Master Career Counselor

Carla Hunter, President of Career Span, Inc. is a Master Career Counselor (MCC) by the National Career Development Association and a Certified Career Coach by the National Board for Certified Counselors. She is an expert in writing resumes, effective job search strategies and interviewing success. Most recently, with over 20 years of navigating the complexity of today's world of work, she published "Finding Your Place in the World of Work", a career interest inventory (2014) and CareerView, an iPad app. As a private practice career counselor and a workforce development consultant, this blog is Carla's trove of ideas, trends, forecasts, and career tips for finding meaningful work.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

A Lifetime Careerlancer

In the last post, the main idea was this:

In the future of the American workforce you may work but not have a typical "job".
It may be that you're contracted by the job with a set deadline and a goal to achieve. You can have tons of flexiblity, but it such availability can lead to serious hours of work especially at night when everyone else is asleep. But in the end, is it worth it?

As a mom of three with a vital need to have flexible hours to put them first, the answer is yes. I do much of my work on a contract basis only. I see clients hourly and limit my private practice hours. I do trainings, workshops and a variety of tasks that are on deadline. It is an awesome career to allow freedom to be an academic coach at my daughter's school, take a break whenever I choose and to walk the dogs at a moment's notice. To be a careerlancer (career professional + freelancer)means that I have opportunities to cook dinner in the middle of 40 emails, run to the post office before or after lunch and to eat lunch at 2:30pm if I wish. The challenge isn't finishing or accomplishing the goal, but rather how to blend it all into a meaningful and rewarding life with no regrets.

Professionals today run a marathon as though it were a sprint and very few know how to pace the demands into the synchronicity of life's precious and fleeting moments. Thus, I said no to daycare and yes to raising my children. I said no to working in a job that asked for "40" a week when the unwritten rule was really "50" or more. I said no to a sense (albeit a false one) of security with a job title, and a knowledge that I would have a job. There are no promises for that anymore.

Rather, I have said yes to being the driver rather than passenger of my career. The car may be in warp speed at times, but its me who puts it in gear.

Yes, it is scary but so is staying in a cubicle from 9 to 5 with no flexibility for a life calling to be lived once. I am writing into a blogosphere of almost nothingness trying to tell someone that needs to hear, "It is worth it to take a chance on making work fit your schedule rather than being a slave to it.
The answer?
Becoming a careerlancer for life. The how to guide will continue in these posts.

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