Self-paced course · CHF 395

Your Next Move

Working out what comes next, positioning yourself for it, and going and getting it. Seventeen modules for senior people between roles, or about to be.

Buy Your Next Move · CHF 395

Same quality. Same loyalty. Different outcome.

Across a technology function of 13,000 people I watched a great many careers end at the same moment and go in completely different directions afterwards. Two people, comparably good, comparably committed, comparable records. One had somewhere to go within weeks. The other spent nine months applying.

The variable was not effort. It was positioning, and most of it had been set years earlier.

Here is the part that is genuinely hard to see from the inside. Being highly regarded is not the same as being sponsored, and the two feel identical while you are employed. Praise arrives constantly. Sponsorship is somebody arguing for you in a room you are not in, and it is invisible by definition. People who confuse the two do not get blocked. They simply do not get mentioned, and they never find out.

I was Head of Technology HR at Credit Suisse. Then technology reward at UBS, during the integration, running the full technology reward cycle and 24,000 bonus decisions. What looked like arithmetic from the outside was negotiation. What looked like fairness was calibration. I did not own those decisions and I did not decide who stayed. I advised, I was present, and I saw who landed well and why.

The people who landed well had invested in relationships before they needed them. That reads as a platitude. It was the most reliable predictor I saw, and the good news buried in it is that most of the work is still available to you once you know that is what you are doing.

What nine months of doing it the obvious way costs

Every one of these is what a capable, organised person does when the thing that has just happened is unfamiliar.

You start with the CV. It is the most tangible object in a situation with no tangible objects, so it absorbs weeks. A CV is a rendering of a decision about direction. Written before that decision, it renders your last job, which is the one thing you have established you are leaving.
You go to the market before you can say what you are. Search partners and hiring managers are not withholding opportunities from you. They are failing to recall you at the moment it matters, because nothing about you was compressible into a sentence they could repeat to somebody else.
You choose the next thing as an escape from the last one. A direction chosen against something tends to be revisited within a year, and the second search is materially harder than the first because the gap is now longer and the story is now complicated.
You discover the contractual problem in month three. Restrictive covenants, non-solicitation, garden leave, unvested awards, work authorisation. Every one of these is manageable if you know about it in week one and some of them are not recoverable if you find out after you have accepted something.
You walk into the final conversation believing it is a negotiation. Most of the time, by the time you are in the room, it is a ratification. The decision happened elsewhere. Knowing which of the two you are in changes what you should say completely.

What is in the course

Three steps in order, and the order is the point. Step two refuses to start until step one has produced a direction written as one sentence, because everything downstream inherits that decision. Before any of it, a readiness check on the five contractual things that are expensive to discover late.

Step one

Work out what is next

What just happened, and what to say in the first days while you are still deciding what you think. The money conversation, which is really a conversation about how long the runway is and what is load-bearing on it.

Then what you actually built and what you know, separated out properly, because insider knowledge is the asset most senior people undervalue and cannot articulate. Then your path: the options that are genuinely live, ruled in and out, ending in one direction and a named fallback.

Step two

Position for it

A positioning statement, the proof points underneath it, a profile paragraph and a headline. Not adjectives. A claim narrow enough that the person hearing it either refers you accurately or recognises immediately that they are not the audience.

Then the CV built around scope and impact rather than responsibilities, and LinkedIn treated as what it actually is, which is the thing somebody opens during an informal reference check.

Step three

Go and get it

Search strategy and the honest ratios between channels. Headhunters and network, and what makes a search partner remember you between mandates. Interview preparation, including what gets said about a candidate after they leave the room.

Then the offer. What is discretionary and what is not, what you are anchoring without meaning to, and the first ninety days, where the risk is that the organisation you joined is not the organisation that will exist in six months.

Every module ends in a written output and a gate. Each one states what you should be holding before you continue, and tells you to go back if you are not. It is the most disciplined thing in the course and it is what stops it becoming seventeen articles.

A search and pipeline tracker comes with it. Stage, channel, next action and the date it is due, and a field for whether a number has been named yet, so that your position stays consistent across several firms at once. That last one is a practitioner's field and it prevents a specific, common and expensive mistake.

Who this is not for

Three people, and the first one is the most common.

You want your CV rewritten. This is not a CV service and it argues against the belief that brings most people to one. If what you want is a document produced for you by somebody else, there are people who do that well and I am not one of them.
You are staying and going up. Getting to the next level inside your current organisation runs on a completely different mechanism. Inside the Promotion is that one.
You already know you are going independent. The course covers the first honest test of that idea and is upfront that it does not go further. Actually building a practice is a substantial separate body of work and pretending otherwise in a single module would not serve you.

Where the line is

I am a chartered management accountant. I am not a lawyer, I am not a tax adviser and I am not a financial adviser. The course tells you which contractual questions matter and when to ask them. It does not tell you whether a covenant would be enforced, what your equity is worth, what the tax treatment of anything is, or whether to accept an offer. Where the question turns on your contract or your jurisdiction, it says so and tells you to take it to somebody qualified, early rather than late.

CHF 395, and you have it straight away

Self-paced and yours to keep. Seventeen modules, and the honest reading time is eight to ten hours for the essential path. The elapsed time is longer, because a senior search takes months and the course is built on that assumption rather than on a fortnight of enthusiasm.

Buy Your Next Move · CHF 395

If what you have is one decision. An offer to weigh, two directions to choose between, a conversation next week that you cannot afford to get wrong. A Decision Call is CHF 550 for sixty minutes on it, with written observations afterwards. Take the hour instead.