How to Prepare for Your Next Career Move

Life tends to move a bit slower over the summer. The slower pace can allow you to get a lot done to set yourself up for a successful career move later in the year when business picks up again. But, what exactly should you do to put yourself in a good position when you're ready to make a move?

Fortunately, we're chatting on the latest episode of the #GetHired podcast with May Busch , who is an executive coach, advisor, speaker, and author. She's also a former managing director and COO at Morgan Stanley. Busch explains the steps you should take now to be ready to make a move later in the year.

For example, she explains how regular self-reflection empowers us to evaluate our progress and make necessary adjustments along the way. Busch also says that goals should evolve as we gain new insights and experiences. By doing so, we make sure that we remain on a path that truly reflects our authentic selves and brings us closer to a life of meaning and fulfillment. You can also join her Career Mastery Challenge by clicking here.

You can read a transcript of the episode below. You can also listen to the show above or on Apple Podcasts by clicking here.

TRANSCRIPT: How to Prepare for Your Next Career Move

Andrew Seaman: Hiring slows down a bit during the summer months before picking up again in the fall. So what can you do this summer to set yourself up for success once September rolls around? We're talking all about it on today's episode.

From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs and the ever-changing landscape of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's Senior Managing Editor for Jobs & Career Development, bringing you conversations with experts who, like me, want to see you succeed at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

Okay, so the world of hiring has its ups and downs throughout the year like anything else. Generally, hiring slows down during the summer as people take vacations and some companies figure out their next fiscal year. Hiring is still happening. The process in some industries just moves at a more relaxed pace. A leisurely summer is a great time to prepare for a move later in the year when the speed of hiring ramps back up.

So what can you do now to be ready for later in the year? Well, May Busch is going to tell us all about it. She is a sought after executive coach, speaker, advisor, and author of Accelerate: 9 Capabilities to Achieve Success at Any Career Stage. May stopped by our studio to offer her top tips on getting ready for a change.

May Busch: So in laying the groundwork, there are three main things that I think are important.

One is because summer is midyear, it's really helpful to do a mini midyear review for yourself. This is just a look back. What kind of things did you accomplish? Where are you relative to the goals you had set, if you had set some goals? One nice way to do it is the went well, do differently. So what things went really well? What things would you want to do differently in the second quarter?

Which then brings us to the second piece, which is looking forward for the rest of the year. If you want to look longer term for the next 12 months, that's great too. It's coming up with what your game plan is going to be. Update the game plan you might have done. So that would be the look forward.

The third piece is looking at all that; the look back, the look forward, is figuring out what are the handful of action steps that you want to take? You can either be taking some of them during the summer. Others you might be setting up for hitting the ground running when you get back in the fall.

Andrew: Yeah. You should always be moving your career forward. Maybe things are going to get really complicated for you in the fall. You could still do the midyear review even if you're not having a plan of looking for a new job or getting a promotion or something like that, right?

May: Absolutely. Your career is a big part of your life. We spend more than half of our waking hours working. Even though I'm talking about this midyear review, it's important to also figure out what element of self-care needs to be woven into that as well.

Andrew: Yeah, I think that's really important because even though you maybe want to devote a certain amount of time preparing for whatever's going to happen in the fall; you don't want to devoid yourself of fun.

May: Absolutely not. In fact, life is really precious and fragile. We want to make sure we're setting ourselves up to enjoy every day, and fun is a big part of that.

Andrew: Yeah. Once you do that midyear review, what is the next step? Because obviously there are a few different ways you can go. What would your suggestion be?

May: There are five things I would advise we think about, and I think of them as key success factors for moving yourself forward.

The first one is what I think of as carving out coffee time. I call it coffee time because you want to give yourself time to think and reflect and percolate. Thinking about how you set yourself up for career success and advancing in your career or finding that dream job, it's part of a process. It is part of a journey. So you want to give yourself that time. The percolation is to also get really in touch with what is inspiring to you.

