In our last episode, we talked about making time for your job search by creating a routine and making it part of your calendar. Something that you can do every day, even if you don’t want to, even if you don’t like it, but it needs to be done. Now today, I want to talk about a different challenge that we face when we’re job searching. It’s uncertainty. The kind of uncertainty that can happen inside you.
or out there in the job market and it just makes you freeze. That stops you from making decisions and moving forward. That makes you think, maybe I’ll just wait and see. Let’s wait and see what’s gonna happen. But here’s the thing, if you want a better future for yourself, you cannot wait until your future is clear. You might be waiting forever.
So in this episode, it’s all about moving forward in the face of uncertainty and even when you are not sure about things.
Now I couldn’t do an episode about uncertainty in the job market without talking about artificial intelligence. So let’s start with AI. How to think about AI in your next career move? Will it impact your profession in any way? I’m assuming yes. Let’s assume yes. But let’s talk about something that is in a lot of people’s mind.
What do I do with AI in my profession? If you’ve been laid off recently, you might be wondering if AI had anything to do with it. I know many of my clients come to me with those concerns and not knowing how they’re going to position themselves in the market moving forward. Or whether your next job might also be under threat because of AI.
And the honest answer that I can give you is yes and maybe. Here’s how I recommend that you think about AI. If you’re going back into the workforce, you have two main options. Option one, you become hyper knowledgeable in your area. Learn how artificial intelligence is being used in your industry.
in the sort of function that you do in your expertise, your profession. Understand all the AI tools that are being used in your profession. Know what’s being automated and why it’s being automated. Know how to talk about it in interviews. That would also be very beneficial to you. Not in a buzz-worthy way, but in a practical, clear, confident way.
Show that you’re someone who keeps up with what’s going on. You don’t necessarily need to be an AR coder or expert, but you need to know how AI is going to influence the future of your profession, your industry, your sector, and so on.
Then there is option two. Option two is if you’ve been made redundant and you think AI is not something you’re interested in pursuing or doing, there could be a possibility of you shifting careers and focusing on human first roles. Right? So it’s equally challenging and hard work to either remain in your profession
with all the uncertainty that AI is causing and learn how to use AI to remain relevant in your profession. And the other option is to change careers and work on a human centric role. Choosing work where emotional intelligence, judgment, ethics and leadership matter more.
than speed or automation, where customer service, human customer service is still really important and up until now and maybe in the next decade or so, it won’t be replaced. You can think about something like coaching, you know, even though there’s a lot of AI involved in ⁓ people looking for work, this.
I’ve never been busier, so I’m not really concerned yet about my services. And there are other types of coaching, executive coaching, life coaching, sports coaching, facilitation, speaking engagements, those opportunities that if you’ve had a long, ⁓ successful or filled with experiences career, you could
translate that into facilitating coaching, speaking, so forth. Stakeholder engagement, know, things that are linked to sales and business development and company growth and making sure that the stakeholders and shareholders, donors are involved in the business in a way that is human centric. Governance and strategy and change management still require
that input from humans more than ever to get things done in a way that is meaningful and successful. These aren’t roles that AI is about to replace yet. There is no right or wrong answer here, but I just wanted to give you options and make you think really strategically about the next decade, two decades ahead. You don’t have to become a tech person if that’s not your thing.
I know that that’s not my thing, but I still know a lot about AI because as a career coach, how could I not? I need to help my clients use artificial intelligence as they’re building their profiles and job applications. But I also need to teach them that AI is probably going to be looking at their applications once they apply and explaining to them best ways of strategically positioning themselves for those bots and ⁓
automated eyes and not just the human eyes that are going to look at their LinkedIn profiles and so forth. And you can make a choice, you know, trying to ignore AI altogether and just go back to how things were is not an option. It’s not an option if you are in one of the countries where I assume you are, if you’re listening to this podcast, most of my listeners are in the United States.
And then Australia, which is where I’m based, but I have more listeners in the US than Canada and UK and European countries and so forth. AI is just moving too fast in these developing countries. So ask yourself, do I want to lean into new tools and get ahead and get ahead of the curve and be in the know? Or do I want to move towards work that’s built on distinctly human strengths?
