Page 194 - Talane Miedaner - Coach Yourself to a New Career_ 7 Steps to Reinventing Your Professional Life (2010)

182 COACH YOURSELF TO A NEW CAREER

You may need to go back to school to get a specific degree or type
of training before you can change your field or career. Don’t be afraid
to do this, but make sure you have done enough informational inter-
views and values work to ensure that you are not wasting your time
pursuing education that isn’t necessary to your career or business
success. I had one client, very briefly, who was dead set on getting an
M.B.A. for the status of it, even though she wasn’t a numbers person
and would probably never want the sort of job that would require an
M.B.A. Why waste all that money and time if you don’t actually need
the degree?
On the other hand, a client who was in her early sixties confessed
to me that she had never been to college. I pointed out that nobody
cared, since it hadn’t affected her career, and that many very suc-
cessful people dropped out of school (Bill Gates, for example). She
still believed that she was missing out on something important
and felt insecure around people who had been to college. She hesi-
tated about going back to school, though, because of her age. My
response was that she could go back to school and graduate and be
sixty-six years old with a college degree, or she could postpone it
and be sixty-six years old without a college degree: which did she
prefer? She laughed and decided to go to school!
Use the informational interviews (see the discussion that fol-
lows) and do some research before you enroll in training programs
and academic classes. The people who are already established in
the field in which you are interested may have some viable sugges-
tions on the best schools or training programs for that particular
job or career, as well as on which ones to avoid.

Reinvent Your Networking and

Interviewing Style

Now that you are equipped with your career profile and have
outlined what you want to do, I thought it would also be help-
ful to give you a few networking and interviewing tips that will
help you find the right job. You may have heard this said once or
twice before: it’s who you know that can help open new doors and