Thanks to all who participated in the Jane Knows survey!  The results are in and I would like to share some of them and how this survey is helping Jane Knows become a better resource for you!

Let me start with the most popular answers to a few questions:

• What are you most excited about when you think about your career? 78% said, “doing good work."
• What is your biggest fear about finding/keeping your ideal job? 62% said, “getting the right company match."
• Where do you look to gain self-confidence? 83% said, “gaining confidence from real life experiences."

And as I read the responses to the open-ended question, “what was your best job related experience and why was it so great," I was so stoked!  I could feel the power behind your stories of great work or that boss who really supported you!  The underlying theme for most of the answers was a strong sense of accomplishment of a job well done. That is truly gaining confidence from real life experiences.

So, I was a bit surprised that only 52% of you described yourself as confident and just 7% were very confident.

When I read the answers to “what is the one job-related experience that you could do over and what would you do differently,” I could definitely feel your pain!  Although every answer was different, the underlying theme had to do with how you reacted to a situation, or over-reacted as was the case in many of the examples.

Over-reaction.  That was my number one problem when I was at the start of my career.  And it is easy to over-react when you don’t have a lot of experiences to work with.  In fact, 75% of the surveys came from the 18-24 crowd and most of your do-overs could have been prevented with the help of a good mentor!  A mentor that you can go to with really difficult questions; like how do quit a job eloquently!

Which leads to the question, “who influences you most in your career decisions?”  Not surprisingly, given the age of respondents, parents were the answer 49% of the time.  But what was surprising was the number of write-in answers saying that you were making the decisions on your own.

Gosh, that is what I did and when I tried to tackle difficult situations on my own, I almost always blew the situation out of proportion and, you got it, over-reacted.  Asking my parents for advice was not a choice for me, but my guess is that most of us don’t take the really hairy, ugly stuff to our parents!

So what does this mean for Jane Knows going forward?

I am developing a mini-book series called Seven Fail-Safe Tips and each mini-book will deal with the issues you highlighted in your do-over answers!  We will create a library here on Jane Knows where you can get advice on tough issues BEFORE you actually act.

Stay tuned for the rollout of my mini-book series in time for the start of the New Year and your new resolutions!

-Jane

PS) I will be reaching out next week to the winner of the two-hour mentoring session and with his/her permission will let you know who won!