Summer Break from your Job Search?

Should you take a summer break from your job search?  Maybe you have decided it’s time for a change so you decide to take the summer off and resume your search in the fall.  Or you have just finished school and now it’s time to get serious about getting your first “real” job, but think having the summer off will be a good way to unwind before you get down to real searching.  But the question is, should you take this time off?

There is nothing wrong with taking a bit of time to re-group after a long stretch of school, or if you need to get some perspective going from one career to another, but do you need the whole summer of doing nothing to work towards that new job?

There are other things that you can do to help you get ready for that new career without actually “pounding the pavement” for those two summer months.

• Research the field to which you are considering to enter to ensure that you have the right education and experience required to be successful in getting a new job;
• Update your master resume and cover letter to include the criteria required by the industry to ensure you are ready to target your resume to the right job;
• Explore the possibility of doing job shadowing or apprenticeships within the new industry;
• Do some volunteer work to gain more experience to help you with Competency Based Behavioural Interviews;
• Practice your interview techniques to ensure that you are ready when you do get invited to an interview;

As you can see, there are a number of things that you can do to keep you active and moving forward to your new career.  You may choose to take some time away, but it’s also important to keep active and not lose complete focus.  Sometimes, when we get too far away from our goal, it becomes easy to let it go and not follow through.  But of course the other side of that is we can sometimes get so entrenched in what we are doing, we lose perspective.

But how do you know how much time and space you need and what is too much?  Well, that is something that is individual to each of us. The important thing is to not completely walk away, but to find the right balance between keeping your focus and not getting overwhelmed.

If you find that you are at the point in the job search or career change, where you have lost focus, or all of your hard work isn’t giving you the results you are looking for, reach out to a Professional Career Coach to help you get back on track.  At the end of the day, you want your job search or career change to be a successful venture.

Do you know someone who is currently challenged with a career change decision? Feel free to share this post by using the share links at the top of this page. Also, if you’d like more career change assistance, feel free to check out the career coaching resource page.