How to Reinvent Career

You hear a lot about people wanting to reinvent themselves these days. Most people are concerned with how to do this without starting completely over. If you’ve decided that you want to reinvent your career, here’s how to start fresh without starting totally over:

1. Take a good look at your skills and experience up to this point. Assess your strengths and weaknesses so you can pinpoint where your transferable skills are. Then look at how to market those. Use power words to describe your achievements and then practice talking about them.

2. Make your values clear. Figure out which values are really yours and which ones belong to your parents, employers, mentors, faith, or society. Latch onto yours and let theirs go. Then review the values about money and security. You may find that one value might be a group of them. For instance, when you look at money, security and benefits, you may really be thinking of lifestyle, safety, independence and adventure.

3. Identify the passions, talents and abilities that motivate you. Be honest with yourself about these things. Decide what is really yours and describe it in a 60 second story using details of who, what, when, where, why and how. Take note of the way that related abilities and talents gather around passion themes. This is a sign of your life’s purpose.

4. Now take all of this information and use it to match to lists of jobs, employers, careers and industries. Use professional career materials to cut, prioritize and categorize this list.

5. Assemble a great package to market yourself to match each of the jobs, employers, careers, and industries that you’re interested in. Develop several versions of your resume and cover letter to match various job titles, industries and career paths. Take keywords associated with each career and sprinkle your resume with them. Then send out your resume and cover letter to employers through targeted mailings, networking, recruiters, online posting sites and ads.

You can see just how simple it really is to do this. While there are various parts to each step, if you do all of them, you’ll arrive at your brand new destination in no time. The only thing wrong you can do is to not believe in yourself.