[00:00]

You know, every business needs a niche. A business that sells to everyone, sells to no one. It’s just the way it is. They have to have a very defined audience; a very clear niche. Your skill set and your career should be the same way. I’m a paralegal, right? And I could go out and try to find another paralegal job, and I’m not looking to do that any time soon. I like my job, but should I decide that I could put my resume out there with a bunch of paralegal jobs and a bunch of different fields, but you know, the ones they’re going to call me back? The ones in my niche. The real estate jobs, because that’s what I have experience in.

Hello, and welcome to The Career Shake Up Podcast. I’m your host, Kristin Szalajko. I’m a certified professional career coach who specializes in career exploration. I believe everyone deserves a meaningful career they love. I know it can be hard to find that career, and that’s why I’m here. I’ve developed an easy formula to help you identify the right career path for you. Let’s to shake up the way you view your career. I’m going to challenge you to look at careers in a brand-new way. Whether you’re stuck in a job you don’t like or just starting out on your path, my goal is to empower you, to take control of your career.

[01:17]

Hello and welcome to episode six of The Career Shake Up podcast. We have been breaking down the formula for finding a happy career. The first step was finding “you why”, and the next step is to understand the six key elements for a happy career. So that’s what we’ve been doing. Last episode and now this episode as we’re breaking down each of those key elements. Today we’re going to talk about skills.

Obviously, we need to be good at what we do, right? I think this one’s pretty obvious, but it’s kind of obvious for a few reasons and there’s a few different ways I need you to look at your skills when it comes to your career. So, we’re just going to kind of break those down.

I want you to imagine…this is a podcast, so it’s kind of hard to show you. I’ll put this graph in the show notes so you can see what I’m talking about if you’re having a hard time visualizing this. But I want you to picture a graph in your mind and I want you to picture a really thick line going straight up diagonal in the graph. Now, the top half above the line is the anxiety zone. The bottom half below the line is the boredom zone. Here’s what I mean by that. So, the demands of your job are on one side of this graph, right? And the skills, your ability, is on the other side of this graph. And when the demands of the job are far above your ability, you’re going to be incredibly anxious, stressed out, overwhelmed, underconfident, and that kind of leads to a miserable experience.

Somehow, you’ve tricked your way into this job, but you’re just not ready for it. And if that’s the case, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be happy, right? You’re going to be really anxious. But on the flip side, if the demands of the job are far below what your abilities are, you’re going to find yourself being very bored and you’re certainly not going to be happy in boredom, right?

So, one extreme example is if I was to be thrown into an operating room as a doctor and someone handed me a scalpel and said, I need you to operate on this guy’s heart. I would obviously like panic, right? One, I don’t do blood and guts, but two, this person’s life is in my hands. I would kill over with stress. I’d be like, no, this is not happening. I cannot do this. Right? You can see how, like, the demands are far below, above my skill.

Obviously, that’s an extreme example and likely never to happen to any of us ever. But a more realistic example would be taking on a management role when you’ve had no experience ever. Let’s say you are fresh out of school, and you’ve got yourself a marketing degree and you land your very first job as a Marketing Manager, managing a team of ten people. You’re in over your head, right? You don’t know what you’re doing. These people are not going to trust you. They’re like, who’s this kid fresh out of school? There’s going to be a trust issue there. And obviously you’re going to lead the ship astray because you don’t know what you’re doing. And that’s okay, right? Not to say that you can never be a manager, but you need to sort of work up to it.

So, there’s really this sweet spot on the graph. That was a really thick middle line I described. That’s the sweet spot where you’re stretching a little bit. It’s a little bit hard. You’re growing, but you’re growing within a way that you can handle. Now, if you take on your first Marketing Manager position after you’ve already been working in the marketing field and you’ve got a little bit of experience, then it’s a stretch for you to have your first management job. But it’s a stretch you can handle, right? It’s a stretch you can grow into comfortably rather than just being thrown into the deep end.

But alternatively, if you take a job that you’re way overqualified for, you’re going to get incredibly bored too, right? So, let’s say you have run grocery stores for decades. You worked your way up. You started in the produce, then you became like the department manager, then you became the store manager and then an area manager. And you’ve been traveling. You work your way up, right? Well, your next job after becoming the VP in this company, you decide, I’m just going to take the cashier position, right? In some magical world, they told you they’d pay you the same amount of money as a VP, right? But the truth is, you’re now overqualified for that job and you’re going to be bored. You’re going to get bored because you’re going to feel like you’re just not making and contributing to the way you were.

Now if taking a job far below your experience excites you. The likely culprit is that you are too overwhelmed and not in the right place. If being a VP was making you miserable and you take this job far below your skill level, it’s likely that you were not in the right spot. There was something else wrong, and so now you just want an easy way out, right? Like, I don’t know, just bagging grocery sounds easy. But, taking a job that’s far below your means is not the answer. The answer is to find what was missing and tweak it, and then you can move on and keep having this happy life, right? So just keep that in mind as you’re trying to think about, where do I fall on the spectrum of anxiety versus boredom?

