Career Explorer Program

Stop wondering and start plotting.

There comes a time in many professionals’ lives when they begin wondering:

“Is there anything else out there?”

For those who are career curious, or just plain uncertain, The Career Explorer Program optimizes your professional story for the role(s) you know you can or want to pursue, while opening a runway to explore career paths you may not know about yet.

At the finish line, you end up with internal resolution, story clarity, and an integrated personal-professional brand so you can finally pursue what’s next.

Career targets you can explore in this program include:

• Obvious next steps (e.g., direct-hit positions, lateral moves in the same industry, new jobs with a title upgrade)

• Adjacent moves roles (e.g., same roles in different industries or contexts)

• Aspirational moves (e.g., promotions, board appointments, advisory roles

• Undiscovered career paths (yet-unknown job types, titles, or roles that might fit your experience, skills, and interests)

If you’re like most of my private clients, you’ll also resolve uncertainty and feel more integrated when talking about your skills, experiences, and fit with a company.

And you’ll have a LinkedIn profile that serves your underlying (and sometimes confidential) career intentions while making you appear publicly as being “happy where you are.”

Got just one career direction? Check out the Résumé Readiness Package (optimizing job search preparedness for a single role). Don’t need this much exploration? Check out the Career Integration Program (integrating 2-3 roles into a single brand).

Step 2 of 3: Review package and program details

In-depth work ahead.

Curious about what else you can legitimately do in your career? What can you offer a company based on your experience to date, without inviting a pay cut.

Get out of the express lane and spend a bit of time settling those long-held questions.

The Career Explorer Program is by far my most intensive offering, designed to help professionals resolve complex or long-held career questions, while concurrently developing an expertly appointed career story.

Beyond written materials, my clients often report that our work together allowed them to re-set their professional value, both within themselves and in how they present themselves to others.

For most of my clients, our work represents the first time they’ve truly taken stock of themselves and their careers. With most hovering between 15 and 30 years of career experience, that’s a powerful undertaking.

But make sure it’s right for you.

This isn’t a $49 résumé written by a faceless copy editor in a résumé mill. With my clients, every nuance counts, and nuance can’t be manufactured in a vacuum.

Simplicity, clarity, and brevity happen only with deep examination.

If we work together, expect an intensive but fun experience where you and I invest significant time and effort thoughtfully examining your professional life.

Here’s how it works:

The following details are designed to make the most of our first conversation.

After all, the work is meaningful and deserves a thoughtful approach. As you review each phase, jot down questions for me to answer when we connect. I’ll have plenty for you, too.

Yes, we’ll eventually write your résumé and LinkedIn profile, and align your self-perception with your career goals.

But for those who are career curious, it doesn’t make sense to do any of that for a future we don’t yet have our arms around.

It’d be like sheet-rocking and decorating a house before framing it.

It’s tempting to want to plunge into rapid problem-solving mode at this time in a career.

Instead, I suggest calming the reflex to write a résumé because your eyes will be fixed on the rear-view mirror. In reality, we need to get out in front of your day-to-day leadership and take a strategic planning approach to your story.

We need to consider where you’re heading rather than merely regurgitating where you’ve been.

The Future Prep phase exists across all three of my offerings, but in the Career Explorer Program, we spend considerably more time in this first phase—researching, mapping, and pressure-testing possibilities.

Along the way, we’ll determine your readiness for specific roles and job titles (including gaps you can fill and roles you might not actually enjoy after all), while investigating roles and job titles you might not know about right now.

It’s reality-based career coaching and internal goal-setting / resolution with a tangle outcome. That tangible outcome is a clearly defined brand and a full suite of branded materials that you’ll eventually use for your active, stealth, or passive job search.

We’ll typically do this through exploratory sessions:

• Future Prep Session 1 - story hierarchy and JDA

• Future Prep Session 2

• Future Prep Session 3

• Future Prep Session 4

• Future Prep Session 5

• Are we fixed at five sessions? Nope. We can use all of the sessions, trim them if they aren’t all necessary, or expand them if we need more time. Five sessions is simply an estimate based on others who’ve gone through it since creating a programmatic approach to my work in 2012.

