Career Advice I Give My Clients

Javier Andrēs Bargas-Avila tagged me in a recent LinkedIn post sharing the disturbing news that “hundreds of UXers at Google were laid off this week”. He mentioned the interview I did with him on my Life Habits Podcast discussing the topic of “Dealing with Job Loss”. Javier regularly posts about large job losses like that at Google where he used to work and he also provides support and coaching for his former colleagues.

I posted a similar sentiment when I heard about a layoff at IBM where I used to work. Many former staff members, colleagues, and even other IBMers I didn’t even know but who knew of me followed up for individual coaching sessions.

Javier and I share a deep empathy for people dealing with job loss and we have a shared passion to help.

Previous insights and advice

I’ve reflected on this broader topic in previous blog posts such as the one on Don’t Layoff Employees or Impose Tariffs: Make Better Products examining the root causes, Applying for a Job: An Employers Perspective giving some advice in my role at the time serving as the Global Vice President of UX Research at IBM, and Designing Your Career for the Future. You can also check out podcast episodes I’ve done on the topics like Landing the Job, Creating Your Own Job, Designing and Marketing the Product YOU, and Future Proofing Your Career.

Lots has changed in the last three years in the job market. I’ve also in that time converted my career coaching that I did during my more than three decades with IBM into a professional career and life coaching practice. I’ve been working with many people who have lost their jobs or were unhappy in their jobs and a unfulfilling life and looking for ways to improve their chances of getting another job and a more fulfilling life.

Why I’m sharing this with you

I realize that many people in those situations need a place to start and a paid coaching call isn’t the way they feel comfortable initially. I feel for each of you who are in this situation and empathize with you so I’d like to help by sharing in this blog post key items of advice that I give my coaching clients.

Here’s My advice

Early days

• Take a breath and be kind to yourself
  The news you’ve just received is shocking, often totally unexpected. As Javier also points out, realize that it isn’t your fault, typically it’s just that your number came up in a company that treats employees like numbers and your number needed to go. It’s often so inhumane. Getting this kind of news is like any other bad news you may get in life but often others around you won’t be as supportive. Typically, you need to deal with a whole new identity after often years of identifying with your job or role. That’s hard. Take a breath and be kind to yourself. Some of the people I’ve worked with who have decent severance packages take time off or even take a vacation rather than immediately starting their job search. I think that’s healthy and will put you into a better frame of mind when you start your job search.

• Celebrate your career progress
  It’s rarely your own fault that you were let go, so don’t get down on yourself. Instead, sit back and reflect on your career whether it’s been a just a few years or often many years. Think about the successes you’ve had, the people you’ve met and worked with, and what you’ve learned. Feel good about what you’ve achieved.

• Take stock for your next steps
  Before delving into a job search, consider what you want from a job and your life. It might seem strange for me to suggest that in such a tough job market but several of the people I’ve worked with who have worked for many years in the tech sector have decided to take a totally different direction sometimes with a cut in salary but a boost in life fulfillment by joining a nonprofit or even starting their own business.

Getting started

• Use a designer’s/researcher’s mindset
  When designers and researchers do their work to create a product or service, they use a well-known process and specialized craft to do so. They make sure they do research on the intended users, ensure that they make the design align with the users needs, minimize the time and effort it will take for a users to use the product or service, and so on. However, in my experience, when it comes to finding and getting a job, those same designers and researchers forget everything they know and take the perspective that they often criticize that developers take of giving the user whatever they think they need. While I do coach others, for designers and researchers I advise them to use their skills to design the best product and the most important product: they themselves.

• Your LinkedIn profile is your product ad
  Consider your LinkedIn profile to be your product advertising. Make sure that it represents how you want to be represented, the photograph, your roles, the About section, all of it. Make sure that it is differentiating and what the jobs you’re looking for are asking for. The people I’ve worked with often have very generic descriptions About sections or providing way too much information. It’s an ad, treat it like one. What are the top three ways you’re different and more desirable as an employee than others and what type of role are you looking for.

• Your resume and portfolio should be the digital version of you
  Again make sure to lean into your designer’s or researcher’s mindset to design the best digital product you’ve ever designed: the digital version of you. Consider that recruiters and hiring managers will be interviewing you in absentia by reading your resume and portfolio. And the interview will often be very brief, so keep the information you’re providing on point, differentiated, and focused. Make your resume beautiful but also realize that the words in it will also be read by a machine either solely in the early filtering process (often heavily used by larger companies) or together with humans. I often get into deeper evaluations of resumes and portfolios during coaching sessions but my general observations are that most people put too much detail into them. Remember, would you do that when designing a product? No, you’d empathize with the user, in this case the recruiter or hiring manager, and make it simpler to consume. If your portfolio lists similar work that you’ve done for several clients, don’t create a page for each of those, instead just create a single page showing a representative instance and just list the clients you’ve done that type of work for. Make sure to lean into vibe enhancing your resume and portfolio by using ChatGPT.

