How to Find Your True Career Calling with John Lees

Podcast Details

In today’s podcast I talk to John Lees, one of the UK’s best-known career strategists on how to find your true career calling when you don’t have a clue.

We discuss:

The stats on the amount of people who are in careers that they don’t like.
Why people stay in careers that they don’t like.
The normal barriers that someone has to overcome to leave a career they don’t like.
How to overcome these barriers.
Changing a career is one thing BUT not knowing what you want to do as a career is another thing! How common the problem is.
The age limit on changing career direction.
John’s top tips to help you establish what a potential dream career could be.
Once a potential career or careers has been established, what are the steps you need to take.
What needs to be in place before you can leave a job you don’t like to pursue a new career.
The mistakes that he commonly sees being made.

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Bio of John Lees

How To Get A Job You Love regularly lists as the best-selling careers book by a British author, is now in its 10th (2019/20) edition and previously a WHSmith Business Book of the Month. John is the author of a range of career titles (including Take Control of Your Career, Knockout Interview, Knockout CV, The Interview Expert, Just The Job!) Other titles include Secrets of Resilient People (Hodder & Stoughton), and The Success Code (John Murray Learning, 2016). His books have been translated into Arabic, Georgian, Polish, Japanese and Spanish. In 2012 he wrote the introduction to the Harvard Business Review Guide to Getting the Right Job.

John is the creator and moderator of the Career Coach Forum, an international LinkedIn group for career professionals with over 7000 members.

He acknowledges a huge debt to Richard Nelson Bolles, author of What Color Is Your Parachute? John’s work as a career strategist was inspired by the creativity, wisdom and generosity of Dick Bolles’ teaching at his summer workshops in Bend, Oregon.

As a career and outplacement coach, John specialises in helping people make difficult career decisions – difficult either because they don’t know what to do next, or because there are barriers in the way of success. John Lees Associates helps career changers across the UK, and John is a regular conference keynote speaker and has run career workshops in Australia, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Mauritius, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and several parts of the USA.

John has written careers columns for Metro and People Management and thought leadership pieces for The Times and The Guardian. He appears regularly in the national press with features in a wide range of titles including Management Today, Cosmopolitan, Prospects, and Psychologies. His coaching work has been profiled in Coaching at Work and The Sunday Times. TV appearances include Back to Work (BBC Interactive), Working Lunch (BBC2), Dispatches (Channel 4), Talking Business (BBC World), and Tonight – How To Get A Job (ITV).

He is a graduate of the universities of Cambridge, London and Liverpool, and has spent most of his career focusing on the world of work, serving as Chief Executive of the Institute of Employment Consultants (now the IRP). He has worked with a wide range of organisations on career issues including: British Gas Commercial, The British Council, CIPD, Endsleigh, Harrods, Hiscox, The House of Commons, ICAEW, Imperial College, The Association of MBAs, Lloyds Banking Group, Marks & Spencer, NAPP Pharmaceutical, Oakridge, and business schools across the UK. He served as Joint Chair of the Association of Career Professionals-UK (2011-13), was a founding Board Director of the Career Development Institute and in March 2016 was elected a NICEC Fellow. He also an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Recruitment Professionals.