If you are feeling self-doubt about the next step in your career, if you're struggling with transitioning pivoting to a new role, a new industry, a new skillset. Or maybe you lack clarity on what you're doing. Is there a game plan day by day? How quickly is time going to pass without things changing? Dr. Sharon Hole is here to bring direction.
We're going to dig into how to make things happen, like career transitions, making a plan for what to do next, and of course, getting there, whether it be strategizing, cover letters, adding intention to resumes. And proven tools for career transition. Dr. Sharon Hole is the founder of Meta Solutions, an academic professional with 35 years of experience and over 13 years as an effective executive coach. She has successfully coached over.
450 clients dedicating thousands of hours to career planning job search strategies, and navigating professional transitions. Sharon's background includes an extensive career as a family physician with roles in solo rural practice, academic medicine, and administrative leadership. She's also the author of Professional Careers by Design, A handbook for the Bespoke Life, which guides readers through career changes from training to retirement and encore careers.
Sharon is passionate about helping individuals just like you achieve their personal and professional goals. Sharon, welcome to the job interview experience.
Matthew, it is great to be here with you and with your audience. Thank you for the opportunity.
Many listeners struggle with self-doubt maybe day to day throughout their entire lives, but if they're listening to this podcast, they are. Trying to figure out how to pivot within maybe the company they're at, gain a promotion or even just get a job in general. Maybe they have been on the job market for a while. Things aren't moving as quickly or in the direction that they want. With that self-doubt, can you share techniques you've used to help clients overcome doubt and take action?
Sure. And Matthew, I'm really glad that you framed it the way you did because it's so easy in this job market or in the process of interviewing wherever you are in that journey. This can be very stressful and it can cause people to lose hope. And my goal with the book, my goal with this conversation is to help people know that there is.
A way to fall back on what matters to you, make those decisions, and even when the choices before you don't seem very great, you can make the best choice you've got in the circumstances you find yourself. So that's where I hope we get to talk today. You asked me to share strategies. I think what I'll do is start with just saying that question, what matters most to you right now at this season of your life is really a bedrock question for making decisions.
Even in tough times, and it might seem really simplistic, but the idea of saying what matters to me is it that I need to. Have a job and have a paycheck. Is it that I want to get out of a toxic situation or into a better situation financially or in terms of moving up the career, the proverbial career ladder, whatever the reason for thinking about changing, starting with what matters right now is a great place to start and I can elaborate on that, but I will give you a shot at responding first.
When we think about what matters, what comes to mind for me is prioritizing, In different times in life, it might be having fun with friends, going out, uh, living the adventure. And then oftentimes as we grow professionally and in our personal lives, I. A lot of those priorities shift away from us in certain ways, whether it's caring for family, whether that be parents, grandparents, or children.
How do we balance these things and our professional goals and the sacrifices we have to make to get there?
That's where this, I have what I call the hip pocket questions. It's really five questions to ask yourself and those around you. It starts with what matters to you. And the way that I ask people to think about that question is to imagine writing a top 10 list of the things that matter. You don't even have to prioritize them at the beginning, just write them down. And I tell people, your list has to include some personal and some professional things, but there's no right ratio.
You just have to be attentive to both. So make your list of those top 10 things and then. Put them in a priority order for you as if you're the only one who has to answer that question. Then you ask yourself, who are my stakeholders? Who are the people that if I don't have a job or if I take a job overseas would be really impacted by the decisions that I'm making? Those are your stakeholders. They are often, but not always, a spouse with significant other.
Sometime it's always your children if you have them, but the degree of involvement that they have in the decision varies. And sometimes there are other stakeholders. I have coached clients who really didn't wanna leave a strong friend community or a strong faith community. And so whatever matters to you. Ask yourself, who matters to me next? And then go ask those people if they are of anything approaching an adult age. Ask them what matters to them.
Ask them to make their own top 10 list independent of you. And don't compare notes till you've both or all done your list. So those are the first two questions. What matters most to me? What matters most to my stakeholders? And then ask yourself if you're currently employed, what matters to my current organization if you're not currently employed, but interviewing what matters to the organization or organizations that I'm interviewing with? Their list is not gonna be the same as yours.
Neither is your stakeholders list, by the way. But you start saying, what's the priority of the organization I'm hoping to work with? Then you ask question four, is there alignment between my list, my stakeholders list, the organizational lists of the organizations I'm thinking about leaving or going to? And the fifth question is, if there is not alignment, what do I want to do about it? What am I able to do about it? And if there is really good alignment. How do I wanna stay here and thrive?
