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Article from The Straits Times, 17th January 2000
MANAGE YOUR CAREER
Take Charge Now!
Get your career out of cruise control and into full steam ahead!
New year, new decade. Time to get out of the mold of a traditional employee, leaving it all to your boss. Time to better prepare for the future of your career.
Go on, be a new millennium employee. Take the bull by the horns and take care of your own career. From today!
We are constantly reminded by the media that retrenchment exercises are still being carried out by organisations and that we, as workers, need to constantly upgrade and stay relevant and employable.
Organisations, on their part are concentrating their resources and efforts to better tackle the challenges of ever-changing business and customer demands.
So, employees are better off looking after their own careers rather than relying on and waiting for their bosses to do so. Chances are that bosses are too busy fighting business battles on the corporate battle-field, or perhaps looking after their own rice bowls!
The business environment we operate in today is very different and much more complex than that of the past. Logical, vertical mobility up the corporate ladder is history. It doesn’t happen anymore.
Employees need to consciously manage their own professional careers to stay employed.
In all probability, many of us do not even think about career management, let alone doing something about it.
Don’t think so? Ask the colleagues sitting around you how many of them have done career review and planning.
We get so caught up with our daily lives and work demands that often, we’re lucky if we can head off home after 7 pm. So, where’s the time to manage a career?
This is where, like most things in life, the more you procrastinate, the longer you will put off doing it, to the detriment of your career.
In the course of counseling outplaced managers, I have come across many cases of careers that have simply drifted on, not having any purpose nor direction, reacting to whatever organisational changes dictated. Just like bamboo, swaying with the wind, not having a mind of its own.
When it comes to the crunch and they are outplaced, they find that they are in their late 40s and have only worked in one industry sector.
Much as those outplaced would like to work in other sectors, employing organisations are unwilling to take on senior executives without relevant industry experience. Thus, their options are limited.
HELP is HERE!
10 steps to managing your own career – plus some great advice.
Career management is not just for high-flyers. Any employee at any level on the career ladder can do it. All it involves is taking the time and effort to sit down and to the following:
- Learn more about yourself, as an individual. Your likes, dislikes, preferences, what motivates you, what doesn’t.
- Review your career progress.
- Identify the motivation and reasons why you left your last job and/or took up your current one, who influenced you and so on.
- Perform an analysis of what you like most – and least – about your current job as well as previous ones, and the reasons why.
- Identify and write down your past successes, situations that you excel in, and recognize the skills and personality attributes that enable you to succeed.
- Review your “personal life” as a whole. You need to do this because work or your career is just one aspect of your total being. You also have your family, social and other aspects of your life to take care of.
The objective of this is to try and find out where you are lacking and try to achieve a better life balance.
- Use psychometric tools, or consult a qualified psychologist, to enable you to better understand yourself, both as an individual and a professional, your strengths and weaknesses, inclinations and so on.
- Have your supervisors, peers and subordinates (360° Feedback) give you their individual feedback on what they think of you at work, your style, areas for improvement and so on.
- After doing all the above, sit down to discuss career options with your mentor or professional career counselor, who must have a good understanding of the prevailing market conditions, what’s hot and what’s not, now and in the foreseeable future.
- Finally, map out a strategy to arrive at your chosen career path and destination.
Some employees have been known to change mid-stream, after realizing that what they have been doing so far is not what they would want to continue doing.
That’s okay. People’s aspirations do change. When you start on your career after graduation, it is not unthinkable that you find yourself just drifting along in your first few jobs.
You may have some idea, vague though it may be, of what you want to do. Five years on, in your mid-to-late-20s, you should have a clearer idea of the direction in which you want your career to go.
This does not mean that it is the “right” decision. Somewhere down the road, other factors and considerations may creep in and you may find yourself not totally motivated in your job anymore.
If you don’t wake up all geared up for the day’s challenges or find it hard to drag yourself out of bed to go to work, you could need some professional career counseling.
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