Take advantage of long breaks

In any career, you will eventually have a long break from work. If you are lucky, the break was decided by you (a long vacation, sabbatical, voluntary quitting). Otherwise, it will be the unpleasant situation of having been fired, laid off or summarily terminated due to lack of funding, without proper preparation. None of these are nice things to happen to anyone, but they are best faced as lessons and opportunities for learning, reflection, and growth.

Having not worked since middle of November 2011, I have been looking for new opportunities. I am glad to say I haven't been desperately knocking on doors. The previous job was a mind-boggling 14 month full throttle sprint at an ambitious start-up. I was eager for a change of pace. Admittedly, getting funding pulled out suddenly was not the change I was looking for, but hey... things happen... mostly for a good reason.

Here are my suggestions at how you can make use of a break to propel and position yourself for the next project, adventure, or plain old dull 9-to-5 job.

Reflect
Once you are in a break, the benefits of hindsight begin setting in.
Reflect on your past experience with the benefit of being outside of it, rather than having the narrow perspective of being stressed by deadlines, budgets, management, staff issues and what not. In essence, do a retrospective.
Ask yourself:

• How well did I do my role?
• How could I improve?
• What did I learn?
• How did I grow?
• What new skills did I get?
• What situations/roles did I experience for the first time?

If the answers are not the kind that you would like to get, but more like "Not much..." or "Nothing!", then that's ok. It's still useful information. Now is the time you can assess the outcome clearly and use this assessment when looking for your next work.
When that happens, just ask these questions again with a future bias. Pretend you already have the job and ask what you expect to learn from it. The days of being a professional just for money will be soon gone. If you don't know why you chose to do what you do, there will be a lack of direction and contentment.

Personal Branding
Work on your resume. Really, go work hard on your resume... 
Again, seriously, really work on your resume! Can't stress this enough.

• Get feedback from friends, spouses, children, ex-colleagues, headhunters, HR professionals... 
• Expect to go several iterations before you finally get there (I took 5 iterations, and I might have another one coming). You will know you are there when you see it. When you imagine being a hiring manager or HR staff, sorting through hundreds of CVs and your's would at least stand out a bit. Not because it's flashy, with lots of formatting and a pretty picture. But because it's short, concise, informative, focusing on your skills, achievements and who you are as a professional. 
• Remember, a resume is not a novel or even a short story. In marketing terms, think datasheet or newsletter, not case study or market research.

Are you LinkedIn?
If yes, great. If not, what the hell are you waiting for??? Stop reading now and go sign-up. Now!
Either way you need to look out for a few things:

• Go through your LinkedIn profile, with the same gusto you do your resume. In fact, they should be almost identical. DO NOT allow your profile not match your resume. This will most certainly raise an eyebrow, since you might be lying, lazy or just careless. All very dangerous topics in many job interviews.
• Use the recommendations in LinkedIn as much as you possibly can. Be nice, write an endorsement back to those that gave you one. It's not that hard, just say the truth of your unique experience with them and how they stood out. It's not like you are their proud gushing parent or anything. Just a colleague, maybe a friend. Don't you have nice things to say about your friends?
• Advertise your LinkedIn profile on your resume. Make it easy to find you online, see your connections and, most vitally important, see any recommendations you may have. Even the recommendations you wrote can be of interest, as they might serve as examples of your communication and selling skills.

 Network
A personal brand is not worth much if nobody knows about it. You got your datasheet/newsletter (a.k.a resume) done, you have a web based shop window (LinkedIn), these hopefully advertise themselves. Now you need the human touch.

• Call up old friends, ex-colleagues, see how they are doing! Meet them for lunch or coffee or whatever. There is always so much to learn from each other, how life has been and will be, what has been creeping up, what's the headache at the office or home. This is how you can find great opportunities for meaningful relations and fantastic inspiration for a service or product that you would have never thought of on your own. And you never know when somebody knows somebody else who is desperately looking for somebody exactly like you!
• Get in touch with family again and strengthen those bonds! How long has it been since you have seen parents, siblings, nephews and nieces, cousins or uncles, grandparents? When did you last catch up with the people that should matter the most to you?
• Call and meet with headhunters, start a relationship with them. They are motivated to know you, your skills and experience (their potential commissions rely on positioning you correctly to their customers). You can stand out from a massive crowd just by asking them what they need and how can you help them on a semi-regular basis. Maybe somebody on your network is exactly what they need!

(Re)Education
Read books, new and old.
It's amazing how your total sum experience can change the way you relate to books. This is true of personal and professional life. Some books that I favored and raved about in my younger, more idealistic years, now seem rather utopian, jaded, just not pragmatic. Others I can't believe I didn't I read before, the pages read so much differently now that I have been through a few scrapes.
The point is you never know what precious gems of brilliance lie dormant in your head that might be prodded and pried loose by reading something old or new.
So dust off your old classics, indulge on your Kin/Nook/Pad/Droid e-reader at Starbucks, or simply go to the library and enjoy the silence in the midst of rich knowledge and culture.

Certify
There is always some kind of training or certification for any kind of role in any domain.
Project Manager? Do a PMP cert or, even better, embrace Agile methods. Developer? Do a Ruby training class. Designer? Brush up on the latest Illustrator. Sales? Take a communications or consultative selling skills course.
There is always something you can do, even for free sometimes, that will make you a better professional. If you are smart, it will also make you a better person.


Skills Up[grade|date]
Take the opportunity to play with technical areas that you wouldn't otherwise afford the time for.
Programming, design, writing, photos, music making, whatever tickles your fancy!


What next?
At some point you will be getting bored. You polished and advertised your personal brand, you read a few classics, you even made a cool Node.js app just for kicks... If you are not yet working again, now what?
First, don't panic or despair. It's not easy to do that with a mortgage and bills looming, but going nuts isn't going to change those facts of life.
Stay busy, preferably with activities that bolster and project your personal brand.  Here are some ideas:

• Write about it (e.g start a blog - hint hint wink wink).
• Organize meet-ups
• Get a user group going

There is always somebody looking for somebody like you.
Somebody who needs your skills.
Somebody who recognizes the value of your experience.
It might just take some time for you to find each other.

Hang in there!

Seasoned Professional

One of the highly seductive concepts I have come across in my career is the notion of a personal brand.

It didn't quite click with me at first. How can a person be a brand?
At the time, I just didn't know what a brand was. I thought of it as a logo for a product. A brand is really a symbol, a pointer, a representation of an entity, usually an owning entity. The term "brand" started with the need to mark cattle in order to sort out their owners. Think about that for a minute...

What brand, or branding, would represent what you own?
How would you represent your body, your mind, your experience, your skills, the total sum of the activity you have and will impress upon the world?
These are phrased as product and branding vision statements on purpose. The most practical way to look at the brand "you" is to really imagine you as a product.

During my breaks, I had the chance to really look at my chosen path and the current state of the world.
I now realize that in the 15+ years that I have been working, I have seen and done a lot. In many countries, different cultures, different domains.
I have done programming, designing, writing, radio disk jockeying, sports announcer, IT technician, IT manager, skateboarder, amateur musician, systems analysis, business analysis and finally product management. I am very happy to have done so much and to have participated in so many things.
I have been in small companies, large companies, global corporations and start-ups. There isn't much in a business operation that I haven't been in touch with. I have failed and I have succeeded. Certainly more the former than the latter.
Sometimes I even think of myself as a "jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none", normally when I get more self-pitiful.

Now, I just smile and think how hard it is to that flexible "jack".
Some call it "jack". I prefer to call it "seasoned professional".