Both paths are valid and they are there and it’s important for you to have a conversation with yourself or with a coach or with mentors. And either way, the key is to make the decision consciously, not out of fear, but out of clarity and purpose, things that you really want to do instead of things that you have to do to get by. Because the world is going to be more uncertain as we move forward.
especially for those corporate professionals like, you know, you and I. So I’m going to share with you a client example of opting for human centered work. This has been quite a recent situation and I thought I should do a podcast about this. So I wanted to share, ⁓ anonymously, of course, what my client went through. I’m going to call her Ruth. That’s not her real name, of course.
And she worked in a large international NGO for over a decade, focused on grant applications, grant strategy, and community partnerships. It was a marvelous job and her role was made redundant late last year in 2024. And she became…
unemployed and came to me feeling unsure about how to position herself. The NGO in question supported her in the outplacement and hired me to help her. And that is wonderful. I love when organizations take care of their employees that are exiting and off boarding. It’s just so important. The thing is, in 2025, we’re now in June 2025, the NGO sector is
incredibly under pressure, right? If you’re following me on LinkedIn, you may have seen that since then I’ve been supporting the United Nations and WHO and UNICEF and ⁓ UNHCR. They all have lost funding since January and they have all had to make their teams redundant. Over 20,000 of professionals were made redundant amongst all of the agencies that I’ve just mentioned.
So funding is shifting and AI was being brought into automate parts of the grant pipeline that my client worked for. And we then assumed that that AI ⁓ application would be used in other funding agencies and not-for-profits and NGOs as well. Now, Ruth is incredibly capable, strategic, great with people.
But she had no interest in becoming a tech specialist. That’s not what she felt was her strengths. And also learning data systems just to stay relevant wasn’t something that she wanted to do. In fact, over the years, she had felt more and more detached from the work that she started doing because how it became more and more mechanical over time. So that wasn’t her path.
We looked at what made her work meaningful. ran the usual assessments. As you probably know, I’m a global partner for Talent Predicts. It’s a wonderful assessment. If you have never done a strengths assessment, I would definitely start with Talent Predicts. You can purchase it on my website and you don’t really need a lot of help to understand the report. It’s very easy to understand user-friendly report.
⁓ Many of the strengths assessments out there require you to book a time with a coach to go through it because they’re not very easy to read. Not that you couldn’t do it. Of course, I’d love to speak with you. can book a consultation as well. But nevertheless, we worked on the talent projects for Ruth where we looked at how she wanted to proceed with her career.
based on the strengths, the top strengths that she had? And the answer was most definitely her top strength, which was relationship building, right? So that strategic engagement with individuals in purpose-driven organizations was the sort of key for her. And when that’s something that is key for you, people can tell.
When you go to job interviews and you’re speaking about something you’re passionate about, you change, your demeanor change. I see all of my clients via Zoom calls and I can tell in a Zoom call. You I can see the eye sparkles. I can see the tone becomes more different and people speak a little bit faster when they’re talking about something that’s exciting to them.
those little nuances when you’re talking to recruiters, when you’re being interviewed on a panel, they are really important. So my client Ruth repositioned herself to focus on those stakeholder relationships and community partnership roles, roles where you need to be a human to do, particularly in organizations that are committed to social impact. instead of
widening up the net and changing her area of expertise, we doubled down and we really were sharply focused on social impact. Her resume and her LinkedIn now highlight her influence, her network of existing connections and her ability to build new networks as well because that’s something that is a strength for her. And the change she’s
driven, know, rather than the technical details of the past grant applications works that she used to do. Now it’s been a few months, but she’s now interviewing for a senior engagement role at a not-for-profit foundation overseas, not here in Australia. She’s not from Australia. And that organization works closely with communities that don’t even know what AI is.
Her job won’t even be about outpacing AI at all. It will be about building trust with community, cultural intelligence, cultural understanding, long-term impact. So that was such an important ⁓ learning point for me as well in how I can support my clients in making transitions that are meaningful for them.
