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At a Career Crossroads? How to Form a Personal Focus Group

March 3, 2009 | Author: Jessica Howard | Filed under: Career Change, Moving Up

Yesterday’s post shared career advice from Chris Shipley, well known as the executive producer of DEMO conferences and an all-round tech expert. In the second part of our interview, Chris talks about her decision to start the Guidewire Group — which helps startups assess their market potential — four years ago. She raises the idea of forming a personal focus group to help make career decisions - good advice for anyone considering a new career move.

Here’s what Chris had to say: “When I started to think about, ‘So, what else do I want to do?’, the best advice I didn’t follow and I wish I had, was from someone who said, ‘I think you should do a focus group.’

“The idea was to get a group of people that you’ve worked with and do a focus group about yourself. How do people perceive you? What’s your brand?

“I asked a lot of people that question one-on-one but I didn’t bring people together to ask them collectively. I think I would have gotten a faster understanding of how I’m perceived in the market had I done that.

“It just felt uncomfortable to me to say, ‘Please come together to talk about me’!”

She’s right. How do you pull together a focus group on your career?

First of all, there’s no shame in asking your inner circle for advice. Writing about how to assemble a personal board of advisers, career coach Michael Melcher says, “it is reasonable to predict that at some of the most crucial times in your life you won’t really know what to do.”

Melcher says that meetings with personal advisors can take many forms: there may be a planned round of phone calls to your circle of comrades every few months, or perhaps a planned get-together with a group you trust.

This Glass Hammer post says “Your Board is a small group of people who know your strengths and weaknesses, but are not necessarily tied to the emotional outcome of your decisions. The commonality is people who are able to help you think, and can be objective.”

Melcher offers a list of questions that you can put to your personal board. You’ll have to be ready to hear others’ impressions of what you’re good at and not so good at, what they can see you doing and not doing. Author Katharine Hansen passes on the idea of trading resumes with colleagues and asking them to “look for the story that comes through.”

Related Resources:

Network Readiness Evaluator

How to Approach a Mentor: Interview with Pamela Skillings

How to Manage Your Career Like a Superstar

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1 person has left a comment

What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favor of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? ,

Bob64 wrote on October 23, 2009 - 3:53 am | Visit Link

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