In time, the unknown will become known, and patterns will emerge that let you make important go / no-go decisions, and together we can strategically develop a résumé, LinkedIn profile, and professional brand that serves all of the potential directions you decide to explore.

And there’s a byproduct.

The exploration process doesn’t just let us shape your story; it also lets you hedge against potential career missteps, giving you insight into whether you’d even enjoy various roles.

Years ago, a client walked in my office and asked, “What was I smoking?!” Turns out, my Job Description Analysis (JDA) tool had done some heavy lifting by letting her see—for herself, on her own—why one of the career possibilities she’s evaluated wasn’t where she wanted to go.

What Future Prep sessions look like:

Because I use résumé development as the primary tool for career coaching, we’ll spend our first hour scaffolding your story. You can think about it as laying down the forms into which one later pours cement to create a structure.

That first hour digging into your résumé (or your career history if you don’t have a résumé) lets me get to know you, and begins opening your eyes to new possibilities.

After our first session, I’ll give you your first exercise, whether it’s my Job Description Analysis (JDA) tool, a bit of custom research and solo decision-making, a career values assessment, or something else.

We’ll start with simple facts, like roles you’ve held, promotions you’ve taken, and the structures of various companies where you’ve worked. Then we’ll move into harder-to-define elements like activities you’ve enjoyed and haven’t enjoyed, where you’ve excelled professionally, and where you might have tripped up.

We’ll then swim for a while in a somewhat amorphous coaching pond. My JDA adds research to the mix and helps us define both similar and dissimilar themes and skills required of different roles and job types. Our findings methodically frame and inform our organic work, including the codification and quantification of posssibility as we go along.

Occasionally, we draft copy during this phase, but positioning, storytelling, and writing generally begins in Phase 2.

All told, we'll stay in Future Prep mode until our questions are sufficiently answered, with me serving as a guide to the research and exercises that you do independently.

Once we've settled on a realistic set of roles, career directions, and job targets during the Future Prep phase, our approach will become a bit more formalized.

Armed with clarity and a roadmap about the future, we’ll use the résumé writing process to map your future goals to past proof points.

You’ll be an integral part of the decision-making necessary to writing your own story, so the résumé writing process serves as a tool for gaining career clarity across a series of screen-sharing, Zoom-enabled work sessions, including:

• Résumé Work Session 1

• Résumé Work Session 2

• Résumé Work Session 3

• Résumé Work Session 4

• Résumé Work Session 5

• Résumé Work Session 6

• Résumé Work Session 7

• Overtime is available when needed.

There may be a bit of overlap between Phase 1: Future Step, and this phase, but when we finally settle into these résumé writing sessions, we'll focus entirely on translating everything we uncovered in the Future Prep phase into a highly strategic résumé. We’ll consider a surprising volume of questions as we pitch and tune your story around our Future Prep findings, as well as decisions you’re making at every step along the way.

And since we do all of the writing while our screens are connected, you'll have complete authority and insight into why every word is written or omitted.

We'll do "everything from flooring and sheet-rocking to interior decorating" during the Résumé Writing Phase. You’re welcome to do some of the drafting between sessions—and at some point I absolutely will hand over the draft to you for work—but I’ll handle a majority of the writing.

There are times, of course, when clients go beyond the anticipated sessions. It’s never a surprise … or shouldn’t be … because we’re connected via Zoom at every step. Clients actually frequently ask for more time because of the value they derive. The possibility of overtime is critical to mention because I want what I offer to be right for my clients, and if time and resources is a concern, we should discuss it before we even start.

Concurrent value to the writing process:

Note that many of our findings during this period will, or should:

• Make their way into your self-perception and inform the way you begin presenting yourself to others in your day-to-day work life.

