A lot has changed about the way people get and keep jobs in the last 20 years. But certain things have remained constant.
Chief among them? People who are happier in their jobs tend to do better in them. And the vast majority of people are not happy in their jobs.
The number is 70 percent, according to Jody Michael.
The licensed life coach and career counselor has been helping people sort through their deep-seated dreams ever since she left her own unhappy career path and started fresh nearly two decades ago.
But new starts can be costly— $4,000-5,000 if you're working with Michael, and that always bothered her.
"It's get very tiring and painful to turn people away that really need the services all the time," said Michael. "It's very expensive to do this in our firm one-on-one with individuals."
So when Michael stumbled on a way to offer coaching for 20 percent of her price, she and her partner of 18 years, Cathy Cullen, set to work.
The result is Career Cheetah—a computer-based boot camp that aims to put clients on their happiest professional path in three weeks. The program works much like Michael's own coaching practice. The benefit, says Michael, is that it costs a fifth of usual price.
Michael had the unexpected idea for Career Cheetah at a conference in May when she saw a speaker that inspired her, she said.
It was out of character for Michael to participate in a presentation, but when the speaker asked for a volunteer, Michael's hand shot up.
"I had no idea why I was going up on stage," Michael said.
The presenter gave Michael three minutes to pitch the company that she wanted to build. There was no company that Michael had in mind. She already had Jody Michael Associates, her successful career and life coaching practice.
So, without knowing where exactly she was going, Michael started to talk.
"I started to talk to the audience about this idea that I had that I wanted to bring to the masses, that I wanted to become a resource for people in an area that I think brings more pain than just about anything else," Michael said. "Seventy percent of American workers hate their jobs. Let's just start there. The amount of anxiety and suffering and pain that comes from that, I wanted to be a solution to that on a much bigger scale than I ever have been able to do one-on-one, and that's where the idea came from."
Michael pitched what would become the foundation for Career Cheetah, and she brought that idea home to Cullen, a software consultant of 30 years. They decided to give it a try.
The two were in the early stages of building Career Cheetah when they heard about Chicago Lean Startup Challenge, an entrepreneurial competition that would leave them with just 10 weeks to build their company. It was the rocket fuel they needed, said Michael. The two worked feverishly over the summer, sacrificing their social lives to make the company happen. The idea is now a finalist in the competition.
Cullen had taken Michael's career coaching process and translated it for the computer.
Cullen, Michael and team designed a workshop-model boot camp that would take place over three weeks, bookended by two in-person sessions. The in-person sessions focus on information entry for the Career Cheetah computer program. The three weeks in-between are devoted to career research. At the end of the course, a client should walk out knowing what their dream job would be. They also have the option of sticking around at Jody Michael Associates to work on making that career happen.
The benefit, said Michael, is that Career Cheetah can take months off the career coaching process and costs thousands of dollars less. The base price for the program is $995, a fifth of Michael's typical price. And Michael hopes that as the company grows and innovates, she can bring that cost down further. In the meantime, she said, Career Cheetah offers payment plans for potential clients.
However, Michael and Cullen also want to move the new company beyond the traditional career coaching market. The two want to bring the program to colleges and universities, targeting young people before they declare majors and set out on career paths that might end unhappily.
"We want to get systemically to the problem before it becomes a problem," said Michael.
Young people, said Michael, are often easier to help. They tend to pick careers that will make them happiest early on, free of the anxiety and confusion that adult job seekers carry after college and jobs start to weigh them down.
Cullen and Michael also have plans to expand the company beyond their Chicago base. The two want to put the program online by the end of 2014, allowing clients from all over the country to go through the boot camp. That will likely happen via video workshop, Michael said.
Before starting Career Cheetah, Cullen and Michael researched job seeking trends and found that people used two strategies.
"I think that 99 out of 100 and some people said that they were figuring it out by asking friends and family and looking on job boards," said Michael. Those, she added, are two of the least effective strategies. The answer, she said is internal, not external. That concept has remained true, Michael said, no matter what form her coaching takes.
More information is available at careercheetah.net .
