One of my mentors has a favorite saying: If you don’t know what you want, any road will take you there. We speak a lot about setting career goals. After all, how are you going to find the right job for you if you don't have them? It has been my experience that talented individuals set goals because they want to advance. Out of sheer motivation, driven professionals can maintain a clear career focus to obtain their career goals.
However, while having a vision of your objectives can keep you engaged and persistent when it comes to obtaining those career goals, life often has a habit of getting in the way.
Which means, you may have experienced a circumstance that has sabotaged your career progression. Perhaps you have faced a personal illness that has kept you from working long hours. Or maybe you had to take some time off from travel to take care of an aging parent or a sick child.
Experiencing a life event doesn’t mean you have lost career focus…it just means you may have to side-step forward progression towards that goal.
At least temporarily.
And the problem you now have to solve? How to articulate this ‘side-step’ in a way that doesn’t hurt your brand or negatively impact the story you are trying to tell. So how do you show potential employers the career focus you still have when a life event has taken you off track? In this roundtable we discuss how to exhibit a clear career focus…even when life circumstances may have gotten in the way.