You want to have fun and you also want to have meaning. So if you can just tap into what inspires you and what kind of aspirations do you have. So words create worlds, and those are the kinds of words that help lift your thinking up.

Andrew: Yeah, definitely. Actually, it's funny because I do use a percolator. For people out there who don't know what a percolator does; it draws the water up from the bottom and then it pours it over the top and it drips back down. I think that's really great because when you find things that inspire you; it allows you to sort of free your mind to something else. And something that maybe was stuck will bubble up, like you said, in a percolation.

May: Yes. Yes.

Andrew: What are the other steps?

May: Yeah. The second one is what I call build muscle. It's about identifying what kind of muscles do you need to build. One kind of muscle is skill sets. So, as you're looking ahead, what kind of skills do you want to build? What might be important at the next level that maybe wasn't quite such a focal point at your current level? So it's about looking ahead at that kind of skill set.

It's also about building muscle in terms of your strengths. These days, we all talk about strengths-based approaches. That's where it's really important to get in touch with what your really unique strengths are. And then how can you be applying them more than 50% of the time is what I always aspire too?

The third kind of muscle you can be building is self-belief. That was a big one for me. For most of my career, the whole imposter syndrome, the self-doubt, all of that was really holding me back. Start to build that muscle of self-belief.

Andrew: Yeah, I think that's really important. For myself, success is actually a form of confidence. I try and view that as something that's healthy because the more confident I am in something, I feel more successful at it, I feel like just that itself is success because at least I know I can do it. Sometimes there are those little obstacles in the way, but working to overcome those gives you that sort of boost to say, "Oh, actually I am good at this."

We'll be right back with May Busch.

Andrew: And we're back with May Busch, executive coach, speaker, advisor, and author.

May: The third piece is to do what I call lay down some track, like train tracks. This is mainly about what kind of on-ramps do you need to build in order to get to where you want to go? One of the main things that comes up is building relationships. As you and I both know, Andrew, you got to build relationships before you need them. So you want to be building those relationships earlier on.

Another way to lay track is, coming back to the mental part of it, the mindset and the emotional strength and the self-belief, is really laying down some track about what kind of habits of mind do you want to develop. Habits of mind are just your default ways of thinking or talking to yourself, and seeing if they serve you or they don't serve you. So it's noticing what the habits of mind you have are and then starting to shift those to the ones that you need to have to succeed and be inspired and have fun at the next level.

Andrew: Yeah, I think that's really important, and especially the idea of laying down track before you need it. I think of it like a safety net, when people they need something to fall back on. You could either create that net before you need it and it'll be stronger, it'll be more thorough, it'll be more complex, or you can throw it together as soon as you need it, and you're probably going to fall through because it's not going to be extensive. The more time you have to build it and pay attention to it, the better it's going to serve you.

May: Absolutely. Just in terms of the building relationships before you need them, the summer would be a great time to just get back in touch with any mentors, even if you haven't spoken to them for years. I just had somebody who was a mentee from over a decade ago. Haven't heard from her. She hasn't heard from me. She just found me on LinkedIn, the place to be. So we're going to get together after not seeing each other for well over a decade.

Andrew: That's fantastic.

May: Yeah. So don't worry about, "Oh, I haven't talked to my mentor, this person in a long time." They will be delighted to hear from you. And if they're not, then they're in the minority. Don't send out just one email to a mentor. Send out five. Send out 10.

Andrew: And even if they don't get back to you right away, maybe they get back to you a month later. There's no pressure on it, like you said, because you're not asking for anything. You're just saying, "Hey, how are you doing?"

May: Yeah.

Andrew: I think we're on number four, right?

