(upbeat music) All right, so about a month ago, I was let go from my job. It took me a little, a few days to kind of gather my marbles a little bit in my head and figure out what's next. So what I first did was I made a decision that I'm gonna embrace my vulnerability a little bit and I'm gonna post something on LinkedIn.

I finally come to terms with it. Took me about a month. I did a post and kind of helping people understand I'm unemployed, here's where I am in the process, here are the top jobs or skills or functions that I'm looking for that I would love to do and I kind of help people understand if I'm in it for a leadership role or a individual contributor.

Again, helping my network understand specifically what I'm looking for and so they're better positioned to help me find something or connect me with someone. What was really cool was how many people responded to that post and to me it was a real lesson about how to utilize LinkedIn as a social media platform for careers and professionals and you'd think I would know that since I used to work at LinkedIn but beyond this side of it, it really hit home.

So that post got almost 125,000 impressions 99 comments of which half of them were probably mine thanking people for their nice messages and then 23 were reposts and the majority of the reposts were not people directly in my network. Think about that, that's crazy. People see my post, they genuinely want to help out, a lot of people in a similar situation are unemployed as well and we're just trying to lift each other up and damn it if that wasn't just emotional for me.

It was really, really cool and so I wanted to respond in kind. - Hey guys, right now the job market is tough especially for those of us in high tech. At the time of this recording, I'm also unemployed and I'm job seeking. Now recently I did a post on LinkedIn about my unemployment journey and I have been so moved and overwhelmed by the support of this wonderful LinkedIn community.

It's compelled me to want to give back in a way that I'm most passionate about and that's through career coaching. Now just to be clear, I'm not a licensed coach nor am I a TED Talk speaker, far from it. I'm just someone who genuinely cares about the career advancement of my peers and I have successfully mentored people throughout my 20 year career in marketing.

I'm going to make the most obvious statement of the day, the one that is most easily forgotten. Whether it's in our personal lives or career, we want to feel a sense of purpose, a sense of accomplishment. And that can be measured in a lot of ways but I believe that feeling valued and experiencing true joy and satisfaction are key indicators of having achieved your purpose.

Now how often have you been at a job where you're just not happy? You can't pinpoint why but someone will say or do something that just triggers you and now you're just left picking up the pieces and wondering what happened? Or maybe there's a promotion that you've been striving to get.

Three years pass and all you have to show for it is the same job title and now you feel like you haven't made the progress on your career at all and you've just wasted time. I want to help you break that cycle and introduce more predictability and accountability into your career.

In our coaching session, my first goal is to help you rediscover things that truly give you joy and help you articulate your core values. Essentially, I want to reconnect you with you so you can be your true authentic self at work or help influence your environment so that you can thrive.

Then secondly, we'll talk about what jobs or responsibilities you're interested in and map out the skills development roadmap to help you get there. If you're interested in meeting with me, I can probably handle a maximum of one session per day since I'm not doing this full time. So please express your interest in the comments below and I'll reach out to coordinate something.

Now, if we don't connect and someone beats me to it, that's fantastic 'cause we're all in this together. My only ask is that when we meet, bring your true self. Come casual, I'll probably be wearing sweatpants, but do bring a spreadsheet so I can leave you with something tangible that you can reference for the rest of your life.

Thanks guys and good luck and happy job hunting. - The response to that was also overwhelming and I get kind of emotional thinking about it. It made me realize how desperate we all are in this time and how more than ever we need to help each other 'cause the world doesn't have to be broken.

This unemployment situation, yes it's market driven, but we as people, I believe we can do something about it. When I was talking to these people, some of them were directly in my network, some of them were not, there was a unifying theme. Aside of the fears of financial stability, that's a very real one by the way, right?

If you're a single income earner, if you have health issues, you depend on insurance, maybe aging parents, that was definitely a top of mind one for everybody. But that aside, the thing I didn't realize is a fear of change, meaning you've been doing the same job, function, role for 15 years, 10 years, even five and it's kind of your bread and butter and maybe it's time to make a change.

But changing fields is scary and that's when I decided to do this podcast. My goal is to help people find a job, whether it's in their existing field or a different field, by providing them with just true practical advice and insight about a role and the skills needed to qualify.

And I would wanna do this by leveraging my network of people who are actually doing the work today and having a really practical and transparent, tangible conversation. And I wanted people to understand exactly what a job is all about, what hiring managers are really looking for beyond the job description and how you can start equipping yourself to do that.

I'm thinking about people who are graduating from college right now, like they may not know what's all available to them and maybe they say, "Hey, I've always wanted to try a career in comms." Okay, well, did you realize comms has eight different roles within it, internal, external, crisis comms, legal, whatever it is, right?

It's a lot broader than you realize and maybe it'll help inspire them to study something in school or land somewhere else or leverage their network to maybe find something specific now that they know their options. So that's what I'm gonna try to do. All right, so let's see where this goes.

Wish me luck.