• Be repurposed by your PR team (e.g., investor relations, RFPs, pitch decks, firm bio or corporate bio page)

• Serve as interview prep for questions you face later from recruiters asking the same questions.

• Used for executive or board bios written by me if they’re supportive. If so, we'll add the time separately.

We’ll use the clarity and copy we develop to eventually build a LinkedIn presence that serves your short- and long-term goals.

Unlike a résumé that you can tune to each job spec and submission, LinkedIn needs to be all the things to all the potential readers. So, for instance, someone targeting an in-house CFO role *and* an in-house advisor role at a pension fund has a challenge.

Become poachable by elevating the story to be seen by each audience as if it’s written for them alone, while developing your LinkedIn as a tool for business as usual—telling your public story in a way that doesn’t invite speculation from your connections about your underlying intentions to make a career move.

How?

• Put the right lures in the water.

• Position, elevate, and scrub your public story, instead of simply copying and pasting your résumé.

• Think of LinkedIn as genuine tool for business instead of merely and online résumé despite what many, many people will tell you.

• Set your profile as a “quiet lure” to attract passive attention, while powerfully supporting your active or stealth job search intentions.

How we’ll do it:

When your résumé is nearly or completely finished, we'll shift our attention to LinkedIn. The "About" section is where a lot of careful strategy and attention can make the whole profile transformative.

That said, I’ve done this work and I’m still surprised by how challenging the “About” section can be. It’s also the most fun and the most rewarding section once completed.

Long before we begin crafting your LinkedIn copy, you’ll begin working on my LinkedIn for Business Questionnaire (I'll release it during Phase 2). When we finally begin writing, we’ll carry out the work over several writing sessions, again using Zoom’s screen-sharing capabilities so you’re smack in the middle of crafting your own public-facing story.

• LinkedIn Session 1

• LinkedIn Session 2

• LinkedIn Session 3

• LinkedIn Session 4

• LinkedIn Session 5

• Overtime is available when needed, and elected 40-60% of the time.

Writing your story is the foundation of our work, of course, but you’ll receive a total of three modules that will comprehensively guide you through the broader overhaul of your LinkedIn profile, ranging from the pros and cons of various LinkedIn features (what's good for a recent grad isn't necessarily great for a company leader), to the full public treatment of your career story.

Dual purpose profile, aka the secret sauce:

Because I work mostly with people who don’t want to give away their real intentions on LinkedIn, I generally position client profiles as a tool for business, with all of the inline keywords, underpinnings, dog whistles, “halo effects,” indirect references, and lots of other subtle tricks that lets them appear “happy where they are” while making them findable for the roles and opportunities we identified in Phase 1.

It’s not all fun and games. Our lively, challenging, and hopefully fun Zoom-based work sessions will ultimately result in usable materials for your next move.

Our bursts of visionary insight and practical grinding-at-the-details will eventually produce a forward-looking Library of Master Documents, which includes:

1. Executive Résumé (for humans and machines)

2. Résumé Addendum (if needed)

3. LinkedIn Overhaul

   1. LinkedIn Module 1 of 3: Principles & Philosophies

   2. LinkedIn Module 2 of 3: Sections, Connections & Technical Tidbits

   3. LinkedIn Module 3 of 3: Public-facing Copy

4. Cover Letter Kit

5. Variable Introductory Paragraphs for Cover Letter

6. Thank You Letter Template

7. Thank You Email Templates

8. References Sheet

9. Salary History Sheet (not necessary in all U.S. states)

Add-ons available include executive / board bios and pitch decks, as well as short-form bios for book jackets, speech introductions, social profiles, and beyond.

CURRENTLY BEING PILOTED: Clients routinely report that our work together helped them interview more confidently. I am currently piloting a potential new deliverable called, “Interview Answer Bingo,” where answers to potential interview answers are formally captured as they emerge during our work. In some cases, clients are allocating standalone time for the activity at the end of a project.

Step 3 of 3: Compare all three paths and book a New Client Consultation

If you’re making the investment, make sure you choose the right path.

Book a New Client Consultation