May: Yeah. Number four is to hone your narrative. When I say hone your narrative or prepare your narrative, it's coming up with a way to communicate your storyline to help people connect the dots. Because people aren't spending all day long thinking about May or Andrew or Joan or Jeff; they're thinking about their own stuff. So the more that we can help people understand who we are, the value we bring, what we're interested in, then make it into a gel cap that they can just pop in and go, "Oh yeah, okay, I get that. I can either help you with this or I know somebody else who could help you better than me with this." So it's just getting in touch with what that narrative is.

In many ways, everything about being successful in your next career move hinges on conversations. They might be written at first, like a little email or a cover note or whatever, but then they invariably become real conversations between two people. Those are all scary unless you have prepared the narrative, you've prepared the storyline and you've practiced it out loud with your partner, your friends, somebody you trust.

Andrew: Yeah. Also, when you have that narrative down, you're more confident in yourself because you know what you want. It is counterintuitive in one respect, where people they want to be the answer to everything for everyone. Because if that's your selling point that you could do anything, well, then you're going to get a job, but that's actually not the case. If you're really good at something, you'll get a job. But if you're a jack-of-all trades, master of none, your net worth actually goes down.

May: Absolutely. There's certain questions also that you can anticipate that you're going to get asked, and you can start to craft this narrative-based answer that's going to be interesting and intriguing to the listener as well, and help you to stand out, that highlights something that's unique about you and memorable.

Andrew: Yeah. I think we have one more.

May: Yeah, we have one more. This one is about the action taking part, because all of that percolating and muscle building, laying down track, it's ultimately about the actions you do or don't take that will propel you forward. This is where whatever actions fell out of it, maybe it's that honing your narrative, preparing that, practicing it with somebody, maybe it is the part of laying down your track about which relationships, former mentors you want to reach out to or new people, whatever it is, step number five is about embedding it into your calendar or whatever system you use to make sure that it's not just thought of, and then poof; you get busy, you get sucked into whatever it is, whether it's a fun thing or a work thing, so that you actually do it.

Andrew: There is a concept I heard of called an ideal calendar. Basically, you create a calendar of your ideal week. You overlay that with your actual calendar. You could say, "Oh, okay, but I really wanted to do this." It's that sort of gentle reminder that says, "Okay, but I'm supposed to network during this time." Or, "I'm supposed to sit down and work on my narrative." Or, "Do my midyear review for myself." I think that's a really good way to sort of have that there every week, so you can make the conscious decision at least to do that.

May: Exactly.

Andrew: Yeah. I think those are all really great tips because people are sometimes hesitant to make a move over the summer because of everything that's going on, but you can really sort of prime yourself for something big in the fall. Especially now. Obviously, the economy is a little shaky. It's not bad. People are still hiring. But hopefully things will turn a corner, and at least at that point, you're ready to make a move.

May: Absolutely. I know it's tempting to write off the summer. The contrarian in me says, if everybody is thinking the summer is a write off, then what if you were to do a little bit of outreach? You might just stand out by being one of the very few who ping somebody or have a coffee with somebody over that time.

Andrew: I think all of those are really great. Thank you so much for joining us, May.

May: You are welcome, Andrew. It's been a delight. Always a pleasure. Thank you.

Andrew: That was May Busch, executive coach, speaker, advisor, and author of Accelerate. As a reminder, you can find the link to the challenge May mentioned in this episode's show notes. Remember, it's up to you to put her advice into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue this conversation.

Also, if you like this episode, please leave us a rating on Apple Podcast. It helps people like you find the show. And don't forget to click that follow, subscribe, or whatever other button you find to get our podcast delivered to you every Wednesday, because we'll be continuing these conversations on the next episode right here wherever you like to listen.

Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. This episode was produced by Alexis Ramdaou. Rafa Farihah is our Associate Producer. Assaf Gidron engineered our show. Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Dave Pond is Head of News Production. Enrique Montalvo is our Executive Producer. Courtney Coupe is Head of Original Programming at LinkedIn. Dan Roth is the Editor-in-Chief at LinkedIn. And I'm Andrew Seaman. Until next time, stay well and best of luck.