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Chapter
Building
Your Career
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2. Copyright ©2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
Building Your Career
Career: A sequence of work positions held by a person during his or her lifetime.
The term “career” can mean advancement (“She is on a management career track”), a profession (“He has chosen a career in accounting”), or a lifelong sequence of jobs (“His career has included twelve jobs in six organizations”). For our purposes, we define a career as the sequence of work positions held by a person during his or her lifetime. It’s a concept as relevant to unskilled laborers as it is to software designers.
Career development programs used to be designed to help employees advance their work lives within a specific organization by providing information, assessment, and training needed to help them realize their career goals. Career development was also a way for organizations to attract and retain highly talented people.
These days, downsizing, restructuring, and other organizational adjustments have led to one significant conclusion about career development: You—not the organization—will be responsible for designing, guiding, and developing your own career.
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3. Career Development Today
Boundaryless career: When an individual takes personal responsibility for his or her own career.
This idea of increased personal responsibility for one’s career has been described as a boundaryless career. The challenge is that few hard-and-fast rules are available to guide you.
The optimum career choice offers you the best match between what you want out of life and your interests, your abilities and personality, and market opportunities. Good career choices should result in a series of jobs that give you an opportunity to be a good performer, make you want to maintain your commitment to your career, lead to highly satisfying work, and give you the proper balance between work and personal life.
Once you’ve identified a career choice, initiate the job search. Let’s assume that your job search was successful. Now, how do you survive and excel in your career?
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4. How Can I Have a Successful Career?
You’re already doing the most important thing: getting a college education! Assess your personal strengths and weaknesses: play to your strengths
The best thing you can do to improve your chances for career success is to get a college education! It’s the surest way to increase your lifetime earnings. College graduates earn, on average, $800,000 more than high school graduates over their working career. Investing in your education and training is one of the best investments you’ll make in your lifetime.
Assessing your personal strengths and weaknesses is key to your success. Ask yourself, “Where do my natural talents lie? What can I do that gives me a competitive advantage over others? Am I particularly good with numbers? Do I have strong people skills? Am I good with my hands? Do I write better than most people?” Play to your strengths.
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Be Proactive
Identify tomorrow’s job opportunities.
Manage your own career.
Develop your interpersonal skills, especially communication.
To be successful, identify where tomorrow’s job opportunities are. Regardless of your strengths, certain job categories are likely to decline in the coming decades—such as bank tellers, small farmers, movie projectionists, travel agents, and secretaries. In contrast, abundant opportunities are more likely to be created by an increasingly aging society, continued emphasis on technology, increased spending on education and training, and concern with personal security.
Take responsibility for managing your own career by thinking of it as your business and you’re its CEO. You have to monitor market forces, head off competitors, and be ready to quickly take advantage of opportunities when they surface.
Develop your interpersonal skills, especially the ability to communicate, which tops the list of almost every employer’s “must have” skills. Whether it’s getting a new job or earning a promotion, strong interpersonal skills give you a competitive edge.
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Be Active
Work harder and smarter
Stay up-to-date
Make learning a lifetime commitment
Keep networking
Increase your visibility
Seek a mentor
Super-high achievers aren’t fundamentally different from the rest of us—they just work harder and smarter. Based on studies of world-class performers in music, sports, chess, science, and business, it’s been found that people like Mozart and Bill Gates put in about 10,000 hours (or 10 years at 1,000 hours a year) of persistent, focused training and experience before they hit their peak performance level. If you want to excel in any field, you have to consistently engage in repeated activity specifically designed to improve performance beyond your current comfort and ability level.
Stay up-to-date in today’s dynamic world because skills become obsolete quickly. To keep your career on track, you need to make learning a lifetime commitment. This can include continually taking classes or reading books and journals to ensure that your skills stay current.
Networking refers to creating and maintaining beneficial relationships with others to accomplish your goals. It helps to have friends in high places and contacts who can keep you informed of changes that are going on in your organization and industry. Go to conferences and stay connected to former college friends and alumni. Get involved in community activities and cultivate a broad set of relationships. In today’s increasingly interconnected world, join online business networking groups such as LinkedIn, Spoke, and Talkbiznow.
Increase your visibility through networking, writing articles in professional journals, teaching classes or giving talks in your area of expertise, attending conferences and professional meetings, and making sure your accomplishments are properly promoted.
Seek a mentor to enhance your mobility, increase your knowledge of your organization’s inside workings, gain greater access to senior executives, increase satisfaction, and increase visibility. For women and minorities, having mentors has been shown to be particularly helpful in promoting career advancement and success.
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7. Leverage Your Competitive Advantage
Don’t be afraid to take risks.
It’s OK to change jobs.
Be prepared and willing when opportunity knocks.
Leverage your competitive advantage by focusing on skills that are important to employers, skills that are scarce, and areas where you have limited competition.
The world of employment rewards specialization. You don’t have to be good at everything. You just need to be good at something that others aren’t and that society values. The secret to life success is identifying your comparative advantage and then developing it.
Don’t be afraid to take risks, especially when you’re young and you don’t have much to lose. Going back to school, moving to a new state or country, or quitting a job to start your own business can be the decision that will set your life in a completely new direction.
Changing jobs may help you stay ahead in this fast-changing job market. Employers no longer expect long-term loyalty. It is increasingly likely that you’ll need to change employers to keep your skills fresh, your income increasing, and your job tasks interesting.
Successful people are typically ambitious, intelligent, hardworking, and also lucky. Success is a matter of matching up opportunities, preparation, and luck. If you’re lucky, you will recognize those opportunities, make the proper preparations, and then act on them.
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