Is your job target one you love, or one you are actually qualified to do? 
It’s a painful process for some people.
Sometimes, I get clients calling me who want to do a complete career pivot, which I love. It’s fun to completely reinvent someone using their transferrable skills that can point them into a different direction.
However, once in a while, I get a gushing client who is so entirely fired up about their job target that they lose their perspective.
Loving your job target
We all have things that light our fire and really get us excited. The fantasy of having that dream job doing all those cool things we’ve always wanted to do… and getting paid to do it!
We should all aspire to have such a position.
Interestingly, many baby boomers and now Gen Xers are starting to repurpose their latter years in the workforce into what is commonly known as an encore careers.
That’s when you leverage your existing skill sets into a new direction that is more purpose-driven versus monetarily-driven.
Cool concept, and given the fact that most of us spend more time at the office in our job than with our families, I’ve always held the belief that we might as well enjoy what we are doing during all that time out of the home.
However, there’s also the reality check.
When LOVING a job idea clashes with qualifications
But sometimes, no matter how much you are in love with a potential job target, there just isn’t a business case to hire you for it because you simply don’t have the chops.
It might be that your background is entirely dissimilar, or your skills don’t transfer. Or perhaps the position is so specialized that there are simply better-qualified people out there.
So what I urge clients to do when they are faced with this scenario is to take a good, long look at their background and then go line-by-line in the description of the job target, asking themselves, “What specific experience do I have that relates to this requirement?”
If you find that you can’t make that big of a stretch, I don’t want you to despair.
It only means that you simply can’t make that leap… yet.
What this tells job seekers is that there is going to have to be an interim step between where they currently are, and where they want to go.
We can work with their background to parse out the most relevant aspects, but the rest of the work is yet to be done… either through skill acquisition, training, internships, or more of entry-level position to gain the fundamentals in the new direction.
Having a realistic approach in whether you are in LOVE with a job target and qualified, or simply in love and NOT qualified is critical to determining your next steps.