The Job Market at Your Level
When you were in your twenties or in the early stages of your career, employers and recruiters looked at you as someone with limited experience who could easily adapt. Your lack of experience was not usually a critical issue, if you had the education that met their criteria and the right attitude.
Now that you have several years of work experience and are in mid-career, even though you may continue to believe that you are very adaptable, employers and recruiters are more likely to typecast you, believing you can only do what you have already done. If you are making a vertical job move within the industry where you have worked, that may not be an issue. If, however, you find that you need or want to change industries, this will be the time when you need to understand how to navigate through the job market.
Although, you may have previously found jobs by sending your resume to recruiters and you may have even found your last job by being headhunted by a recruiter, you will now find that recruiters will not be effective at helping you find a new job.
If you send your resume to employers without an introduction, it will more than likely be routed to the HR department where it will be reviewed by someone at an entry-level position whose role is to screen out anyone who does not have all or most of their recent experience in their industry – and industry to them means direct competitors. If you send your resume to recruiters, they will focus on classifying you within a specific industry and will not look at your resume unless they currently have a position where you might be a perfect match.
Success for you, therefore, means that you will have to rely more on your own efforts and much less on those you do not know. You will need to get others to help you and you will need to do it in a way that they will want to help you and will know you well enough to be effective at helping you. A great resource to you will be 12 Steps to a New Career. Please review the section on Networking for some additional information about networking for employment.
For career changers:
A career coach in a book.
For employers:
A lifeline for departing employees.