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Article from Human Resources, Hong Kong, October 2000
E-Career Management
The internet has made job-seeking and selection more efficient but does it provide the advice and guidance that individuals really need to manage their careers, or are we all simply being swept along in the ever-expanding job market?
Where does career management feature in the e-commerce business world we are now living in? Is there a place for career management in the first instance?
In the course of counseling numerous senior and mid-level executives, I have come to realize that there aren’t too many executives out there that practice career management! Some, quite a few actually, do not even know what career management is all about. This isn’t a major revelation nor is it an earth shattering discovery. We have seen countless career paths that are not shaped by the owner, but by circumstances. In most cases, it is the employer and business needs that determine the career direction and path of the executives.
Therefore, to put things into perspective, the issue is not whether there is a place for career management in the e-commerce business world, but that there must be career management! And, it must be initiated and owned by individuals, not left to employers nor to companies.
Besides taking a proactive stance, you must (if you have not already done so) develop a mindset of lifelong learning. Constant changes make it imperative that we keep ourselves up to speed with changes that may affect our careers.
Another key area that you need to specifically address is ‘employability’. You need to ‘stay employable’, rather than ‘staying employed’.
Here is an inventory of competencies that you need to maintain a high degree of competency in, in order to have a better chance of staying employable:-
n Relationship skills
n Teamwork skills
n Decision making
n Customer focus
n Thinking ‘outside the box’
n Information technology awareness
n Personal responsibility
n Process improvement
n Change management
n Technical / functional expertise
With on-going mergers and acquisitions, corporate restructuring etc it is imperative that we do all that is necessary to keep our jobs.
Strategic Career Management
What is strategic career management?
Here is one way of looking at it:
Strategic career management is about finding an ideal job fit. As shown in the diagram, there needs to be a combination / balance of three factors to achieve this:-
1) Your strengths and experience
2) Your interests, preferences and values
3) Strategic needs of the organisation and the marketplace
E-career management, i.e. management of one’s career using web-based tools, is not widely available for the moment, at least in this part of the world. Two websites that I am aware of that offer career management tools are aboutHR.com and Asiaone.com.
AboutHR.com is a one-stop human resource portal designed for the Infocomm industry. Launched in January 2000, it has several major unique features, principally for the recruitment function, that include:-
Assessment Centre – this virtual centre comprises of a battery of online tests ranging from personality tests to technical skills and knowledge evaluations where potential candidates have their skills and knowledge tested and even benchmarked against other candidates online.
Job Centre – this virtual centre shows a listing of potential employers and situations vacant. The portal is equipped with a proprietary Virtual Selection Manager – which will provide hiring managers with a list of applicants who are each ranked by percentage in relation to their match to job selection criteria. It also features virtual interviewing of candidates and monitoring of candidates who take online tests.
Resource Centre – this virtual centre features a myriad of human resource and career planning related articles, as well as salary survey reports in the Infocomm industry.
Asiaone.com is the e-commerce arm of Singapore media giant, Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. Besides aiming to provide news, it also has a career centre that is catered, not unlike other portals, to both employers, job seekers and the corporate employee.
Both websites provide a selection of tools that are geared towards some aspects of career management needs. However, they are not comprehensive enough nor is there any particular website that allows for individualized career management advice to be dispensed.
You could fill in the blanks for (1), (2) and perhaps (3) above in cyberspace. However, you may not be able to put everything together so that they make enough sense to provide you with tailor-made advice and guidance.
As Japanese management guru, Kenichi Ohmae said: “While younger people have abundant energy and abilities, it is old folks who provide much-needed doses of common sense”. In a similar sense, e-commerce and the internet may threaten to take over our lives, but one-to-one, interpersonal career counseling is here to stay, at least in the foreseeable future.
Paul Heng
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