We recently released our 18th annual Executive Job Market Intelligence Report to our membership, and this year, amidst all the challenges, there were quite a few success stories. In the last decade alone, we've experienced recession, recovery, high demand for executive talent, recession again, and now, the slow climb back up. But where past recoveries have been more robust, this rebound has the spring of an underinflated basketball and not the high-bouncing SuperBall we'd like.

What became apparent in our research and the experiences of our members throughout the last year is that job search and career advancement require a much more specialized strategy than ever, with an amalgam of skills that reach well beyond functional expertise. To succeed as an executive today, you need to:

• Collect data like a market researcher
  
• Investigate like a private eye
  
• Talk to others like a journalist
  
• Evaluate like a business development professional
  
• Target like a salesperson
  
• Think like a marketer
  
• Interview like a consultant
  
• Operate like a profit center
  
• Help people like a humanitarian
  
  

It might sound impossible, particularly if you've been off the market for a while, but there is one element at the nucleus, and it's the thing that has remained constant in our research as a means to long-term career growth: your network — because that's where you can find the market researchers, journalists, consultants, sales, marketing and biz dev pros who can help you.

Robyn Greenspan
Robyn Greenspan is the Editor-in-Chief at ExecuNet, where she is responsible for setting and driving the editorial content engagement strategy across the private business network's publications and expert-led programming. She is also a Huffington Post blogger. You can follow her on Twitter @RobynGreenspan

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