6 Ways to Evaluate Your Career during the Holidays: Get a job that fits for 2025.

Our winter holidays can be a time of reflection and reassessment. You may want to adjust career goals based on a performance review, pay raise, or bonus, or because your organization plans to restructure. Or you may have decided that your current role no longer fits you.  

Most of you need to earn a living so it’s not unusual to spend time in jobs that don’t fit well. There are, however, some concepts career management coaches such as Susan Britton Whitcomb discuss in Job Search Magic and Interview Magic that can help you decide whether a job or career matches your skills, interests, and personality. The concepts to think about are:

1. Job function, including your title, your competencies, and the job you want to do,
2. Industry, or the kind of place where you work or expect to work,
3. Things that matter, including your priorities in terms of salary, working conditions, location, ability to work remotely, etc.,
4. Fulfillment, or why you work,
5. Identity, or who you are and who you want to be, and
6. Type, or your personality type.

Career coaches sometimes refer to Function, Industry, and Things that Matter as your “external fit” with a job or career. These three concepts are paramount to us when we construct a resume and prepare for interviews because they provide essential information.

The fulfillment you get from a job, how it impacts your identity, and the job or career’s match with your personality type may be referred to as your internal fit. We can collaborate on a resume and profile that matches you to a job function, industry, and aspects of the job that matter to you. You could be miserable at the job you land if you don’t feel fulfilled, it does not match your identity, or does not match your personality.

Here, we will focus on your external career fit because that is most important for preparing a resume and helping you prepare for interviews. Then we’ll discuss the internal fit briefly to help you think about setting a career direction.

External fit is key for career communications.

It is difficult to create career communications strategies without a job target. A job target, as discussed in previous posts. includes a job function, the industry in which you perform the function, and things that matter to you about your work—what geographic area you work in, and whether you work full-time, part-time, freelance, or at remote assignments., among other things.

Function: One of the first questions I ask a prospective client is “what is your job function?” Once you have established your job function, your job search strategy documents—resume, LinkedIn profile, and job search letters—should demonstrate how your strengths, talents, and personality qualify you to fill the job. A resume writer will ask you to specifically list technical competencies related to your job function and document accomplishments that demonstrate your people and leadership skills.

Industry: The industry or employment sector you specialize in will also differentiate you from other candidates in your career communications. For example, if you are a nurse that works at acute care hospitals this should be in your headlines to differentiate yourself from nurses that work in nursing homes or schools.

Your job search will be more focused when you specify both your job function and industry. Experience has shown that job seekers who know what they want, and those that demonstrate that they are qualified get jobs faster.

Things that Matter: Things that matter to you are less relevant to your resume because it reflects what is important to you while your career marketing has to address your prospective employer’s needs. Nonetheless, things that matter to you will affect the tone of your resume. For example, if you value flexibility and remote work, you might decide to indicate that your recent positions were flexible, remote assignments. On the other hand, if you are seeking a full-time traditional office role, we may decide to de-emphasize the remote and flexible aspect of your previous jobs.

Internal job and career fit is what makes you happy at work.

The extent to which you find fulfillment in your role, identify with your work, and the job also matches your personality could be crucial to your career success. Your career communications materials, though, will usually focus on external rather than internal factors. These are marketing documents that highlight how you meet the needs of your customer—your prospective employer—rather than how the employer will meet your needs.

Fulfillment: Coaches relate fulfillment to questions such as why do you work, and what makes work rewarding for you? It was traditional at one time to open a resume with an objective such as “a rewarding job that fulfills my need to help others.” Although we do not prepare resumes like that anymore, keep goals such as this in mind if that is what you want.

Identity: Your identity, from a career point of view, can be thought of as an adjective you use to describe yourself. For example, are you an entrepreneurial engineer or a “closer” as a salesperson?

We avoid excessive use of adjectives in resumes, and let the facts speak for themselves. For example, we have demonstrated that clients in sales roles are closers by highlighting accomplishments such as exceeding quota at every assignment or increasing average order size (AOS).

Type: Career professionals refer to personality type as measured through a variety of assessment tools. If you have taken a personality or interest inventory such as DISC, MBTI, or SDS it could be appropriate to briefly include those results on your resume. Those results will bolster your case if, for example, they show you have an entrepreneurial personality, and you are seeking work in entrepreneurial organizations.

A cautionary note is in order here, though. Career assessments typically measure characteristics such as your communications style. They may compare your results to other people in specific industries and occupations. No assessment will tell you what job you should work at. They do not measure your aptitude for the work, either. But an assessment can point you toward areas to investigate more closely.

Our bottom line is that, for you to be successful, you should match yourself to the job, and then explore whether or not the job or career matches your personality, knowledge, skills, and interests. This strategy could help you avoid being among the half of all workers who are in jobs that do not fit them.