As an Associate Director of EO Executives, I have had an extensive career in both placing high calibre candidates into senior roles and providing career advice around how individuals can progress in their careers. For the Senior Level/ C-Suite/ Board Level it can be challenging to visualise further career progression because arguably they have already reached an elevated level of progression. Nonetheless, there is always room for development, whether it is taking on a more challenging role or building on core skills and qualities.

So, ask yourself the following:

Have you stopped progressing in your professional career? Do you want to improve but are unsure on where you need to focus? Perhaps you’re struggling to understand what you need to be doing daily to become a strong leader. Regardless of how hard you work, you just cannot seem to shift the big rocks on your desk and make some real progress for both yourself and your team. You get bogged down in the doing and mundaneness of your role. It’s not to say you don’t enjoy your work but you keep asking yourself “is this it?”

In a business world that is so demanding and competitive, it is fundamental for individuals to establish a strong personal brand that will enable them to stand out as top talent. With over 500 million users, LinkedIn is one of the most popular platforms enabling individuals, both passive and available to showcase their core skills, competencies and achievements. It is unlikely you’ll find a successful head-hunter/ recruiter or even candidate that isn’t on LinkedIn. And if they aren’t, where are they?

In recent months, I have found myself involved in discussions with leaders in my network, which have led me to reflect on the Interim market as a whole and question what interim trends we should expect to emerge in the coming months.

Considering that these discussions have primarily been with career interims, in the truest sense that they operate through their own Limited Companies and typically are engaged at times of change / transformation, I wondered if we would have seen any significant changes as to how assignments are sourced with the emergence of the ‘gig economy’ and global rise in social media?

I recently spoke with Essie Russell Butler, an innovative talent acquisition leader with strategic level exposure within the world's largest businesses including EMC, Diageo and Microsoft. Consulting with clients across Europe on the creation and implementation of bespoke, effective Diversity & Inclusion strategies to improve business performance. Essie offers deep expertise in the augmentation of the resourcing function to support businesses in hiring a more diverse and inclusive workforce. 

We all know how important mentoring is to career success. Yet having a sponsor is even more critical to advancement in the workplace.

A sponsor is an ally in your current company who will advocate for you at the decision-making table when it comes to staffing large, highly visible projects, promotions, and who has the power to effect change. While mentors may be seen as career developers, sponsors are considered to be career accelerators.

 Diversity is a topic that has been at the forefront of insurance board agendas in recent years. With many industry leaders working hard to raise awareness around the careers and opportunities women have within the insurance industry.

Successions can be a tricky affair and history throws up some intriguing leadership succession stories. Tim Cook taking the reigns at Apple was initially met with heavy scepticism, and last year Pandora Media took a leap in announcing a full technology leadership succession.

 Technological advancements, smarter and quicker ways of developing products, regulatory changes and a huge shift in customer (and employee!) expectations are shaping the way companies do business.

As an Executive Search specialist focusing on CIOs, CTOs and Heads of IT, I’m privileged to meet lots of innovative, forward thinking leaders who have a real focus on moving their businesses forward digitally. These technology leaders are ideally placed to learn from the innovation happening around them, and channel that creativity and best practice into both their business functions and their own personal careers.

Becoming an interim manager is potentially a very exciting career move. From interim management you often get a lot more variation than you have had in your corporate career, the ability to negate a lot of the politics that you've previously been involved with and potentially some very good reward. A lot of people, when they first get into interim management though are quite surprised by the number of different factors that lead to a successful interim career. The team at EO have put together the following tips for you if you're thinking about becoming an interim manager to help you navigate all that.

Your LinkedIn profile is the shop window to your professional life. With over 400 million members worldwide, it’s hard to imagine life as a job seeker or a recruiter without LinkedIn… it’s become a fundamental part of the recruitment industry.

That being said, senior executives still approach us looking for their next role without having optimised their LinkedIn profile to reflect their background, experience or achievements. Even if you aren’t actively looking for a job, LinkedIn is used extensively by recruiters to find talent for roles, so if you can see yourself changing jobs within the next 5 years it’s definitely worth taking the time to tweak it and maximise your visibility in the marketplace.

CVs are a difficult topic as people tend to get a lot of conflicting advice from either friends or colleagues or so-called professionals in the space around how it should be structured and the things to watch out for.

We're quite lucky. We've got in the region of 250,000 Executive CVs in our global database so we've seen everything from the very good, to the not so good. What we've managed is do is form a view, and distill this down into a template, which we think will really be beneficial to anybody about to go to market or in the middle of any sort of job search activity.