Career Control
Is there such a thing as career control?
With rampant job dissatisfaction and the resultant job insecurity, career control seems to be an oxymoron. How could it be possible to be in control of your career when businesses seem to be out of control with their sales and profits. (Look at the turnover of the Fortune 500 to see how unstable, er…dynamic our economy is.)
While career control is not something we can guarantee, it is something that can be achieved through the application of career management techniques and strategies.
Linda, age 50, had survived two downsizings and a spinoff and landed on her feet in a position that was well-below her capabilities. She was happy to have a job, even though she was doing the work of three people. As the next round of layoffs approached she was very worried. She was earning too much in a position that was too small to support her salary. There was a slim possibility of a lateral move. But, it didn’t look good. While she was tuning up her résumé, she attended a career control seminar. In it she learned how to position herself as a problem-solver. She dollarized her accomplishments in past positions and found out how to approach her boss’s boss with a New Résumé . Two weeks later, when the downsizing was announced her name was not on the list. For that matter, she had been given a position as her former boss’s boss in a newly formed division.
The great part of Linda’s story is that now, instead of fumbling through work that really didn’t match her strengths, she was working with her strengths most of the time and enjoying it.
How did she do that?
For Linda, it was as simple as selling her strengths to the person who could make a decision to allow her to use them and proving that she could with a New Résumé. It’s not always that simple.
Here are some more ideas as Part I on our series about Career Control.
As the era of guaranteed jobs and planned careers is now history. It's time to develop a new set of career control skills to survive (and thrive) changes in the economy, according to a career development experts.
Forget about the security of your current job. These days no job is secure. Even those companies that are experiencing outrageous profits are continuing to restructure and downsize to become evermore effective and competitive in our rapidly changing economy. Any downturns will only accelerate the pace of change--and make careful career management and the need for career control even more important.
Even if you haven’t begun to think of yourself as temporary help, you are. Traditional, full-time jobs as well as contingent, contract, or freelance workers are all living and working in Temporary Work World. Nothing is forever, everything is temporary: where you work, what you do there, the skills you use, the people you work with. But, your personal strengths are yours wherever you go.
There are no guarantees. But there is much you can do to protect yourself
through change and economic upheaval, by equipping yourself with the skills to manage your career more effectively.
Become a career activist.
Instead of taking a passive approach to your work, you have to take
charge of your own career, organizing your life to ensure that your
long-term career and personal needs are met. Career activism can take
many different forms. Here's how four people took charge:
* Sam, a 27-year-old systems analyst, quit his job to study Chinese for six months. He wants to be able to parlay his information technology skills into work with an international organization.
* Zora, 30, a video producer, is devoting all of her free time away from work to networking with consultants as well as furiously saving her money. She hopes to become a ghost writer for management consultants.
* Forty-three year-old James has just sold his home in a Chicago suburb and moved to a small town in Minnesota. He is using the proceeds from his house to subsidize his pursuit of a law degree.
* Twenty-five-year-old Peter chose to work for an international petrochemical company as a contractor because of its reputation for attracting top talent and doing leading-edge work. He's managed to stretch out a six-month contract into two years, acquiring important business skills, by understudying pregnant women and then taking over
from them when they go on maternity leave.
But, none of them has the security or control of their careers that a person who develops a career portfolio, a New Résumé , has.
We’ll talk more about this in subsequent articles on Career Control.