So if you are also wondering whether AI is a reason for you to panic, I think that Ruth is the proof that you can opt out of the tech arms race if you want to. But you do need to be intentional about it and not offering yourself to every single job application out there. I think that that was really something that Ruth and I had to work on and she needed
to trust me with that, right? Because diluting your message is never a good idea in a job marketplace that’s filled with candidates. So if you’re listening today because you are in the middle of a career shift or you’re ready to make one, this might be the right time for you to give that career a proper reset and start reconsidering things.
considering AI is here to stay and making a strategic decision about should you join it or should you move away from it. And talking about reset, you know I love that word. I’ve created a short course called Reset Your Career. That course is a few years old now. I’ve updated it twice already. The recent update is only a few months old and it’s designed to help you walk away ⁓
from your current job with a standout LinkedIn profile, a resume that reflects your values. And right now in June 2025, if you purchase Reset Your Career, which is an online course, it’s ready for you on demand. If you purchase it, I’m offering you a free 30 minute one-on-one chat with me. But it needs to be in June, okay? So here’s how it works. You go through the course.
and you do it at your own pace. The course has six master classes. You update your LinkedIn, you update your resume using the ideas that I share with you in the course. And once you’ve done the work, then we book a time to meet and review your progress and answer any questions that you may have from the course or something else that’s going on in your career. I think it’s a great opportunity for me to get to know you.
give you personalized feedback and help you fine tune everything that you’ve done during the course. Some people do this program over the weekend. It’s one of the most popular things that I sell on a Saturday, sometimes on a Sunday. ⁓ And I know that some of you also do it over a course of a week or however it suits you. It’s yours to keep. You do with it what you want. But ⁓ yeah.
So just wanted to let you know that it’s there for you and you don’t need to do anything extra. You just enroll and I will reach out to you with a Calendly link for us to book that session. Okay. And I hope to see you soon.
one more thing. If you don’t know how to find, reset your career, I hope you do. But if you don’t, there’s a link to it in the episode show notes. So go there and find it and find me and we can work together. All right. Let’s go back to the podcast.
OK, let’s not talk about artificial intelligence anymore. Let’s talk about this fog of uncertainty that just fell upon 2025. I feel like it’s a heavy fog. You know, I really wasn’t expecting it. I really wasn’t. ⁓ think we did discuss at the end of 2024. I don’t know if you listen to episodes that I do with Jeff Slade at the end of every year. You know, we discussed how difficult 2020
was and we were optimistic about 2025. new tenures in, know, a new president in the US, new presidents in other countries as well, UK included, now Canada, Australia, but still, I think it just made it made matters worse. The ⁓ wars that we had, they haven’t been resolved, at least not, you know, up until now, June 2025.
There’s this fog that’s really thick. And to be honest, the job market can feel confusing when geopolitical issues are affecting our lives. Companies don’t grow. They just don’t know how to position themselves. I mean, I don’t think we’ve ever been in this sort of situation with trade, international trade and taxes being so confusing, international education and…
blocks to international students. All of this has a snowball effect to everything else. So the economic signals coming from the United States are reverberating across the world and providing mixed signals and wars to add on top of that don’t make things easy as well.
Industries are also changing, roles are shifting and if you’ve been laid off you may feel very disoriented. So there has been a lot of things that have been affected by current geopolitical issues and you might be coming out from a sector or an industry type of profession and you just don’t see jobs advertised for those roles anymore.