[06:42]

Another part of skills that I want to talk about is that skills are not discovered, they’re built. I talked about this with passion on the last episode, and you don’t really discover your passion, but it kind of develops. But skills are the same way sometimes.

Let’s take passion and skills at the same time here.  I want to liken it to a metal detector. Oftentimes we think we’re just going to walk along the beach with our metal detector and suddenly it will go – beep, beep, beep – and you’ll go “oh, that’s it. I found the gold!” Or found my skill, I found my passion. Like, we’re just going to stumble upon it. That’s not how it works, right? That’s not how it works.

Take Michael Jordan, for example. I think everyone knows that he was cut from his high school basketball team the first time he tried out. Okay? So, the true story is he wasn’t actually cut for the team, but he was placed on junior varsity instead of varsity so that he could take time to develop his skill. He was not good. But that didn’t mean that he could never become good. Obviously, he became great. Right? But you’re not great at something the second you try it, the first time you try it. And so, if you limit your career search to skills that you have currently or that you’re already really good at, you’re going to cut out a lot of opportunities.

You want to find something that’s not necessarily something you’re good at now, but something you could become good at. Right? Michael Jordan stuck with it. He kept practicing basketball, and he overcame. Right?

I’m quite religious. I go to church often, like, every week. It’s a big part of my life. And I went to this event once where a woman came. I forget her name, and so I tried to find her and look her up, but I couldn’t remember her name. And I had a hard time finding her. But she was speaking about her experience. She’s an artist. She has beautiful paintings. She brought an example of her painting, and it was beautiful. But she’s telling a story about how when she first started, she was terrible. Like, terrible. Probably like me, if I tried to draw today, it would look the same way. But for whatever reason, she stuck out. She stuck with it. She went to college, she got a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better. And now she’s drawing and painting for a living and making good money and is really good at it. But that doesn’t mean she started out good. Right? And so I want you to really ponder what kind of skills could you become good at, what kind of new skills could you try and stick with and over time develop them? Right?

When you have a natural talent like Michael Jordan and the basketball…We have natural talents but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be developed and worked on and fine-tuned. Right? I have a natural aptitude towards math. Math was always really easy to me. It was the easiest subject in school. But I took calculus in high school as a junior, and then after that, I think…math wasn’t where I wanted to go in my career, even though it was easy for me. So, after I finished my math qualifications to graduate high school, I just stopped taking math. And I took super easy math in college just to get it over with because I knew it would be easy for me.

But even though at some point I could do calculus, I cannot do calculus today. Not because I don’t have the talent for math. I do. But I’m very out of practice. Right? Like, it’s been a long time. I’d have to re-teach myself this, and I’d have to keep practicing often. As it is, with skill. Right? So, I want you to just kind of start pondering what things do you have maybe some potential for? Maybe a natural knack towards. That with some time and effort, you could become good at?

[10:18]

Often in our career, the first breaks we get come from the relationships we have. Let’s take photography, for example. So, you want to be a photographer and your neighbors like, yeah, sure, you know, you’re like, I’ll do it for free, just let me get some practice. And you go out and shoot. But the photos are terrible. Your friend will thank you for giving them the free family photos, but they’re not going to really spread the word of mouth. And you’re not going to grow because you’re not good at it.

Your first job tends to come from relationships, but the second break, the third break, that all comes from skill. You know, like a hairdresser, for example. I let one of my friends cut my hair in college and I didn’t think she did the best job, and I never let her cut my hair again, but I gave her a shot because she was my friend. And as it will be with you guys, right? So, the more skills you have, the more refined your skills are, the more doors that you’re going to open.

And having a skill also gives you some strong negotiation power. When a business and their success relies on your skills and you have that skill, that niche that they’re looking for – you’re going to have this power to get what you want, right? In terms of pay, the projects you get to work on, the say you have over the way the company is operating, the more skilled you are, the more power you get. I don’t want you to be like power hungry and misuse that power, but I think you understand that you could take more control of your career.

Every business needs a niche. A business sells to everyone, sells to no one. It’s just the way it is. They have to have a very defined audience. A very clear niche. Your skill set and your career should be the same way. I’m a paralegal, right? And I could go out and try to find another paralegal job, and I’m not looking to do that anytime soon. I like my job. But, should I decide that I could put my resume out there with a bunch of paralegal jobs and a bunch of different fields, but you know, the ones they’re going to call me back? The ones in my niche. The real estate jobs because that’s what I have experience in.