Applying

• Finding the jobs you’d like to apply for
  Think again about the item above about taking stock of what type of work you’d like to pursue next. If you’re in tech now, maybe you’d like to consider roles outside of tech. Be realistic about the jobs that you’re qualified for and double-check the job posting to ensure that you satisfy the key requirements. Many jobs will stipulate the city and country you’re required to live in and be in the office for a certain number of days. Don’t apply for those thinking that you can convince them to make it a remote job. The job market is too tough right now so you’ll be wasting your time and the recruiter’s time by applying in that way.

Interviewing

• Congratulate yourself for getting an interview
  Most applications don’t get you to an interview so feel good about what you’ve accomplished in the process thus far.

• Do your research
  Consistent with my theme of using your designer’s/researcher’s mindset, explore more about the company, the recruiter, and the hiring manager, whatever you can find. When candidates I interviewed had checked me out on LinkedIn and also read some of what I had written, I was impressed that they were prepared and already had demonstrated their interest in the job, the company, and me. It also allowed them to ask particularly well-thought out and pertinent questions.

• Practice and rehearse for your interview
  Some of the people I’ve worked with assume that they’ve been in work meetings before including one-on-one meetings so they should be able to just wing an interview. Job interviews are different, especially now. You need to practice and rehearse. Write down the kinds of questions you think you may be asked and then go and answer them. And don’t do it on your own. Recruit a partner, family member, friend, or even your dog to work with you on this. The advice I now often give is to turn to your very knowledgeable colleague, ChatGPT or your preferred GenAI assistant. Give it all the information your interviewer has been given and then prompt it with something like “you are recruiter for company X and you are going to interview me for this job” and give it the job posting. Even ask it to ask you tough questions about things that you’re concerned about regarding your resume or portfolio like gaps, potentially your age (good interviewers won’t ask you directly about age but may prod you about being too inexperienced or the obverse too experienced). If you have the paid version of ChatGPT, you can also have a full live verbal interview. If you don’t, you can print out the questions and have a friend ask them to you.

• Doing the actual interview
  Make sure to arrive on time by planning to be slightly early, whether in-person or virtually. Take some deep breaths and try to remain relaxed. When asked a question, don’t rush to answer, think first and then respond. Ensure that you fully understand the question first and ask for clarification if you don’t. You don’t want to be answering the wrong question. Get back into your designer’s/researcher’s mindset and consider what the interviewer would like to know rather than simply blurting out everything you want to tell them about how great you are. In initial mock interviews I’ve done with clients, they often focus so much on what they want to say that they don’t actually answer the question. They often speak in generalities and don’t focus enough on what differentiates them from others.

• Waiting for the reply
  Celebrate if and when you get a job offer. But in this job market, that isn’t often the case that you get an offer. Don’t despair. If you have the rare opportunity to learn why you weren’t offered the job from the company, reflect on that. More often though regrettably, you don’t get any or much in the way of feedback. So, reflect on how the interview went yourself and consider what you could improve upon.

Other things to consider

• Self improvement
  Your feedback from or your personal reflection on the interview if you didn’t get the job may lead you to consider further developing or honing your knowledge, skills, and/or experience. This could take the form of additional informal or formal education. One incredibly important area to focus on is Generative AI regarding typical more general use-cases but also ones directly related to your discipline. Realize that AI is also often now doing the work that entry level designers and researchers used to do so you should also focus on further developing your higher level skills as discussed in this article written by my designer son. If you need to get more experience, fill a gap in your employment, and/or want to feed your soul and not just your wallet, consider volunteering your skills with a nonprofit. I co-lead one where the other co-founder and I are committed to giving you work experiences that you desire to have. Check it out at Habits for a Better World.

• Consider fractional roles
  For decades, careers followed a predictable path: one company, one role at a time. That model is changing. A fractional role is part-time but strategic. You’re not freelancing task-by-task. You step in as a leader or specialist for a set number of hours or projects. Smaller organizations can’t always afford full-time senior staff. Startups and nonprofits need expertise without the overhead. And, the staking stock reflection I mentioned earlier is leading professionals to want greater flexibility, variety, and alignment with their values. Fractional job postings grew by 57% between 2020 and 2022. Today, about one in four U.S. businesses already use fractional hires, and that share is projected to reach one in three in the coming years. It’s no longer a niche trend but becoming mainstream.

My own path

When I retired a year and a half ago, I decided to take on several factional roles: president and co-founder of a nonprofit, Industry Professor at a university, hosting my podcast, serving on a couple of boards of advisors for a startup and a scale up, taking on the occasional consulting gig, and offering my career coaching services. I couldn’t be happier.

Next steps

I hope that the advice I’ve provided in this post is helpful to you. Feel free to reach out in a LinkedIn DM if you have any questions, and if you want further one-one-one customized advice to your own situation consider my career coaching services or Javier’s as well. We’re both experienced executives in the tech field, have deep empathy for the many people who are unemployed or underemployed, and have honed our coaching to suit the times we’re living in.

I’d like to thank you for reading through all of this and I wish you well in your job search!