I'm beginning to understand why it's been so hard and taking such a long time for me to find a new CIO job. It's not just the economy (i.e., “Bad News Comes In Waves For Economyâ€), the wildly fluctuating stock markets, a Presidential election year in the US, and overly cautious business and IT leaders that are complicating my job search.  Major shifts in global corporate ownership are rippling downstream, affecting enterprises' hierarchical structures, executive roles, and hiring criteria, as I've learned from my recent discussions with David Gray, an international executive consultant and researcher based in Australia.

Keeping track of your job search efforts -- which companies and positions you've applied to, which ones are thru recruiters, your next scheduled follow-ups, etc -- is absolutely critical to your success, especially in today's market.

I've had three people in a month comment their concern about my blogging's impact on my job search. Now I'm concerned and looking to CIO Magazine's readers and fellow bloggers for your thoughts.

Being in a job search is difficult enough, with its family pressures and financial concerns, not to mention our own negative feelings of disconnect and self-doubt.  In Part 1 of this "Who Am I" series of blog entries, I discussed the cycles that I have seen my job search transition through.  In Part 2, I discussed how individuals can feel disconnected from their careers while in a job search, and I detailed an unexpected personal barrier that I had to overcome in order to get my job search project plan back on track.  In this final post of this series, I discuss how I learned to get past these issues, and how you can apply my lessons to your own job search.

The technical difficulties with some blog postings disappearing or becoming inaccessible continues to also affect my most recent posts. While we continue to work on these issues, here are the direct links to my two affected blog posts:

When in a job search, we frequently feel left out, disconnected from our career, and we even start worrying about our skills getting rusty. Today's post continues the "Who Am I?" discussion I started two weeks ago with an in-depth analysis of what has been holding me back in my job search. It also explains the benefits of applying this same introspective process I used to your own job search situation.

Just a brief note that there has been an unusual technical issue with my most recent blog post that has caused it to disappear shortly after I enter or re-enter it.