Congratulations, you’ve just secured an offer for the role you have spent the best part of a month interviewing for – not to mention the month before you’ve been psyching yourself up to make the leap.
The overriding feeling is excitement around this new opportunity and every you have ahead of you, but there are still some hurdles to navigate before you can get there.
This next phase of the interview process is critical, as you have to balance maintaining credibility with not only your prospective manager but also to your current employer. Leaving a business is difficult in any scenario, especially when you are hopefully a valued employee with a strong track record of over-performance.
It’s at this point the doubts can naturally set in.
How am I going to break the news to my manager? What if they counter me? What if they’re furious? Am I making the right move? What would my partner think?
Everyone who has ever changed jobs has had to deal with these conundrums. Take a minute to breathe and reflect.
What were the real reasons for looking in the first place all those weeks ago?
Now, think about the following:
- This career move should be designed to improve your quality of life – weigh up both options with this objective in mind.
- Your current manager wasn’t born into the business, and so any suggestion that the grass is never greener is completely false – you are not a tree, don’t be scared to move.
- Expect a counter offer, however more money may not mean make you happier – if you have squeezed every ounce of professional development from your current role, a new challenge is probably still the best call.
- Use your partner as a vital sounding board from the earliest point in the process. Don’t wait until the kids have finally gone to sleep, creep back downstairs and drop an offer letter for a new career onto the table in front of them and expect everything to run smoothly.
- Self belief meant you felt you deserved more than your current position, and you were strong enough to secure an offer of employment from the leadership team of your prospective employer – use this to give you the confidence that you’ll be strong enough to succeed in your new role and the next phase of your career.
As a final note, sometimes ‘failure’ can still happen – there’s no golden bullet for making the right decision. The silver lining in all of this is that no successful business professional or entrepreneur has ever reached the lofty heights they are today without experiencing adversity or failure – we learn from every experience and we’ve got to build on our professional journey without regrets.
I genuinely believe that the right career move has the power to transform lives! Now go out there and get the job you deserve.