’s what you want to do? And even if you love doing those things, will anyone pay you money to do them? That’s what we’ll explore in this blog. I invite you to take the journey with me and, as historian and philosopher Joseph Campbell often said, “follow your bliss.”
Now, that’s a real career search.
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I’m writing an e-book with audios, videos and other materials that explain the 16 steps in greater detail. Please take five minutes and complete the anonymous e-book survey by clicking HERE. This will help me address your needs, wants and concerns as I write the e-book. Thanks.
