Martin Yate - Knock em Dead 2014: The Ultimate Job Search Guide

Avon, Massachusetts

To your successful job search

You didnt come to this book because everything is good in your professional life. You came because these are times of upheaval, crisis, and change. Managing a successful career isnt easy, so Im not going to waste your time.

You are somewhere in the middle of a half-century work life, in which, statistically speaking, you are likely to change jobs about every four years (not always by choice) and have three or more distinct careers.

Add an awareness that recessions causing widespread job loss rear their ugly heads every seven to ten years (I have worked in career management through five of them in the past thirty-five years), and you can see that smart career management strategies and a firm grasp of practical job search tactics are critical to your survival and happiness. In the context of your whole work life, career management and job search skills are the most important skills you can ever develop, bar none.

All the advice youve been given about careersget an education, choose a career, settle down and do a good job; patience and loyalty to the company will be rewarded with job security and life successall the promised rewards of running straight and true have proved themselves a crock.

We live in a global economy where voracious political and corporate greed has turned your life into a disposable commodity to be used and discarded. It is time for a radical shift in your career management strategy. You need to move from hapless employee at the whim of financial currents beyond your control to enlightened professional who puts the pathway to personal success in its proper context.

Whats this context? Those job changes coming round every four years or so add up to twelve or more over fifty years, with perhaps three of them involving the greater challenges concerned with career change. This means professional change is constant; professional change is a given. You need to recognize that your career is not a fixed thing that came as a gift with the purchase of your college diploma. Instead, its a critical aspect of your life, and it needs management. Face this and you can begin to change your situation, today and forever.

Enlightened self-interest means placing your financial survival front and center in your life. I want you to start to think of yourself not as a person looking for a job, but as a company, a financial entity that must maintain a steady cash flow over half a century. Start to think of yourself as MeInc., a corporation that must always plan and act in its own best interests; in doing so, you will begin to see this job search and the management of your career in a new light.

As a corporation, MeInc. has products and services that are constantly under development. These are the bundle of skills that define the professional you and are positioned and sold to your targeted customer base: those employers who hire people like you.

The success of MeInc. depends on how well you run your company, which means that just like every successful company in the world, you must have ongoing initiatives for:

• R & D: Your identification and development of products and services that will appeal to your customers. This translates to skill building in response to market trends; it also relates to your development of job search, interview, and career management skills.
• Strategic Planning: The development of effective career management strategies that make you more visible and more desirable for the times when you must look for work, and strategies you pursue when employed to make your job more secure and to encourage professional growth with that company, as you continue with strategies that build your credibility and visibility within your company and profession.
• Marketing and PR: The establishment of personal credibility for the services you deliver, and the positioning of these services so that your professional credibility becomes visible to an ever-widening circle of potential customers.
• Sales: A state-of-the-art sales program to sell your products and services, including resume, job search, and interviewing tactics.

Now, this may or may not be your first job search, and it almost certainly wont be your last, but it can be the last one that you begin in confusion. This can be the last time you have no clear idea of your options or how best to pursue them.

In these pages you will learn how to achieve your goal of a successful and happy professional life as I show you the best ways to find job openings, effectively turn them into interviews, and transform not one but sometimes many of those interviews into job offers.

This intelligent approach to job search will not only help you land jobs but will also show you how to achieve greater success within each of those jobs. This book has been updated and expanded every year for more than twenty-five years, always reflecting the changing needs of the job hunter in changing times. People who used this book all those years ago tell me they still use it today. They tell me it is why they are VPs at Fortune 500 companies or why they own their own companies and how it changed both their sense of self and their life for the better.

This is not because Knock em Dead or any of my fourteen career books is some motivational quick fix. Instead, what this book gives you is an infinitely flexible, completely down-to-earth plan of attack for your job search, which also happens to make sense as a blueprint for a successful professional life. That just happens to be something no one else has really thought through the way I have, but then Ive been at it as my chosen mission for more than thirty years. This is what I think about every day of my life: no hidden religious or political agendas, just me talking to you, using all my insights about work and careers to help you get out of a tough spot in your life and into a better place for the future, so you understand how it works and how to play the game.

No one ever thought to give it to you straight. I will because I understand, and I care about your well-being. Change and the unexpected are constants in professional life today, and I have an intelligent approach to dealing with these issues. Follow the job search advice in these pages, and you will make that next step up the professional ladder. Follow the strategic career management advice in these pages and you will be in far greater control of your destiny.

I update this Knock em Dead book every year because too much of what I find online and in bookstores lacks real insight into vitally important issues: your financial survival and success.

Twenty-nine years and millions of copies later, Knock em Dead has become a time-tested and proven commodity both here in America and in many countries around the world. If you want to make sense of your career, I have a carefully coordinated approach for making this job search and your professional life a success, and Im here to help.

Sincerely,

Martin Yate, CPC