So that's a quick run through my five hipp pocket questions, and I'll toss it back to you for whatever you'd like to dig into from there.
Of course, there's no right answers or wrong answers here. I'm curious if you've identified patterns with clients that you've worked on these lists of and what you've learned from those patterns.
I have identified patterns, and what's fascinating to me is what my clients learn. I'm learning the patterns, but they're learning what it means to them, right? So some common things I see early in a career as you were talking in the intro sometimes our choices really get to focus on us. If we don't have a lot of other stakeholder responsibilities, it may be the time that we choose to travel and be a digital nomad.
It may be that we can't do that for some reason, but early in the career, there is a lot of focus on advancement. There's a lot of focus on building skills. And frankly I'm in the boomer generation, so when our younger colleagues look at boomers and say, okay, boomer, that's me. They're talking to, I'm trying to learn from them because they've got this idea that I think we older folks could benefit from.
They know something about what matters to them and they're going after it faster than we did. I think that's a good thing. And what I would, the reason I brought that up is that. They're asking the questions and early career people are more facile with those questions. They're more attuned to what matters to them. What I see in mid-career is people are beginning to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work they have to do.
And frankly, if they are going to build a family, that's the time that's often happening and childcare. Or dual career couples will. And I guess what I would say about that is the priority shift. It's not just about, oh, I can go be a digital nomad and work from Thailand, or I can live the van life and go do all around the country. That's great. But there's a time and a season for some people where they can't, what I see in.
Mid-career to senior career is that the caretaking responsibilities often straddle generations. There may be folks caretaking children and parents, or other loved ones, and the demands change on our time and our seniority changes and what we care about changes. There is a constant pattern that I see though, that I wanna share with you when I ask people to make their top 10 list and then rank. Order the things that matter and then come back and tell me what they learned. Do you know?
Here's the most common thing they say to me. It stuns me that my first seven things are personal, not professional. And that has been a response I've gotten from people at all stages of career. And it just opens up what I think our younger colleagues are saying is life is not all work and it's not all professional ladder climbing. So it's a really powerful exercise and you can't do it wrong. So that's the other bit of encouragement I'll give people. Just make your top 10 list.
And if you can't get to 10, do seven. Do whatever you can come up with, but just make sure you have personal and professional things on the list. Thanks for letting me go on about that for a minute.
If we do 10 questions and seven are personal, and that's the pattern, I'd be 70%, If those are the priorities how much of that are they living out? If 70% is personal, are they still giving 90% to professional? Where's the stress come from? What ruins your day or nights or what causes the stress in your life? And my guess would be that's pretty unbalanced for most people. Their heart is 70% in the personal, but their life is dominated by the professional.
I think that's a really astute question, Matthew, and I'm really glad you asked it because it sets up the tension between personal and professional that we have spoken about for years as work life balance or work life alignment, and the reality is. It's very rare that people are completely balanced in terms of where their heart is and where their profession calls them to be if they want to be successful. And so a lot of what we do in coaching is coaching around that tension.
And the way that I encourage people to think about it is, okay, you have your top 10 list in whatever order your heart put down. Is there a pressure from any one of these things that is time bound or that is really about, I have to get this done before I get to X, so I gotta focus there even though I want to focus on these other things. So where's the tension? And then.
You step back and look at the list as a whole and say, how could you organize your life and your work to get more of those things than you have now? You very rarely are people going to tell me they have, they would rate themselves 10 out of 10 on everything in their top 10 priority list. I don't think I've ever seen that. I've never experienced it personally, and I think it's a, not the realistic goal. The goal for that list is it's your touchstone.
It's the thing you come back to when you're not sure what to do. Start with that inventory and then say, how could I get more of these things? And is there anything that has a time bound pressure to it? So it's a great question. I don't think we ever get fully balanced. This is a tool. It's not the end point.
Traditional long-term career plans. Have become outdated. The old plans were rigid and now whether we like it or not, we have to be flexible. Make that choice by leaving or taking, other jobs, promoting ourselves by accepting outside offers, but seems like we now have to be adaptable and flexible whether we like it or not. are some ways to do that and make a career plan around knowing that whether you want to or not, you're probably not gonna be able to be at a company for 15 years. I.
I think you've just hit on a real shift in the way that people view work in Western society over the last 50 years. When I was growing up, when my parents were working, the idea was you would get a job, you would stay there for 30 or 40 years, get your retirement, get your defined benefit pension, and I. Have a period of your life where you didn't work. I think this is where our younger colleagues are saying to us, that doesn't work anymore.