If you’re still working, you might be scared to move. And that’s a very common during times of uncertainty, times of VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, ⁓ VUCA, something else and ambiguity. There is an episode about VUCA with Janet Zanak who is a true expert. If you think I have a soft voice,
And I speak calmly. You should go and listen to my episodes with Janet because she is just so knowledgeable and she speaks so beautifully about VUCA. And I want you to go and listen to that if you are feeling paralyzed by indecision because of uncertainty. I will put the links to those episodes in the show notes below as well. But being stuck in indecision is not safe, right? For professionals that need to find work.
that need better jobs, that need to remain ⁓ sustainable in their careers for the next five, 10, 15, 20 years, 30 years ahead, you cannot be paralyzed by uncertainty. We know that things go up and they go down and they go up and they go down and you have to be ready for those as you navigate your career transitions. One approach that I use with clients is something that I call lose
planning, lose planning. Okay? You don’t need to have a perfect five-year plan. You need to have a direction, right? The direction sets the tone of where you’re going. It sets the conversations that you will have with your network and recruiters. It’s like a compass. It’s not a map, but it really gives you a north. Ask yourself, what’s the best step I can take with the information that I have right now?
Right? It’s not the perfect step. It’s the best step. Maybe that’s updating your resume to the best of your ability. I know that a lot of people like to stay there and I can understand because it’s something tangible. A resume is tangible. And I think that even though I prefer as a coach to do a lot of career planning and conversations before I tackle the collateral, the paperwork and the documents, I understand that even if you
start there, ⁓ it will give you an opportunity to start reflecting on your career, remembering things you’ve done and initiating that important conversation with yourself about where you’re going next. The other thing you could do is reconnecting with past colleagues. Sometimes we’re too busy and we forget to talk to people, but there’s so much intelligence that comes from conversations.
Another thing you can do is learning a new tool. It doesn’t have to be an AI tool. It can be any tool, but don’t over plan. Just begin. Begin with something that feels more natural and you’re more motivated to do. Right? Then I want you to think about anchoring yourself in your values. I don’t think it’s a privilege. I think it’s important, right? To have purpose in your career. Again,
If you want to know a little bit more about purpose and a career, there’s conversations I’ve had with Cassandra Goodman. She’s such an excellent expert in purpose. She has coined the term called self fidelity. And I think it’s an amazing opportunity for you to sort of think about what it is that is your purpose. What do you want to focus on in the years ahead that will make you not only earn money, but feel fulfilled.
and content with how you’re spending most of your day. We spend so much time working. So when everything feels up in the air, your values are your anchor, really. We think that maybe we need to go into survival mode and those things of self-fulfillment don’t matter much. I’m starting to disagree with that. I want you to ask yourself, what’s important to me in my work? Because I can see when people are
purpose driven and they are talking about things that they like. They’re just so much more energized by it that I think it will influence how others see you and how they decide to hire you for opportunities and engage with your work. Right. So what is your purpose? What is important to you right now? Is it flexibility? Is it lifestyle? Is it having purpose in the
job that you’re doing. Is it being a leader of people or a leader of projects or no leader at all? Is it stability? Is it creativity? Once you know your top values, and I’ll go back to Talent Predicts because I think it’s such a great tool. You can find all of these things if you do the assessment. You can start evaluating opportunities through that lens. And it’s funny, isn’t it, that we need to do an assessment, but I think I’ve probably bored you to death.
about our lack of reflection and our lack of journaling, we just don’t know ourselves anymore. We really don’t, because we forgot to pay attention to us, right? And doing a strengths assessment like Talent Predicts is probably the easiest, quickest way to understanding, you know, what are your strengths and what are your personal values and what are your career drivers, and then start reflecting on those once you do the assessment.
it will take you less time, it will cost you a little bit of money, not too much, it’s quite affordable, but still. Look, in the end, the idea here is you don’t need perfect clarity right now, you just need enough to say, yes, this aligns with who I want to be, let’s invest a little bit of time in expanding on this further, in working on this further, let’s workshop this idea, right?
Hmm, what else? Busting the barriers. I don’t know what I meant with busting the barriers, but let’s go. You know, I did these notes and then I’m like, okay, busting the barriers. How can I explain to you what I mean? I’m talking about mental barriers that come up during a job search. You may have been feeling them as you decided to listen to me on this podcast.
