Page 169 - Marky Stein - Get a Great Job When You Don't Have a Job-McGraw-Hill (2009)

Get a Great Job When You Don’t Have a Job

• How to leverage multiple job offers
• The most important questions to ask the employer
• How to be a master at negotiating your salary

My Story

In the next chapter, we’ll take a look at some of the fears you too
are going to leave behind, but before we explore the rest of the
techniques I’ve told you about, I’d like to tell you a little bit about
how I became a career coach and how I came to write this text.
I became a career coach in 1989 for many reasons, but
there’s only one reason that really counts. I simply love talking to
people about their work! Even before I was a counselor, I had a
sort of innate sense that every person has a certain career destiny.
I was absolutely fascinated by people’s career choices—how they
started doing what they were doing, if they liked their work, and
especially if they had a secret dream about what they’d really like
to be doing. For some reason it seemed just as natural to me to
talk about people’s careers as it was to talk about their pets, their
gardens, or a movie they had seen.
But even though talking about careers seemed to come nat-
urally to me, becoming a career counselor wasn’t nearly as easy
as that. I faced many of the same feelings of rejection and frus-
tration as other people sometimes feel in interviews. Shortly
before I took up career coaching as a profession, I decided to ask
a few professional career counselors whether they thought I was
suited to the occupation, what I could expect from being a career
counselor, and what the job prospects were like. All ten of the
people I talked to said I would “never make it” without a mas-
ter’s degree in counseling or education. I didn’t have one, and
I didn’t plan to get one soon.
One said: “None of the agencies are hiring—the economy’s
too soft. There’s a waiting list of over a thousand people from all
over the world trying to get the one job at the local community
college.” (Sound familiar?)
Still another professional warned: “I’d hate to see you waste
your time trying to build a career coaching business in this town.
It’s too small, and I’ve never known any counselor to succeed
at it.”

156