Career Explorer Program

Yes, we’ll eventually write your résumé and LinkedIn profile, and align your self-perception with your career goals.

But for those who are career curious, it doesn’t make sense to do any of that for a future we don’t yet have our arms around.

It’d be like sheet-rocking and decorating a house before framing it.

It’s tempting to want to plunge into rapid problem-solving mode at this time in a career.

Instead, I suggest calming the reflex to write a résumé because your eyes will be fixed on the rear-view mirror. In reality, we need to get out in front of your day-to-day leadership and take a strategic planning approach to your story.

We need to consider where you’re heading rather than merely regurgitating where you’ve been.

The Future Prep phase exists across all three of my offerings, but in the Career Explorer Program, we spend considerably more time in this first phase—researching, mapping, and pressure-testing possibilities.

Along the way, we’ll determine your readiness for specific roles and job titles (including gaps you can fill and roles you might not actually enjoy after all), while investigating roles and job titles you might not know about right now.

It’s reality-based career coaching and internal goal-setting / resolution with a tangle outcome. That tangible outcome is a clearly defined brand and a full suite of branded materials that you’ll eventually use for your active, stealth, or passive job search.

We’ll typically do this through exploratory sessions:

• Future Prep Session 1 - story hierarchy and JDA

• Future Prep Session 2

• Future Prep Session 3

• Future Prep Session 4

• Future Prep Session 5

• Are we stuck with five sessions? No. We can adjust the number of sessions based on our needs—using all of them, reducing them, or expanding them. The five-session estimate is based on past clients' experiences since I began using a programmatic approach in 2012.

In time, the unknown will become known, and patterns will emerge that let you make important go / no-go decisions, and together we can strategically develop a résumé, LinkedIn profile, and professional brand that serves all of the potential directions you decide to explore.

And there’s a byproduct.

The exploration process doesn’t just let us shape your story; it also lets you hedge against potential career missteps, giving you insight into whether you’d even enjoy various roles.

Years ago, a client walked in my office and asked, “What was I smoking?!” Turns out, my Job Description Analysis (JDA) tool had done some heavy lifting by letting her see—for herself, on her own—why one of the career possibilities she’d evaluated wasn’t a career direction she wanted to go.

What Future Prep sessions look like:

Because I use résumé development as a core tool for career coaching, we’ll spend our first hour scaffolding your story. You can think about it as laying down the forms into which one later pours cement to create a structure.

That first hour spent digging into your résumé (or your career history if you don’t have a résumé) lets me get to know you, and begins opening our eyes to new possibilities.

After our first session, I’ll give you your first exercise, whether it’s my Job Description Analysis (JDA) tool, a bit of custom research and solo decision-making, a career values assessment, or something else.

We’ll start with simple facts, like roles you’ve held, promotions you’ve taken, and the structures of various companies where you’ve worked. Then we’ll move into harder-to-define elements like activities you’ve enjoyed and haven’t enjoyed, where you’ve excelled professionally, and where you might have tripped up.

We’ll then swim for a while in a somewhat amorphous coaching pond. My JDA adds research to the mix and helps us define both similar and dissimilar themes and skills required of different roles and job types. Our findings methodically frame and inform our organic work, including the codification and quantification of posssibility as we go along.

Occasionally, we draft copy during this phase, but positioning, storytelling, and writing generally begins in Phase 2.

All told, we'll stay in Future Prep mode until our questions are sufficiently answered, with me serving as a guide to the research and exercises that you do independently.

Once we've settled on a realistic set of roles, career directions, and job targets during the Future Prep phase, our approach will become a bit more formalized.

Armed with clarity and a roadmap about the future, we’ll use the résumé writing process to map your future goals to past proof points.

You’ll be an integral part of the decision-making necessary to writing your own story, so the résumé writing process serves as a tool for gaining career clarity across a series of screen-sharing, Zoom-enabled work sessions, including:

• Résumé Work Session 1

• Résumé Work Session 2

• Résumé Work Session 3

• Résumé Work Session 4

• Résumé Work Session 5

• Résumé Work Session 6

• Résumé Work Session 7

• Given the in-depth and personalized nature of projects, 40-60% of clients opt to extend their original timeline.

There may be a bit of overlap between Phase 1: Future Step, and this phase, but when we finally settle into these résumé writing sessions, we'll focus entirely on translating everything we uncovered in the Future Prep phase into a highly strategic résumé. We’ll consider a surprising volume of questions as we pitch and tune your story around our Future Prep findings, as well as decisions you’re making at every step along the way.

And since we do all of the writing while our screens are connected, you'll have complete authority and insight into why every word is written or omitted.

We'll do "everything from flooring and sheet-rocking to interior decorating" during the Résumé Writing Phase. You’re welcome to do some of the drafting between sessions—and at some point I absolutely will hand over the draft to you for work—but I’ll handle a majority of the writing.

