For much of your career, you probably haven’t needed to apply for a job.
Someone you worked with moved to another company. A former colleague called. A client knew someone who was looking. Your reputation travelled ahead of you.
At a senior level, that’s often how careers are built.
But what happens when the people who know you, know what you can do and know your value are retiring, moving overseas, leaving the energy industry or changing direction themselves?
Suddenly, the career model that worked for 20 or 30 years starts to look very different.
And that is a reality facing a growing number of senior professionals in Aberdeen.
Aberdeen’s executive market is changing
There is still enormous depth of experience in Aberdeen’s energy sector. But the market around that experience is changing.
The North Sea is moving through a period of structural change, with consolidation, asset sales, decommissioning and an uncertain pipeline of new activity. AGCC business surveys highlight early retirements and experienced talent moving overseas and from my own experience, I know that employers don’t necessarily see headcount growth as a sign of success.
For senior professionals, that raises the question: Where does my experience fit now?
When you haven’t had to look for a job in decades
If you’ve spent most of your career progressing through reputation, relationships and internal promotion, today’s recruitment process can feel strangely unfamiliar.
Where do you start?
Do you apply for advertised roles? What should you do on LinkedIn? Do you contact former colleagues? Should you register with a recruitment agency?
And perhaps the hardest question: how do you explain what you can do now?
Your CV might say Finance Director, Operations Director, Managing Director, Commercial Director or Engineering Director but an employer isn’t necessarily looking for your previous job title.
They are looking for a problem to be solved.
They might need someone to restructure an operation, develop a new market, lead a transformation, bring commercial discipline to a technical business, advise on AI deployment, prepare for growth or provide experienced leadership without committing to a permanent executive appointment.
The distinction between experience and capability is becoming increasingly important.
What problem can you solve?
One of the biggest mistakes senior candidates can make is assuming that extensive experience automatically means they should target an equally senior permanent role.
The market doesn’t necessarily work that way anymore.
Organisations aren’t hiring for the kudos of what you’ve achieved. They are hiring to meet a business need. Rather than asking “What job should I apply for?”, it's more constructive to think about the problems you can solve.
Perhaps you
- Can help a business avoid an expensive mistake.
- Have relationships that would take years to build.
- Know how to enter a market you have previously worked in.
- Have led a major transformation before.
- Can bring experience that the existing team doesn’t have.
Your value isn’t intrinsically linked to your previous job title or salary. It's reflected in the relevance of your capability to the problem a business needs to solve.
That's also why offering yourself for less money isn’t necessarily the answer. If an organisation doesn’t need the capability you are offering, reducing your salary won’t create the need for it.
This is where a recruitment consultant can make a difference
For a senior professional, a recruitment consultant should do considerably more than send you vacancies.
The value is in the context we provide.
We’re not just reviewing today’s vacancies. We’re thinking about where your experience could fit next and we:
- Talk to an employer about why your background is relevant even when your CV doesn’t immediately match the job description.
- Explain the experience behind the job title.
- Challenge a brief when the organisation is asking for more capability than the proposed package reflects.
- Negotiate the rate or total rewards package on your behalf.
- Champion you to people who don’t already know you.
Your network may have been built over 25 years. But your next opportunity may sit outside it.
I've witnessed the value of introducing experienced executives to organisations and decision-makers who would never have thought to approach them. This becomes particularly powerful at a time when traditional networks are changing.
Your next chapter might not look like the last one
For some senior professionals, the answer will still be a permanent executive appointment.
For others, it might be an interim role, a fractional leadership position, a consultancy assignment, a project, a portfolio career or a move into another part of the energy sector.
As Aberdeen’s energy landscape evolves, organisations are thinking differently about how they access senior capability. They may not need another permanent executive. They may need specific expertise, for a specific period, to solve a specific problem.
That creates opportunities for experienced professionals who are prepared to think beyond their last job title.
You don’t need to start again. You need to reposition.
If you haven’t applied for a job in 20 years, you don’t suddenly become less valuable because recruitment has changed. You may need to change how you present yourself to the market though.
Your network may be smaller than it once was. The organisations you know may be hiring differently. And the people who once knew exactly what you could do may no longer be in the room.
That doesn’t diminish your experience. It means your experience needs to be translated for today’s market.
Your next opportunity might never be advertised and the person who needs what you can do might not know your name yet. Successful job searching doesn’t need to start with a job description, it starts with a constructive conversation.
If you’d like to talk about your next career move or the executive leadership job market, contact Amanda T01224 327 016; amanda@tmmexecutive.com