Want to change jobs and head in a different direction? The best career search outcome is attained when you anticipate potholes and roadblocks ahead and refuse to let hindsight be your tour guide. If you wait for perfect road conditions and “right opportunity,” you’ll consistently detour your efforts and eliminate premium career options.

Complacency damages your career more than lack of qualifications. The most obvious roadblock you’ll encounter on race to find your next job is usually regrets about skills, education, and professional knowledge. However, be careful that you don’t possess an inner smugness that rests on past successes. Complacency will trick you to believe that employers will find you without any effort on your part to find them. You’ll be anesthetized to job search urgency by this false sense of security. Overconfidence costs you money and opportunities if you decide to sit back with a Jack Daniel’s and idle your time away until phone rings. It won’t.

Job seeker loses $30,000 and top management role while waiting for “right opportunity. Rich Connell, senior consultant for R. L. Stevens & Associates Inc., a leading international career marketing firm headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, regretted a huge blunder he made during his earlier career adventures. “I lost a high level management position and $30,000 in commissions and bonuses because of job search complacency.”

After being suddenly downsized, Connell admits several valuable months vanished while he waited for “right” opportunity to magically appear. He didn’t take his search seriously. These tactical errors took him out of marketplace and off hiring radar at critical start of his sales career. Employers didn’t know he was available. He missed a great position that was significantly more suitable and provided larger financial reward than one he settled for because he ran out of leverage. “In retrospect, I should’ve jumped right back into market and not wasted all that time. If only I had started my search sooner and gave it more attention. Losing $30,000 and a management fast track was an expensive teacher to learn how to conduct a successful job search,” he lamented.

Marketing-with-Intent precisely drives you to your target and with greater speed because you are using right mode of transportation, an accurate compass and a clear vision of where you’re headed. You’ll differentiate yourself from your competition by using right vehicle to uncover best career for you. Finding a job is easy. Locating a meaningful career is much harder but well worth sweat. The traditional method of career transitioning moves you out of driver’s seat and into back seat. Whenever your career marketing campaign is driven by your needs rather than employer’s, you lose control of steering your job search in right direction. Today’s customer-centric marketplace requires companies to selectively position each product properly, target it toward right market and package it into an effective, memorable branding. You’ll need this same laser-beamed approach to pinpoint right career. It is not a one-shot, random deal. You must market with intent.

Marketing is whole business seen from point of view of its final result, that is, from customer’s point of view. We distinguish ourselves through our marketing. Sell solutions, not product. Create demand. Effective marketing both in business and career campaigning also demands continued:

•Diligence in tracking outcomes

•Courage to ditch non- or underperforming efforts

•Hands-on creativity to exploit hidden opportunity

There is no such thing as “soft sell” or “hard sell.” There is only “smart sell” and “stupid sell.” If you try to appeal to everybody, someone else is going to sneak behind you and pick off significant chunks of your market. Translation: Your competition wins. You lose. Smart selling understands critical difference between mass marketing and marketing segmentation:

•In mass marketing, candidates seek to appeal to a broad range of employers by passively utilizing a single untargeted and generalized marketing strategy. Dumb choice.