I think there are stories that we tell ourselves that hold us back, right? And I hear them all the time. I hear the, I’m too old, you know, my career is too weakly, it’s not very linear. I’m a generalist, I’m not an expert, I’m an expert, I’m not a generalist, I’m too young. Hmm, I’m not a male, you know? And then a man would say, but I’m not female. We all have those…
barriers and I think of all of them honestly I think it’s because of the ⁓ demographics of my clientele. Ageism is one that you know is most popular you know people feeling that they are too old and yes ageism is real all of the things I’ve listed before are real they are conscious and unconscious bias that happen during the recruitment process
But you know what else is real? Your experience, your professionalism. So show how you’re still learning, show how you’re still growing, show that your age is not a barrier for you to know what’s trending in your profession, that you’re still adaptable. I don’t know what I want. Well, then work with a coach, talk to people, talk to your network, talk to your mentors.
That’s okay if you don’t know what you want. You need to try things out, experiment and talk to people until things become more clear to you.
I think learning through action is so underrated. People feel like they need to reach out to networks and connections and have conversations when they’re ready. How can you be ready without intelligence, without research, without grounding yourself in information? Right? You can do a lot of reading and podcast listening, but I think you know that once you start talking to people, you get the real
you can see what it really means to be in this sector, this industry or involved with this specific company or working with these type of people. The other thing I hear a lot is this feeling that your skills are out of date. Maybe they are. I want you to trust your instincts. And what’s one skill that you could refresh this month?
Right? If your skills are out of date, it’s important for you to start working on them. One thing that we do when we start working and it becomes really busy is that we learn things on the job, but we don’t crystallize them with certifications or more formal education. An example that I’ve used several times on the pod in previous episodes is project management. Everybody feels they can do project management, but…
They don’t have a certification, they go to the job market, position, the job ad and position description usually requires that or asks that those certifications are desirable. And then in a very ⁓ overpopulated pool of candidates, those that have it will probably have a competitive edge. That goes for everything else. Cybersecurity, ESG. ⁓
you name it, you know, there’s just so many things I could list here. And I want you to start thinking about crystallizing the learnings that you are acquiring through your work. You’ve lost confidence is something else that I hear a lot. I’ve lost confidence. That is normal. It’s part of the growth mindset, right? Growth mindset means that you will
start continue to grow because you are confident up until a point in your experience and the competencies that you’ve acquired but then as you start moving forward acquiring other competencies and seeking out new experiences you don’t have confidence in those yet you’re still a student in those right so that lack of confidence is normal especially in times of uncertainty
And you are not your last role either. Right. So your values go beyond your title, go beyond the things that you’ve done in the past and remaining agile and learning things and being open and vulnerable to say, ⁓ you know, I’ve been working with these types of processes or systems. I don’t know this system yet.
Can you tell me about it? Should I be learning it? Is this important for my career? So talking to people and inquiring about things like that where you lack the confidence, ⁓ you don’t even know if that’s something that you should invest in or not. Why not have a look at it before you do? I sometimes think that people over capitalize in education and investment in learning things that may not necessarily be
important for their hiring process. I’ve spoken about this on the podcast as well before. So if you’re a binge listener, and I know there are several of you, which is so nice, ⁓ you know what I’m talking about, right? We do that overcapitalizing by doing lots of masters, degrees, and lots of certifications we end up not needing. They’re not material to the future of your career.
So ideally you want to invest in things that are material to the future that you seek for yourself.
Okay, let’s talk about another client. I’m going to name him Peter. Peter has been at the same company for over a decade, more than, way more than a decade. Okay. And when he was laid off, it shook his identity, right? He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next. He was afraid of being too senior ⁓ and was afraid to pivot because he was, you know,
to senior, I’d say that the job that he now has is probably his last job before he goes under retirement or semi-retirement if he wants to do something else or ⁓ part-time or contract consultancy in the future. But in terms of permanent roles, the one that we ⁓ got together when he was working with me is most likely his last job.
What we had to do is work to help Peter regain his clarity and regain his confidence in job searching because he hadn’t done that, I think ever. You know, people are tapped on the shoulder for roles throughout their careers. And I think before the pandemic that was happening way more often than it is now. There is this opportunistic behavior that
was happening a lot in offices and environments. I remember here in Melbourne where I live, there’s a street that’s quite business like called Colling Street. And I was in business development working on Colling Street for many years. And whenever I had no idea what to do next and no prospects to follow up, I would just go up and down Colling Street. I would go, if you know Melbourne, you know, I’ll tell you, I would go from.
