Feeling capable but off course is more common than most professionals admit. Strengths-led career consultancy explains why, and why the usual advice often misses the real problem entirely.

A personality test can tell you how you think. It rarely tells you where your value actually lies. For professionals weighing a promotion, a change, or simply feeling overlooked, that distinction matters more than it first appears.

With UK employers receiving around 140 applications per graduate vacancy, applying to more jobs no longer improves a graduate's odds. Paula Donnan Advisory shares two real examples of engineering graduates who built focused shortlists instead, and explains how to build a realistic shortlist, reach people directly, and use recruitment agencies well in 2026.

For senior hires, where expertise, client trust, and leadership complexity are involved, the true cost, when productivity loss, management time, and team disruption are factored in, can reach multiples of annual salary. Yet most organisations never carry out that fuller calculation. They measure what is easy to measure and overlook the rest.

Ask a manager how their one-to-ones are going and they will almost always tell you: fine. The meetings happen, the topics get covered, the time passes. And yet the same issues surface a week later. The same person seems flat. The same friction stays unresolved. If the one-to-one is doing its job, why does so little actually change?