People in the generations younger than me watch their parents lose their jobs and not have any corporate loyalty. If they're old enough to remember the 1980s and that economic downturn, or the economic downturn in the 2008 era, or what happened in the pandemic. Folks are realizing that the loyalty that 40 year commitment required of employees isn't returned by companies. 'cause companies may not last 40 years anymore.
The pace of change is very fast, and that's, I think, a big difference even in the last 10 years, but certainly in the last 20. Which is why I tell people it's hard to have a three, five, or 10 year career plan because we can't even see three months around the corner to know what's coming in three months. So we have to have an alternative strategy that starts with, okay, what really matters here? How do I get more of those things?
And then what do I have to put into operation to get a way to make a living that aligns with what matters to me? So you ask what I think is both a generational and a societal question, and it's a practical question because I don't think those 30 or 40 year jobs are out there very much anymore. I know the defined benefit pensions are not, and I just think people have to adapt to the world of work as it. Is going to be not what it has been.
I'll tell you that in writing my book I started writing it during the pandemic, but I've been gathering, information for it for 10 or 12 years. And during the pandemic, I watched the pace of change accelerate. It's oh, people need a different way to look at this. And that's when it became apparent to me that I needed to take this model of, you have a touchstone.
You have a set of tactics you can do when you're in the job transition, and you have to take the long view of what's the lifetime plan for your career, not just this job. I don't know if that's what you wanted me to lead toward, but that's where my brain went.
Identifying the right time for a career shift is challenging, but from what you and I have discussed so far. Being able to do so seems important, whether it be by analyzing what's going on in your life, prioritizing and realizing that there's too much tension, Maybe you lose a job, maybe your industry starts to disappear. It could be many things. What are some key signs that might indicate for our listeners that they need to make a career transition or start planning to do so?
I think the first thing is to ask yourself what's happening in the environment around you? Does the organization that you're working with seem stable? Is there a lot of turnover? Is there an industry spanning change that's happening? Those can all be signals that it's time to have. An alternative plan. The other thing, there are two tools in my book that I think are really useful to, to think about for this question. The first is what I call the stay go grid.
It's basically draw a two by two table or a four box square and you label the two columns. Stay and go. You label the two rows, survive and thrive. Ask yourself which box you're in. Are you in stay and thrive, or you've got your head down staying and surviving till you can figure out a plan. Do you have a toxic boss you have to leave to survive, or are you looking for better opportunities and you need to go in order to really thrive?
That little exercise of just which box are you in can help you think about how urgent is the need to change and. What might it look like for me to thrive? So that's one tool. The other tool I have clients use is what I call the four Es. There are people could come up with probably five or six other E's, but I'll give you my four. They're things that we get from our job. I happen to make a list that all started with E, so those ees are education. I'm learning something new.
I'm building a new skill. That's worth staying for maybe. The next thing is experience. I'm getting experience doing something new that will help me not only in this job, but maybe in the next one. The third is exposure. I'm getting visibility. I'm being seen doing this, having this skill, building this expertise, leading in this way. That's exposure. The fourth E is enthusiasm. I still love to get up and go do this job every day.
Now, most of us don't have all four ees for very long at any given time, but if we've got two or three, we're probably on that stay and Thrive grid unless we've got a toxic boss. If you find yourself having one or zero, that's probably a good time to look. So those are two tools that I use a lot with clients to say, is it time to look? I am curious what else you hear from your audience about how they do it? What are the questions they're asking?
I hear a lot of emotion
Yeah.
it, and of course, obvious answers would be fear
Yes.
the jumping into the unknown. The other is time, right? How long is it gonna take me to become adept in a new role or industry to learn the jargon, but it's a lot of emotion, I think, on leaving. A good boss or a good company, something that has worked well for you has helped pay the bills. And I think that there is corporate loyalty and then emotional loyalty, and there's probably some other types as well. Corporate loyalty I think is transactional.
You've been good to me for a while, but now you aren't. And so now I'm not. Or maybe I see the writing on the walls of this company is going under, so I have to be loyal to me. That's, I'd say that's more corporate or, or transactional. And there's the emotional side. I like my boss. My boss took care of me. This personal life event happened and my manager looked out for me, gave me the time off I needed or whatever. I think that's where people have trouble because they don't know.
