What’s Your Plan—What’s Next?

Before you start your search for new employment after a layoff, it’s a good idea to take stock of yourself. Think about it. Yes, you want to earn a paycheck again, but first, who are you professionally and what do you want to be doing when you go back to work?

After I had updated my resume, notified everyone I knew and updated my online profiles, I took a little time to develop my own strategic marketing plan—where I wanted to be and how I planned to present myself. My inspiration was a book I was reading, called Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing, by Lois Kelly (see My Blog List to the left). Reading her book reminded me that the conventional approach to a strategic plan is to define:

• Vision
• Mission
• Values
• Value Proposition
• Messaging (including an elevator speech)

All of these are helpful in defining yourself and creating your personal strategic marketing plan. But Kelly goes one step further by proposing that companies—and I suggest this for jobseekers too—identify their “point of view,” which she defines as:

“Beliefs and ideas that help build understanding, provoke conversation—and are something a person would actually say.”

Conventional strategic planning produces a one-way message in buzz word language, in the same way a resume can. Kelly says, however, that the most effective marketing today is done by “making meaning” rather than “creating buzz” and through creative conversations. In my thinking, the same approach should work for the job hunter.

What are your thoughts on applying this new approach to the job hunt?