There are times, of course, when clients go beyond the anticipated sessions. It’s never a surprise … or shouldn’t be … because we’re connected via Zoom at every step. Clients actually frequently ask for more time because of the value they derive. The possibility of overtime is critical to mention because I want what I offer to be right for my clients, and if time and resources is a concern, we should discuss it before we even start.

One process, multiple benefits:

Here are a few of the common byproducts of the introspective work we do together:

• Self-Perception: Insights you gain may shape how you present yourself in your daily work life, while influencing your self-perception and professional image.

• PR Strategies: The content we develop can be repurposed by your company’s PR team for various materials, such as investor relations, RFPs, pitch decks, and corporate bio pages.

• Interviewing: The process often serves as valuable preparation for common interview questions, helping you better articulate your experience, and how that experience might help a new company.

• Executive / Board Bios: If applicable, the content can be used for executive bios and board bios, with additional time allocated as needed.

We’ll use the clarity and copy we develop to eventually build a LinkedIn presence that serves your short- and long-term goals.

Unlike a résumé that you can tune to each job spec and submission, LinkedIn needs to be all the things to all the potential readers. So, for instance, someone targeting an in-house CFO role *and* an in-house advisor role at a pension fund has a challenge.

Become poachable by elevating the story to be seen by both audiences as if it’s written for them alone, while developing your LinkedIn as a tool for business as usual—telling your public story in a way that doesn’t invite speculation from your connections about your underlying intentions to make a career move.

How?

• Be strategic about how you position your public story, instead of simply copying and pasting your résumé into LinkedIn.

• Despite what many people will tell you, think of your LinkedIn profile as genuine tool for business instead of merely as an online résumé (“Your LinkedIn Profile Might Be Giving Away Trade Secrets”)

• Set your profile as a “quiet lure” to attract passive attention, while powerfully supporting your active or stealth job search intentions.

How we’ll do it:

When your résumé is nearly or completely finished, we'll shift our attention to LinkedIn. The "About" section is where a lot of careful strategy and attention can make the whole profile transformative.

That said, I’ve done this work and I’m still surprised by how challenging the “About” section can be. It’s also the most fun and the most rewarding section once completed.

Long before we begin crafting your LinkedIn copy, you’ll begin working on my LinkedIn for Business Questionnaire (I'll release it during Phase 2). When we finally begin writing, we’ll carry out the work over several writing sessions, again using Zoom’s screen-sharing capabilities so you’re smack in the middle of crafting your own public-facing story.

• LinkedIn Session 1

• LinkedIn Session 2

• LinkedIn Session 3

• LinkedIn Session 4

• LinkedIn Session 5

• Because projects are highly detailed and tailored, 40-60% of clients choose to increase the duration of their original project plan.

Writing your story is the foundation of our work, of course, but you’ll receive a total of three modules that will comprehensively guide you through the broader overhaul of your LinkedIn profile, ranging from the pros and cons of various LinkedIn features (what's good for a recent grad isn't necessarily great for a company leader), to the full public treatment of your career story.

Dual purpose profile, aka the secret sauce:

Because I work mostly with people who don’t want to give away their real intentions on LinkedIn, I generally position client profiles as a tool for business, with all of the inline keywords, underpinnings, dog whistles, halo effects, indirect references, and other subtle strategies that lets them appear “happy where they are” while making them findable for the roles and opportunities we identified in Phase 1.

It’s not all fun and games. Our lively, challenging, and hopefully fun Zoom-based work sessions will ultimately result in usable materials for your next move.

Our bursts of visionary insight and practical grinding-at-the-details will eventually produce a forward-looking Library of Master Documents, which includes:

1. Executive Résumé (for humans and machines)

2. Résumé Addendum (if needed)

3. LinkedIn Overhaul

   1. LinkedIn Module 1 of 3: Principles & Philosophies

   2. LinkedIn Module 2 of 3: Sections, Connections & Technical Tidbits

   3. LinkedIn Module 3 of 3: Public-facing Copy

4. Cover Letter Kit

5. Variable Introductory Paragraphs for Cover Letter

6. Thank You Letter Template

7. Thank You Email Templates

8. References Sheet

9. Salary History Sheet (not necessary in all U.S. states)

Add-ons available include executive / board bios and pitch decks, as well as short-form bios for book jackets, speech introductions, social profiles, and beyond.

CURRENTLY BEING PILOTED: Clients routinely report that our work together helped them interview more confidently. I am currently piloting a potential new deliverable called, “Interview Answer Bingo,” where answers to potential interview answers are formally captured as they emerge during our work. In some cases, clients are allocating standalone time for the activity at the end of a project.