Stop Digging Random Holes in Your Job Search
I once spent 40 minutes digging random holes in the snow and calling it progress.
When I was 18, I took a year off before starting college to establish in-state tuition in Wisconsin. I was living with my aunt and uncle in Milwaukee, working as a drive-thru bank teller, and driving around in my tiny Ford Aspire (it was silver and we called it The Bubble).
One day it snowed. A LOT.
This SoCal girl came home from work before everyone else and found the long, steep driveway completely buried. So, being the 18-year-old that I was, I gunned The Bubble up the driveway! And... I made it about a 1/4 of the way up.
So I thought - no problem! I got this! I got out, grabbed a shovel and went to town.
Except, I had no idea what I was doing. I'd dig a hole, then move that snow into the next hole. Then I'd dig another hole. Then fill that one in. 30-40 minutes of rearranging snow and my car still wasn't moving an inch.
Eventually, I gave up, went inside in tears, called my friends in CA, and said, I can't do this! I had to come home. Wisconsin had won.
About an hour later, my uncle got home, looked at the driveway and took me back outside. He showed me how to start with a straight line down the middle and then work outward from there.
Suddenly, it made sense, and now I know how to shovel a driveway.
I think about that story a lot when I coach people through career transitions.
I've worked with a few clients lately who were trying to move into private sector investigations roles. They had found several types of roles that interested them, and were spending most of their time up-skilling.
Open source research, AI tooling, Crypto, SQL, python. More skills. More courses. More preparation.
While upskilling is definitely valid, these clients all struggled to make themselves do the thing that I see move the needle again and again: networking. And, I TOTALLY get it. Learning feels productive, you can see the progress, you can check something off a list. It FEELS good. Networking requires uncertainty, discomfort, and asking others to take time to help you.
The problem is that all that preparation isn't necessarily helping them figure out which direction to go. They're doing what I did in Milwaukee: digging random holes.
I see people do this in their job searches all the time. They scroll LinkedIn, apply to whatever looks kind of interesting, take courses, rewrite their resume, add a skill, apply some more, and months later they're exhausted and wondering why they haven't yet landed the new role.
A better, more efficient approach is to start with that line down the middle:
Get clear on what you want to do.
Find the places that fit YOU.
Network your way in.
If getting clear on those first two steps is where you’re stuck, MissionPivot™ can help you narrow down what you want to do and identify the roles that make sense for your background.
Once you know the direction, you can find the jobs you actually want, identify the skills THOSE jobs require, and be intentional about where you spend your time. You don't have to have your entire career figured out. But you do need to stop digging random holes.
