Wednesday, July 23, 2008

How Long Does It Take to Find a Job?

One mistake that people seem to make repeatedly is to grossly underestimate the time it takes to find a new job. The majority of people take the attitude of "Hey, I'm going to enjoy my severance for a while and then later I'll think about getting a new job." Time flies when you're not working, and before you know it, time (and money) is up.

Here's a sobering rule of thumb: Career coach and author Katy Piotrowski says that it takes, in general, a month for every $10,000 you want to make. So if you're looking for a $50,000 job, you can plan on it taking five months--way longer than most severance packages.

Katy does have some good news in her forthcoming book, The Career Coward's Guide to Job Searching (which went to the printer yesterday): If you spend more than an hour a day working on your job search, you can shorten the time it takes to find a job. She recommends devoting six hours a day to your search (obviously, you can't do this when you've still got a job). In this way, you can shave months off your search time.

Meanwhile, in this tough economy, I think all bets are off. So, as they said in the Little House books, make hay while the sun shines.

2 comments:

Krisan Matthews said...

Three years ago, I was unemployed. I had left my college job at a family doctor's office and was hoping for my big break in publishing. From the time I left my job in April, it took about 5 months before I started my current job as an editorial assistant. I had to cut back drastically on my spending and was living off very little. But with a lot of patience and time, I found what I was looking for.

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