Whether it be a new company, a new industry wide culture of maybe a industry is more cutthroat or maybe it's more working hours. That's what I see from listeners and the concerns that they have. Will I fit? In this industry, I know I can do the things. I know I have the skills that will transition, but how will this fit with me? Because things seem to align with me personally in my current role, industry company type. That's what I've seen most of.
Okay. I asked you a question, which is not the way this is supposed to go, but it gives me a way to jump off from what you're hearing from your listeners. I think there's an additional type of loyalty, and I think you're spot on in terms of describing the transactional loyalty and the emotional loyalty. I think there's also a loyalty to our. Goals, a loyalty to our aspirations. And this is where I think gen X, gen Z, millennials. Got it better than the boomers did that.
Okay. Look, if I'm not gonna build a new skill here and I've topped out on what I can do, I gotta be loyal to the long game, and I gotta go find a place I can learn a new skill in the same job, family, or in a different industry completely so that I can maximize the long-term success of my career, not just for one job.
The shift is that people are thinking more long term about what's the portfolio of skills they're building and experience they're getting, and that I would think of that in your framework as a loyalty to aspirations.
Of the ways to help facilitate a career transition is a cover letter. If used correctly, I think Cover Letter is a great place to make sense of why I am applying from. X industry to y industry what? A company how the skills you have may be eliminate wine spots in their Or your exposure to things that they may not see can give them a competitive advantage.
I don't want to spend the next 20 minutes of me talking about cover letters, so I'll transition this over to you, but can you share some foundational elements that are crucial for. An effective cover letter, not just in career transitions, but in general. There should be something that's conveyed. What is that and how do you do it right?
So I will answer the question you actually asked me. I want to pull the lens back just a minute and say Your cover letter is a part of the professional wardrobe you have on the job hunt. begins with your CVR resume, which tells as much of your history as you're gonna give a hiring manager. The cover letter should not reiterate. Your resume or curriculum vitae because you've already put that piece of the library together, that piece of the wardrobe, your cover letter is a story.
It should be chronologically, sensical. It should make sense. It should also engage the reader. It should address any unique experiences or gaps in your resume or cv. In a way that the hiring manager can say, oh, that's why they made that change. That's what that gap year was about. That's really interesting. I wanna know more about this person. It's your chance to tell a story.
And so I focus on the cover letter as being the narrative about how you land in the lap of the hiring manager, and that's not the right term to use, but how you land before them. Looking at you as a potential candidate for the job I used to say, how did you get into the chair in the interview room? Tell me the story that got you here. We now do interviews over Zoom, or you might not even get interviewed till you've been screened and your cover letters.
What gets you past the screen, the combination of your cover letter and your resume or cv. The whole goal of those two documents is to get you in front of a live person for an interview. Okay. Then the third part of your professional wardrobe is what you say in the first five minutes of an interview. That can be a different question if you want to go there, but that's how I look at a cover letter.
Let's stay on cover letters, it's a great place to explain. Those gaps or if there's no gaps, the best thing you can do with a cover letter is directly tell a company how you hope to help them and how your skills can do something unique for them. How do you succinctly tell a story, make sense of it, justify it, and do that? In my opinion, you need to be able to do that in four sentences most, because you could have the cure for everything bad on earth.
If it takes up a page on a cover letter, a recruiter's just not gonna read it.
So the first thing I think is to set a reasonable page limit on your cover letter. And I think it's academia is a different place. So let me set that aside. We can talk about that if you want, but in the corporate world, a page to a page and a half is sufficient. That's my experience. You might have a different opinion and I'm happy to hear about it. But you gotta keep it succinct and I suggest to people write your opening statement.
Write your closing statement and then give me three to four bullet points that become the first sentence of each paragraph, but they got to string together in a narrative arc like your English teacher taught you in high school. You gotta tell a story and it's gonna have a fast arc that you can get through the drama. This is not a play, this is not the drama. It really is. Tell me the short story.
I'm gonna put myself in the shoes of a young recruiter that has a thousand applications to look
Yes.
very limited time. Even if they wanted to read the whole Letter. They just can't you work in healthcare and you took time off to take care of a family member. Say, this is my calling. To care for people. And so that's what I did. That's why I chose to step away from this role example of tying into the industry and the company's purpose. That's going to be hard sometimes if you work for a company that makes energy drinks. A Red Bull might not care about that calling, but.
You used the word narrative With their narrative and making sense of this for them In a short way is important. Because if it's just a story I don't, I'm not saying this from a place of a lack of empathy, but I just Got a bunch to get through and how does this help me? How does this help me fill the role in the next two weeks? Because someone's putting a lot of pressure on me.
