Looking for a job in today’s market is no longer a challenging task. The market is red hot and one needs very few technical skills to find a new job.  You’ll require many more skills to find the right job, substantially more to land that dream position, and a few extra special skills to negotiate the compensation package you deserve.

A technical leader’s challenge is even stronger – you climb higher on the corporate ladder, put more years of experience behind you, then you aim even higher, and find it even more difficult it to get there.  That’s possibly because technical leaders seldom have or use skills of self-marketing intended to successfully negotiate a meaningful package. 

When the job market is on a downslide, as did happen just after Y2K, it gets so much tougher.  So some of us settle for the first offer we manage to get, while others – like me - try to enlist professional help and end up with extremely expensive, generally useless career coaches and self-marketing agencies.  First I spent an amount I am too ashamed to disclose on a self-marketing agency that provided me with a mediocre rewrite of my resume and access to buggy or zero value search tools that turned out to be mere branded aggregation of publicly available data. Then I ended up accepting the first job I could find without even an attempt to negotiate the package.  The best part of the entire ordeal was that I finally learned the lesson.  Since then I not only managed to improve my employment status by an order of magnitude but also helped quite a few people do the same for themselves.

A quest for a new job is almost like a sales process where you (a sales person) sell yourself (a product) to an employer (customer), and thus has many similar stages – prospecting, product presentation, overcoming objectives, negotiating and closing the deal.  Of course the process has its unique attributes, mainly the fact that you have a single instance of product to which you are very emotionally attached.

I hope that this section of the site will help you prepare and go through all stages of this process and make your next career move successful.  In particular you will find here:

• Information on things you need before you start your job hunting process – supporting material and collateral
• Tips and techniques for the actual process – prospecting, interviewing and negotiating the package
• Useful links, templates, examples and other reference materials