Career

Be a career activist: craft your own future

• take control
• be vigilant on your behalf, identify and prepare for opportunities, rather than expecting anyone else to guide you during your day and do reconnaisance
• be independent, define yourself in temrs and concepts that are independent of your jbo title, organization, or what other people think you should
• be entrepreneurial — look for opportunity, undertake enterprise that provide opportunities and risk
• be informed, vigilant, flexible
• be passionate, engaged
• be an unconventional thinker with no preconceived concepts
• be opportunistic
• be mobile, fast, fluid
• be well-informed about both your strengths and environemnt
• turn advantages into opportunities

Knoew yourself, know who you are, what you are good at, the contents of your personal portfolio, what you have to do. Redefine your experiences to identify underlying themes and skills

• Personal “work ID” based on skills, attributes, interest, values and personal prefernce
• personal portfolio, identify assets and potential liabitlies. What are your distinctive skills and strengths? What value do you add? Are you constantly vigilant in seeking opportunities and market niches for your services? What specific steps can you take to overcome or limit personal liabilities?
• Think of yourself as a coporation of one, with a number of departments and you as the product

Marketing: What key assets do you have to sell? What market niche can you expoit? What opportuniteis can you take advatnage of? Do you have a marketing plan? What is your product worth? Have you developed creative and effective ways of selling your services?

R&D: What are the areas in which you’re going to learn and develop? How are you going to keep your skills on the leading edge?

Production: What services are you going to offor?

Pomotion and Public Relations: How are you going to promote your product?

Know what you love: what is most important to you

• be engaged: flow

Be who you are: see yourself as capable. Develop a personal success paradigm

• If I have to change my life when I arrive at work each morning, that’s slavery
• be authentic
• play to your strenghts
• you will get more return for you investment of time and effort by becoming better at what you are already good at.
• Find environments to play to your strengths
• become even better in areas you’re already good at
• be patient when you’re learning in an area that doesn’t play to your strengths but is a must for your work
• Believe in yourself: as a competent, effective human being
• be realistic in your appraisal of change and your ability to manage it

Ensure your Marketability

1. If your current assignment ended tomorrow, how quicly could you find a new one?
2. Are your skills up to the standard set by the external community or are you evaluating yourself against internal corporate standards?
3. Are you confident that your skills and knowledge are sufficiently current that you could sell your services to another employer/client?
4. Do you search for opportunities to enhance your marketability?
5. Do you have a full tool kit, portfolio, of goals? Are you always looking for opportunities to fill up your toolkit to ensure your longer term marketability?
6. Is what you are dling providing experiences or new skills that enhance your marketability?
7. Are you updating your resume every 6 months?

• Think of everyone you work for as a client rather than a boss.
• Know your product: you and the skills you have to offer — your assets, strengths, and potential liabilities, and how you can add value to an employer or client.
• Know your market: both current and prospective clients.
• Be able to communiate your strongest selling points to your market
• Look for opportunities to leverage skills and experience, identify business niches and unexploited areas where you can add value.

Have a Fall Back Position

1. Could you readily change career directions if required?
2. If you lost your main source of income tomorrow, could you successfully move onto another course?
3. If there was a downturn in your industry/profression, could you transfer your skills to pursue an alternative career directly?

• Have a broad repertoire of skills within your portfolio

Build Broad Networkds

1. Do you cultivate relationships with people outside your profession, employer or industry?
2. Do you cultivate and nurture relationships with a broad range of people?
3. Do you stay in touch with people just for the sake of staying in touch, or because of their economic utility?
4. Do you feel comfortable “networking” or do you see it as phony and insincere?

• Get involved in multiple networks to develop a reputation for breadth and flexibility.
• Develop mutually supportive relationships.
• Every relationship can be worth cultivating.
• Send a news paper or magazine article as an “information brief.”

Market, Market, Market

1. Are people you work with aware of your important accomplishments, skills, and work experiences?
2. Do you keep people infomred of your significant work accomplishments and experiences?
3. Are you staying in touch with the people you should — are you keeping your network alive?
4. Do you stay in touch with people to remind them of your skills and how you can add value, or do you just assume that they should know or remember?
5. Doi you feel comfortable marketing yourself or do you feel that it is “below you” or that it shouldn’t be necessary?

• To market yourself effectively, Don’t assume what is obvious to you to others. Point it out. Remind them at appropriate intervals.
• Keep people informed about what you are doing. Look for opportunities to exchange information with them about your work.
• Get to know your clients well enough to anticipate their needs.

Think Globally — Cultuarl and Linguistic Versatility Count

1. When yoiu think of work and your future, do you think of it locally, nationally or internationally?
2. Where are the geographical boundaries of your work?
3. How many languages do you speak?
4. Do you read international journals or belong to international associations that keep you abreast with international trends?
5. Are you online, exchanging information worldwide (e.g. are you on a bulletine board or part of a discussion group)?