Spencer Street station, so my office was towards that end, which is not the fancy end. And I would go all the way up to the French end of Colling Street, you know, it’s Spring Street, and then go down the other way. And I kid you not, I would always bump into someone and say, ⁓ I’ve seen you here. Do you have time for a coffee? We would either have a coffee that minute or we would book to see each other sometime in the near future.
And that’s what I used to do. We don’t have that anymore. And we then have the pandemic followed by hybrid work and remote work and not a lot of tap on the shoulders. Plus, if you’re older, more experienced professionals, your mentors and advocates may have already retired. And that was the situation with my client who I’m calling Peter. So.
Peter was very good at writing, which was wonderful. So he journaled a lot. And even before we did talent projects, he journaled his values. ⁓ We identified transferable skills. He reached out to his network slowly at first, because he was very uncertain about how to do that from a position of vulnerability. Three months later, he had a few job offers. They weren’t full-time jobs. They were…
consulting opportunities, part-time gigs, contract work, not because he didn’t want permanent jobs. was just how it happened. Sometimes you want something and then the market offers you a different hand. And he took it all and he became quite busy. And one of the things that he realized is that through all of those options that opened up for him, he was actually making more money than he would in a permanent role.
with more flexibility, which, and more variety, which for somebody that had been in the same organization for so long was really energizing. And I think that sometimes we forget that, you know, if you have three, four gigs, you know, one day a week here, another board role day, et cetera, it’s quite interesting to see different organizations from that point of view. He didn’t have everything figured out.
You know, it became figured out to bowl because he was out there talking to people because he took action even in that fog, his own personal fog of not knowing where to do next and where to go next. All right. So what does all of these stories and ideas mean to you, to your personal situation? I’m assuming
If you’re listening to this, you’re probably feeling stuck or unsure or you know how it feels, you’ve felt it before. And here’s my message. You don’t need certainty to make a move. You need courage and you need a compass. You need the willingness to take the next step. Focus on what you can control and then take that next step forward. Align your actions with your values. No!
your values, know your strengths, right? Come to me for the Talent Predicts, it’s called Find My Talent on my website. Do that if you’re feeling like you really don’t even know what your strengths are, what your talents are, do that first. And trust the clarity that comes after you start talking and after you start walking. The movement, you know, once you start moving.
there will be more clarity than you being stuck in your head. Right? Look, I want to thank you so much for listening and you are such an amazing group of people, all listeners of the Job Hunting podcast. I get the best feedback from you. It really warms my heart every time I get a review on Apple or, you know, I check my Spotify ranking and I’m like, ⁓ that’s great.
And people that reach out to me when I send out the newsletters, if you’re not a subscriber yet, you’re here until the end. Why aren’t you a subscriber? The newsletter is free and I offer extra content only for subscribers. So make sure that you find that link in the show notes and and start subscribing. It’s a once a week newsletter for you. Before I wrap up, this is the third time and the last time I’m going to be mentioning this, but
I mentioned before in other episodes that the United Nations and WHO have made thousands and thousands of professionals redundant in the month of May. together with the HR team and LinkedIn Europe and myself, we’ve created this banner that you can add to your LinkedIn profile to showcase that you would be open to speaking to these professionals if they choose to reach out to you for a conversation. Many of them
We’ll not be able to go back to the types of jobs they did in the past because these jobs are really not advertised at the moment. The entire international development sector has been compromised by lack of funding. The program is called Korea Pivot Ally Network. I will have a link in the show notes. Anybody can be an ally. You don’t have to be a coach, of course.
All you need to do is just have a conversation if they want to reach out to you and ask you questions about what you do or about your profession or can you have a look at my resume, something like that. So I’ll have a link below and it will be lovely if you could contribute. Bye for now. I’ll see you next time.