When…I told this on a previous podcast, at some point I wanted to leave…Well, actually, we’ve moved a lot, right? We used to live in Florida, which is where my company is based. Then we moved to Chicago and then we moved to Utah. When we originally were moving to Chicago, my company wasn’t going to let me work remote, so I was going to have to find another job. Well, I knew my niche was real estate, so those were the jobs I was going to apply for. I applied to three jobs total because that’s how many real estate jobs I can find in Chicago. Let’s think about the population of Chicago, right? The odds of me getting an interview for those seem slim based on the numbers. But because my niche was so specific, so clear, I got an interview. Right? And quickly and immediately, and the interview went really well. My current company ended up letting me go remote, so I didn’t take the job. But my niche helped me land.

So, if you’re in a field that’s really broad, I want you to find a way to niche down. Accounting – super broad. Maybe you want to be an accountant for small business. Maybe you want to account for tech companies. Maybe you want to be an accountant for families, single mothers, whatever. Find a niche and set yourself apart. You will succeed so much further if you can figure out how to niche. If you don’t have a niche. Now, really, I honestly want you to think and ponder how you can niche down to give you some more negotiation power when it comes to work.

Now, you may be wondering how you can do that when you don’t actually have experience in this new field that you want to jump into. The way you do that is just by education. Is there some sort of certification you get? Or can you volunteer to work on a project with someone? Can you jump on Fiverr and offer your services there? Think of the niche that you want. Go find a way to gain experience in that niche so that when you want to get your regular fulltime job, you have ability to show on your resume why you’re good at that and how you’re an expert in this field.

[14:22]

So, another question you ask yourself when it comes to skills is just how much schooling are you willing to get. Right? Some jobs you’re going to have to jump back to school, but some are not, like, that’s not always going to be required. Maybe you need a degree, maybe you can just get a certification, maybe you can do some informal online training. Think of like: Udemy, Skill Share, LinkedIn Learning, which I think they run through Linda, YouTube. All of these are places where you could gain skills and maybe just practice that skill freelancing. Put up a gig on Fiverr and get some practice.

But you just need to know how much you’re willing to get. If you’re not willing to go back to school and that’s absolutely necessary, then consider a different field. But maybe you can get creative, right? And the truth is, 40% of people are not working in the degree they have. So, if that’s the case, then your degree doesn’t necessarily matter in all areas of your life, in all jobs, right? So, there are a plethora of jobs that all they care about is that you went to school. They don’t necessarily care about what your degree is in. And so, you can shift, you can change.

There’s quite a bit of jobs that don’t require a four-year degree that you can find a lot of success in being a CNA, you could just be certified and that certainly can start working. You can start working on that and build your way up to like, a nurse practitioner, which would require a school, but you can at least start without school. Being a real estate agent can be very lucrative and all you need is a high school diploma. UX design can be done with the certification, insurance, sales, no degree at all. You could go to acting school or you could be an actor and you could choose to go to school or not and still be successful. Trade school, that’s schooling, but it doesn’t require the four-year degree, typically, right? Cosmetology, being a firefighter, patrol officer. Those are just some options of things you can do that don’t require a degree.

And a lot of people have degrees and then end up switching majors. Like I just mentioned, like 40% of people aren’t actually using their degree or they’re just working in a field that’s not related to their degree at all. And this happens and people find a lot of success that way.

Fred Smith, he is the founder of FedEx. His degrees in economics, I could see in some small way how they’re related, but really, running a business and economics is not the same. Right? So, he can run a business without having a business degree. And some people never finished school and still find a lot of success, right? The founder of CNN. His name is Ted Turner. He was kicked out of college. I mean, he was at a good school. I think he went to Brown. Correct me, I may be wrong, so if I’m wrong, I’ll put it in the show notes and tell you where he actually was. But he got kicked out of school and so never finished and yet still founded this obviously, like, super successful multimedia news company. So, it’s possible, right?

[17:20]

So, I just want you to take on and take an assessment of your skills that you already have and then figure out either what you have and how you can niche down or what skills you can gain and how you will niche those skills. That’s going to really set you apart. And if you’re not good at your job, you’re just not going to love it and you’re not going to be able to find the jobs you want because you’re not good enough. So, work hard to get to where you need to be.

That’s all we have for today. Thanks for joining us. You can find a show notes at www.kristinszalajko.com/episode6. The chart I mentioned and all the other things I’ve mentioned that will be on there. You can find a transcript of the episode on there also. But also, there is a PDF that I have that I’ve created to go along with each of these episodes as we talk about the six key elements that will just break down what they are and give you a bunch of questions you can ask. Sort of self-reflection questions to help you figure out what each of these key elements mean for you because they’re very individualized. What I need in my six key elements is going to be different what you need. So this is just going to help you work through each of these steps. So I encourage you to download that and then listen to the rest of the episodes on key elements and help you figure out what you need.

[Outro]

Thank you for joining me today. I hope you’ve found value as you listened. If there’s anyone you feel can use this episode, please go ahead and share it with them. Also, you’re likely listening to this on the go. When you find a quiet moment, could you be so kind as to leave me a review? That will help others find me as well. Be sure to come back next week for our next episode. Same time. Same place. Have a great week.