This comes down to a couple of tips I will add about cover letters. Number one, you should not have a standard cover letter for every job you have to make the hook. You have to be succinct, but if you have done those five Hipp pocket questions and you ask what matters to this organization, for every organization you're gonna send a cover letter to.
I love that.
if you took time off to care for someone who is ill and you work in healthcare, say, I now bring to my work in this industry the perspective of a patient and a caregiver, and that is invaluable as you plan for future product offerings or service delivery items. Make that kind of connection. If you work for Red Bull, you might say, I learned how to use your product to stay awake healthily long enough to do what I needed to do and I am passionate about your product.
I
That might be a stretch for Red Bull 'cause I am a family doc and I don't want people to go drink enough Red Bull to stay awake for four days. But it's an example of how you tie in to what matters to the company.
There's confusion about a CV versus resumes When should someone use a CV versus a resume, or are there distinctions between the two?
I do think there are distinctions between the two. A CV typically describes the kind of career that has multiple components and most commonly used in academia. In that setting, people want to know about your academic history, your job history, your. Research history, your leadership history, and a CV is a document that gives you room to do that. I have seen CVS as short as three or four pages and as long as 60.
I'm not a proponent of a 60 page document going to a hiring manager, but some academic institutions expect that. A resume is rarely more than one to two pages. It really is cut to the chase of what your skillset is and what kind of job you're looking for, and tie the two together. I think they have different purposes.
Different industries expect different things, and so knowing what your industry expects to see, I wouldn't submit a two page resume if I were applying for a department chair position In an academic institution, it won't get you there. But conversely, I wouldn't put in a 30 page CV for a corporate leadership job. They're not gonna read it. They're gonna think you really don't understand the industry if that's what you do.
Do you have any stories of job seekers that maybe felt lost didn't have a purpose or a path and once working through your book, found that.
What I would say is that the tools in the book I've used with four or 500 people at very different stages of careers, life needs, their top 10 lists were different, but the thing that's really rewarding is to watch a human really take a look at their life and say, how do I use my life energy to create. What I want. That's where the subtitle of the Bespoke Life comes in. The best stories I probably have.
I have a person that I worked with who had two small children and was working in a very high level leadership job, and her children were just very upset that she was not at home. And so we coached a bit about that and she decided to ask them. At, a relatively young age of like middle school, what matters to you? What matters to you about me being home and one of her children said, I just want to go out to lunch or dinner with you by just the two of us once a week or once every two weeks.
That would be enough. The other child said, you know what, mom? I just don't wanna be the last person picked up an aftercare at school. And all of a sudden she came back, she said, I cried when I realized how little it would take to do that. And I realized I actually could make the shift. And she did. And she put it in place to have dinner with her one child every week, just the two of them. And at least two to three nights a week, the other child was not.
The last child picked up and it changed that family. So that's probably one of my most fun stories to share. I've seen a lot of people decide to change careers or change industries. I've seen people plan a retirement that wasn't a retirement, but really a renew for them, move to a different industry. I'll share one more story.
I had the, good fortune to follow someone in my career who had been at the job for 30 years and as he was getting ready to leave, we asked him what he was gonna do with his time, and none of us really realized that he had spent years. In community theater and he said, what matters to me is I want my Screen Actor's Guild card within the year, and I want a Hollywood movie part. It's the last thing any of us thought about him. And by golly, he accomplished it.
He got his SAG card and he got a small part in a well-known movie. And I just look at that as the measure of success for shifting gears after one career and making another.
We'll link to that. Book in this episode's description. How else can listeners connect with you and learn more about what you do?
The best place for them to learn more about what we do is at my website www.metasolutions.com. Meta has two t's. That's the reason I articulate that. It is that website has information about our. Coaching work. It has a link to the book.
It has a blog where we put out new content on a pretty regular basis, and it has an invitation to our online community, which is free and open to people who want to explore what it means to have a bespoke life, have the life that maximizes what's important to you. As balanced away as we can. One of my favorite quotes from the i, I quote a friend of mine, a mentor of mine in the book, and it really is a summary statement, personal and professional, it's all one life.
We have a finite amount of life energy. How we spend it is up to us. And that to me is the message of hope. Even if you are stuck in what seems like an endless series of interviews, you. Do have choices. They may not be apparent, but if you start by saying what really matters here, and then how do I get more of it? I'll say what my coach always said at the end of a session, I like your chances.