I was recently approached by someone setting up a business to provide resources to job seekers in a niche market. She wanted my feedback on providing coaching services to job seekers and wondered if I was interested in being one of the coaching resources.

My first reaction?  Job seekers are often desperate people and I don’t like working with desperate people. (Yes, coaching could certainly help that population and I’m sure there are other coaches who specialize in serving that population.)

Which led me to memories of being laid off during the last part of my career, working in large companies. My two layoffs, one in 1996 from U S WEST (now QWEST) and the other in 2002 from Avaya, couldn’t have been more different.

In 1996, I was the desperate job seeker. I was well-connected inside the company but practically invisible to people who could help me on the outside. I was heads down in the minutia of project management and hadn’t even attended an all-employee meeting the week before where the company talked about impending job cuts. I hadn’t updated my resume since I started at the company, six years prior. And I didn’t know where I wanted to go with my career.

In other words, I had no foundation for moving forward.

On top of this, I was the major breadwinner of a family of four, with two kids under the age of 5 in day care. 

I learned from that experience.

By 2002, I had developed a network outside of the company that connected me with my passion–bringing the human spirit into companies and organization development.  I was well aware that I was in a precarious position in my role at work–not doing technical work in an engineering organization. My husband had purposely re-financed our mortgage at a lower rate several months earlier, so that we would have lower payments during an interruption in income. I knew where I wanted to go with my career and had laid the groundwork. I had attended a meeting of professional coaches, researched coaching schools and had signed up for my first class. 

Two years prior to my lay off, I formally transitioned my role at work to the people side of the business equation, creating my own job of Retention Leader. I studied burn out on a large software development project, created career development talks, became part of a group to create more of a community feel at work, and helped implement a thank you note program that is still in existence today. I was informally coaching a manager (with a limited set of tools in my toolkit) who had approached me for coaching.

Four years prior to my layoff, I looked for ways to dip my toe in organization development and team effectiveness work, providing lunchtime brown bags for my colleagues and signing up to help my engineering colleagues with decision making processes. I took any personal development workshops the company would pay for.

It had been years in the making, preparing to leave the company, to move on to another type of job and career. A colleague said to me on my last day at Avaya, "It was too soon." To which I replied, "No, it’s not too soon."  I had been preparing for that day for a long time. I just didn’t know I was ready.

Job seekers don’t inherently need to be desperate.  And my situation from 2002 is clearly in the minority. 

A phrase that has come up recently in my work is this: We don’t have time to waste.

If you are working at job that you love, hooray! And if you are not, become proactive about your career now, before you need to become the job seeker. What are you waiting for?