There’s a conversation happening in New Zealand career circles that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime, possibly because the people having it are too busy actually building good lives in places like Christchurch, Queenstown, Dunedin, and Invercargill to spend much time evangelising about it online. The South Island is booming. Not in the frothy, overcrowded, cost-of-living-crisis […]
Self-Defined Success: How to Build a Career Around Your Life (Not the Other Way Around)
There’s a version of career advice that’s been quietly running in the background of most of our professional lives for decades, like an old operating system nobody ever updated. It goes something like this: work hard, climb the ladder, accumulate the markers of success – the title, the income, the corner office or its modern […]
How to Get Promoted in Australia’s 2026 Job Market (When There Are 100+ Applicants for Every Role)
Let’s set the scene, because it’s important to understand what we’re actually working with here. Job ads across Australia and New Zealand are sitting 20 to 30 percent below their 2022 peaks. In competitive cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and Wellington, it’s not unusual for a single advertised role to attract 100, 150, even 200 […]
Hidden Job Market in New Zealand? How Your Personality Type Determines Your Networking Style
If you’ve been applying for jobs in New Zealand and wondering why it feels like shouting into a very polite void, here’s a statistic that might reframe your entire job search strategy: roughly 70% of roles never get advertised at all. Not 7%. Seventy. That number lands differently depending on where you are in your […]
The Big Five Personality Test: What It Actually Tells You (And What Most Tests Get Wrong)
The Big Five personality model is different. It’s not trying to sort you. It’s trying to describe you – accurately, honestly, and with enough nuance that you might actually recognize yourself in the results. It’s the most scientifically validated personality framework in psychology, which sounds clinical and boring, but stick with me, because what it […]
The Non-Linear Career Path Is Now Normal in Australia – How to Own Yours Based on Your Personality
There’s a story a lot of us grew up with about how a career is supposed to go. You study something. You get a graduate role in that thing. You work your way up through the ranks of that thing, accumulating experience and seniority like points in a video game, until eventually you are a […]
AI Is Changing Every Job in Australia – Here’s How Your Personality Type Determines Your Best Strategy
Let’s be honest for a second. When the conversation turns to AI in the workplace, most people quietly slot themselves into one of two camps. Camp one: “This is the most exciting thing to happen to my career in years.” Camp two: “I’m fine, I’m fine, everything is fine” – while internally doing the thing […]
The Store Is Finally Open & Everything’s In One Place
You know how you find something useful on a website, and then spend the next ten minutes clicking around trying to find the rest of it? Yeah. I hate that too. That’s the whole reason we built this thing. What’s Actually Going On Here We just launched a brand-new store over at richardstep.com/products, and it’s […]
Why Am I Here? What Do I Want to Do With My Life?
For most people, it can be extremely frustrating to try to narrow down the path which one wants to take in life. A career is a life long commitment, with at least 25 solid years devoted to one’s work life before retirement. This is an extremely daunting concept for young adults who are faced with […]