Cobalt news
Drive your career
Timothy Rowe
21/01/2009
What can you do in the current economic climate if you find your career at a dead or precarious end with your current employer, or worse redundant? We all should be proactive in the management of our careers and make sure that we are being as positive as we can be in order to secure and plan for our futures. It is all too easy to go along with our careers and let events manage our destinies. Surely a better order of events is to be in control and planning, preparing and executing our own career objectives.
When we are forced into addressing the future as many are at this juncture in the cycle, we need to look objectively at our skills, aspirations and realistic options. Career managers are often very helpful resources to use in order to gain the objectivity that is difficult to achieve independently. At Cobalt we offer a career management service for senior executives and young professionals alike and it is a service that is growing in importance in peoples’ career planning, and is also asked to offer the service on a third party basis by employers when they are going through restructuring programmes. Here’s how Dan Tansey, the head of our career management team, describes the service:
“Picture yourself in a 20 mile traffic jam on the M5. Ahead of you sit thousands of drivers, all trying to get to the same place but all unable to move. To your left lie green fields and, what’s more, you’ve got your mountain bike strapped to the back of the car. Do you wait in line for everyone else to start moving, or do you un-hitch the bike and go off-road? Whilst I wouldn’t advocate abandoning your car on the motorway, this is a fair analogy for where people find themselves when facing redundancy, or when they’ve hit a standstill in their career. Unfortunately in the current economic climate the traffic jam can seem endless. Using a career management consultancy at such a time is the equivalent of going off-road. It involves exploring your skills, thinking laterally about your options and provides you with techniques to market yourself and achieve positive change in your career. We all face an exceptionally challenging period but we still have the freedom to choose how we face those challenges. Going off-road with a career manager can propel you to where you want to be, and the journey will be a lot more fun than sitting in traffic!”
In terms of looking around for new opportunities there is a truly global market to explore. Whether in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa or Asia there are always areas of activity that offer opportunity. While we are experiencing a global slowdown we are not seeing a complete dearth of opportunities. This can be seen when looking at our new Middle Eastern office in Abu Dhabi where we are experiencing demand coming from local and international investors and consultancies who are taking advantage of the long term expansion of core infrastructure and development projects across the region. Otherwise one can look at sectors in our domestic markets where there are countercyclical opportunities such as in the areas of corporate recovery/workout and distressed investment, whether via the debt markets or directly.
There are proactive measures that can be taken in this environment and positive outcomes will be found.
(Additional reporting by Dan Tansey, Head of Career Management at Cobalt Recruitment)