This Domain For Sale. Contact us for more information.

Career Transitions: Creating Complementary Careers in a Day

Down-sized? Outsourced? Burned-out? Wizened up? That's what I said. Wizened up! Now is not the time to be depressed. Now, is the perfect time to assess your life and what you want to do with the rest of it. One easy way is to explore career options that are complementary to you. Whether you are leaving by choice or have been asked to leave, you probably have more courses of action then you think.

Give yourself several, uninterrupted hours to perform this task. Find a quiet, comfortable place to sit. Have paper, at least five sheets, and pen ready. Do not use a pencil for this. You want to put down everything that comes to your head. No erasing or changing allowed. Relax, take a deep breath, and begin.

Think about the job you just had. List all the types of businesses you or your company worked with while you were there. Include customers, vendors, suppliers, buyers, and strategic partners.

Go to the second sheet. Make a list of all the skills you gained from your education and employment experiences. Don't forget to include your first paper route or babysitting jobs. If nothing else, it will bring a smile to your face and keep you relaxed.

On the third page, itemize your hobbies, interests, and favorite leisure activities. You can make these subcategories on the page or put into the same list.

Finally, write down on the fourth page the careers you considered before going in the direction you did. Also, put down ones that you would consider dream jobs. Don't let anything stand in your way here. Remember the operative word, dream. Disregard your monetary situation, your education, your appearance, age, or gender. If your inner critic shows up, and this is the place they usually do, tell them to go take a coffee break. This is your time to only listen to your soul talking. Finish up the list by adding any careers from comments that people have made to you over the years, such as, "You would have made a great teacher. You really know your history."

Take a moment and look over your four sheets of paper. You did a lot of hard work. Congratulate yourself with a stretch and go get yourself a favorite beverage. But, don't let too much time go by, no more than ten minutes. You're on a roll and you don't want your bored inner critic to find you hanging out at the water cooler, if you know what I mean.

Lay your four pages side by side across a table. Take your fifth and last sheet. List any combinations or connections from your four lists that could go together or would be fun to have go together. Your list may look something like this:

IT person - tutors senior citizens about computers and email.

Boat captain - runs ecotourism tours for the visually disadvantaged.

Nurse - owns a wellness spa.

Pilot - is an aviation school owner and expert witness.

Your complementary career options are only limited by your creativity. This is the time to be open to all ideas and daring in your resolve to consider them seriously. Seek out others who have blended careers or made career transitions successfully. Study the biographies of people like stars, sports personalities, and even military personnel. Many have made transitions out of necessity or desire. Soon, you'll find yourself moving into a life you had never before dreamed possible.

Kathy Iwanowski, a former cancer nurse and manager, creates art, speaks, and writes about creative living and work. Her articles, editorials, and reviews on art, business, creativity, and nursing subjects have been published in newsletters, ezines, and books in the United States.

To arrange for Kathy as a speaker for your next event or to find out more about her work, visit her website at http://www.kathyiwanowski.com

More Resources

Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting

More Careers & Employment Information:

Dynamic Interviewing Practices
The pre-hiring process can be a challenge. If you're reading this article, you are finished with the pre-hiring process and are looking for tips that will guide you through the interview.

15 Tips for Writing Winning Resumes
The thought of writing a resume intimidates almost anyone. It's difficult to know where to start or what to include.

Do You Work to Live or Live to Work?
Let's be realistic here - hands up all of you who bounce out of bed every single morning, raring to get to work and enjoying yourself every minute of the day?If you didn't put your hand up (even metaphorically), you're not alone. There have been so many articles published recently about working statistics in the UK - that Brits work the longest hours in the EU, that we have higher risks of heart disease than our continental friends due to stress and poor diet, there has been a rise in people "downshifting" and moving to the country to raise chickens and weave baskets.

Job Interviews: Answering Whats Your Greatest Weakness?
Many interview guides advise candidates to answer the common "What's your greatest weakness?" question with a positive trait disguised as a weakness. For example, "I tend to expect others to work as hard as I do," or "I'm a perfectionist.

Where Do I Go From Here?
Making Your Future Work Better For YouIt's the commonest concern people have about their careers. Where am I heading? Is this the right direction for me? How can I tell what will suit me best? Making good career decisions doesn't have to be agony if you clear away a few misconceptions.

Job Hunting Tips: Containing Anxiety
It hangs from the ceiling above your bed while you toss through the night hours. It waits inside the door of every employment office you enter.

Expose Lies on Resumes
Purpose: Learn about the new Polygraph for management hiresHis heart dropped when he saw his boss from his current company walk into the interview room with his prospective new employer. In a flash, every exaggeration on his resume was known.

The Myths of Career Change
Chances are you already have many ideas about what it takes to successfully transition into a new career, even if you have never done it before. Some of those ideas might be useful - most probably are not.

How To Get More Interviews In Your Job Search
Richard Bolles, job search guru and author of What Color Is Your Parachute? predicts that you can expect to search for work 1-2 months for every $10,000 you hope to earn. So, if you're looking for a $40,000 a year position, you may search for 4-8 months to land it.

Five Biggest Resume Mistakes You Can Fix Yourself
A career consultant can diagnose and overhaul a troubledresume. But you can check off the basics yourself.

Mastering the Job Interview - 5 Tips to Make Yourself Irresistible to the Interviewer
So you've figured out, more or less what you want to do and where the opportunities are. Now; you have been called for an interview.

Resume Layouts ... The Hidden Pitfalls
Options for Resume LayoutsThere are many options of available to today's job seeker. With a quick change of graphical elements such as fonts and style, the feel of a resume can change from traditional and conservative to creative and modern.

Resume Software - The Hidden Pitfalls
Disadvantages of Resume SoftwareFormatA large majority of software requires the use of their format; most commonly using the chronological resume style. While the chronological style is certainly the most traditional manner to write a resume, it is not always advantageous for everyone.

When the Teacher Becomes the Student
A relationship expert once said that during an argument, there's usually three sides to every story: his side, her side, and of course, the truth.This is something we must definitely keep in mind as teachers.

Thank-You Notes: Your Thoughtfulness will be Rewarded
I get asked these questions over and over: "Should I send separate thank-you notes to everyone who interviewed me? Can I just send one thank-you note to the hiring manager and ask him/her to thank others involved in the process?"The answers are yes and no, respectively.Send a separate thank-you note to everyone who interviewed you, whether it was an informal pre-interview phone call, an interview lunch meeting, or the final formal interview after a lengthy process.

5 Tips for Customizing your Resume
Gone are the days of the bland, generic one-page resume. Employers these days are more impressed by a resume that is customized and they tend to give jobs to interviewees that have a bit of knowledge about the company.

Take This Job and...Re-staff It
Deciding to leave a job isn't easy. In fact, quitting a job requires courage, especially in today's soft economy when the unemployment rate has reached 6.

Resume That Effectively Promotes You!
Imagine for a moment that you have created a wonderful product. You are excited at the possibilities of attaining name, fame and wealth marketing this product.

Network Now
Have you ever been to a networking event that was awkward, frustrating and nothing more than a business card exchange? In his book MANHATTAN SOCIETY: The Art & Spirituality of Networking, Chris London says "Networking with integrity creates a greater willingness of all parties to be part of a human conduit to serve as energy and resource to one another. Sometimes you will give more than you receive and sometimes you will get back more than you give.

How To Write A Resume Cover Letter That Will Get Your Resume Read
A Resume Cover Letter has only one purpose - to stimulate the recipient of your resume to review your resume. This free resume cover letter tutorial assumes that you will be sending your resume and resume cover letter by email.