• Living and working internationally helps you gain richer concepts not only in the mechanics of business, but also in teh principle of life and work

Be able to communicate in powerful, persuasive and unconventional ways

1. Can you quickly capture your listener’s attentiona nd get your message across?
2. Can you use words to paint a pciture, tell a story, make information vivid?
3. Can you wirte clearly, persuasively, and with impact?
4. Can you zero in on concepts and tranlate them appropriately for your listener’s requirements? (or do you tend to embellish needlessly and bury vital points in a pile of superfluous information?)
5. Can you quicly establish relationships and credibility with people you’ve never met without face-to-face contact

• One of the critical ckills for career success will be being able to comunicate graphically, compelling and quickly in both oral and in written forms

Keep on Learning

1. Are you feeling stretched in a positive way?
2. Are you experiencing “flow”?
3. Can you describe what you have learned in the last 6 months?
4. Can you describe what you hope to learn in the next 6 months?
5. Are you aware of the most recent trends in your field and their implications for your longer-term success?
6. Do you know what skills and knowledge you need to develop in order to ensure your success and employability?

• Take responsibility for what you decide to learn
• Stay current in your own field, and continue to develop skills and knowledge outside it.
• Be an agile learner
• Benefit from your on-the-job experience
• Seek opportunities from learning both inside and outside your workplace.
• Take courses, read books and journals, develop and practice new skills
• Look at period of full time education between periods of work, not as “the off” but as smart career moves preparing you for the future.

Understand Business Trends

1. Do you regularly read business magazines or the business section of your newspaper?
2. Can you identify three trends that will have significant impact on your industry in the next 5 years?
3. Do you know what new technologies might shape your industry in the next 5 years?
4. Do you know what the potential trheats are to your industry/profession?

• Read the business press or keep current through electronic media, and keep track of the fast-changing economic and social landscape. Understand the competitive environment. Get info from a variety of sources and maintain an independent and critical perspective.

Prepare for Areas of Competence, not Jobs

1. Can you describe 3-5 roles that you perform in your day-to-day work?
2. Can you identify 3 roles that you play and how that are independent of your particular job that you could transfer to another work-setting?

• The “hot” jobs of today may not exist in the future.
• Define yourself by what you do and how you get it done, not by your job title
• Identify the different roles you play and how they are applied in other work environments

Resourceful/enterprising

Opportunity-seeker

Time-urgent

Market-driven

Globally-oriented

ROI thinker

Self-confident

Committed/Enthusiastic

Innovative/Creative

Gymnastically flexible

Resilient

Independent/Self-reliant

Ruthless time manager

Balancer of Work/personal life

High-impact risk taker

Obsessively customer-oriented

Problem-solver

Self-promoter

Team worker/leader

Compelling communicator

Insatialbe learner

Leading-edge professional

Build Financial Independence

• Are your most important career and life decisions driven by money?
• Are you “owned” by your debt?
• If you lost your income tomorrow, do you have sufficient savings to tide you over until you find a replacement source of income?

Rethink your Relationship with Money

1. Do you find yourself surrounded by lots of stuff, yet unable to afford to buy things that are important to you?
2. Would you be willing to give up income in order to work less? Would you be able to?
3. Are youmaking significant sacrifices to maintian a particular standard of living?
4. Does all the stuff you buy contribute to your family’s happiness, and if no, could you give up buying it?

• Carefully review your personal values. Know what is really important to you. Ask yourself: What do I really care about? Are my values being met?
• For everything you do, ask yourself: Why am I doing this? Is this meeting my need for personhood? Will it help me in my chosen role?
• Be ruthless in evaluating how your current lifestyle is contributing to satisfying your deeply held values
• “How much of my life energy is this [thing you fancy buying] really worth?”

Think Lattice, Not Ladders

• The career ladder is now more like a lattice: you may have to move sideways before you can move up. In a lattice everything is connected.
• Be active in seeking out new opportunities
• Consider possibilities for job enrichment in a lateral move into a new work assignment that offers opportunities for learning and development, opportunities to mentor younger staff, participate in task forces, and interesting educational programs.
• Track your progress not by your job title or level, but by the dept of content of your work, its importance to the organization and to customers and whether you are still learning and having fun.

Are you more of a Specialist or Generalist?

1. Do you want to grow and develop within your specialty?
2. Do you prefer to broaden rather than deepen your skills and knowledge?

• Conduct a searching self-assessment to make sure you have what it takes to rise to the top of your profession.
• Take an equally careful look at market conditions to make sure that you are investing your career assets in an in-demand specialty
• Stay on top of teh newest trends and information in your profession
• Don’t give up on your general skills
• Find a mentor who:

acts as a sounding board

coach you in effective behaviors

provide insight into corporate politics

open doors for you

act as an individualj on your behalf

give you honest feedback

Be a Ruthless Time Manager

1. Do you have a clear concept of what is important to you and consciously make decisions about how you spend your time in relation to this?
2. Can you, and are you prepared to say “No” to exessive work demands?
3. Are you satisfied with the amount of time you are spending with people and activities that are important to your life?
4. Are you allowing important relationships to suffer becuase of excessive work commitments?
5. Can you allow some things to go “undone” without experiencing undue stress?

Tags: Career, Marketability