Erin

Career Field: Training and Development

Years of Experience: 20

My Career Challenge: For years my manager and I had not been getting along and things had started to go downhill quickly. One day he scheduled a meeting and fired me. I had eight weeks to find a new job and I called Ellen in a panic. My resume was not in great shape, I didn’t know how to market myself, and I needed a job — fast. But after this awful experience I wanted to make sure I got a job I liked.

How Coaching Helped: The elevator pitch I developed with Ellen helped me talk more easily about myself to strangers, and I learned that job hunting was a lot more than submitting your resume to online job ads. Ellen helped me assess my networking skills (I hated the thought of it) and approach networking as relationship-building. She also connected me with the very first informational interview of my career.

Outcome: In just under eight weeks, I accepted a job offer. The offer arrived just two weeks shy of my designated departure date. I am thrilled to have met my goal of finding a new job (I worked at it like it was a full-time job!), one where I will be a managing a team and contributing my skills in cybersecurity to a different type of organization. I also built a large network and am now more confident about what networking means. Now I am sharing my job-hunting experiences with others.

“If I didn’t network, I wouldn’t have found my new position. I learned that you can’t just push your resume to potential employers via the career section of their website; you have to develop a contact in that organization who can pull your resume through the screening process and make sure it gets to the top of the hiring manager’s pile. A more targeted approach may take a little longer, but it’s ultimately more effective in finding a quality opportunity than just playing the numbers game with your resume.”  - Erin