For the to-do list or the don't call us pile?

With all due apologies, today's post is more of a collection of thoughts than collected thought.

• Taking the time to study the career events and achievements you are most proud of, or have remained connected to over time, offers useful insight into your relationship with work
  
• Starting a career dialogue that is ongoing, inquisitive and challenging creates more meaning in your relationship with work and the overall direction of your career
• Setting out to find a vocation is a difficult task but gaining a better understanding of what is important to us in our work, what we are good at and what keeps up going, can help to define our vocation more clearly and move us steadily towards it
• Instead of being something to achieve in the distant future, with a greater insight into our values, talents and goals, personal success can become part of our working experience today

Have a great weekend!

Paul

An argument that holds water or just a bad analogy?

You may have struggled with your career in the past but have you ever thought about your relationship with work? Old-school career planning enters our thinking at specific times in our working lives or around specific events: when we leave school or college, when we are looking for a new job, if we are made redundant or when we start to think about retirement. The traditional career planning approach is like the office fire extinguisher: always there, most of the time ignored but in an emergency we all rush for it.

Your relationship with work is a new way to think about your career and, like most relationships, in order to be successful it needs regular thought and attention. This ongoing dialogue around your relationship with work has more in common with the office water cooler than the fire extinguisher: it's still there all the time but it's used everyday and you always feel better after a huddle around it.

Okay, so the water cooler and the fire extinguisher serve a different purpose but shouldn't you have access to something that serves a better purpose for your career too? Think about your relationship with work and how it could become a positive, ongoing dialogue. Something that can be with you for as long as you need it to be as a source of confidence, information and insight. Something that belongs to you alone that can be explored and understood to define and move you closer to personal success.

If your relationship with work sounds like an interesting subject, start by looking more closely at your values, talents and goals (this post might be useful here, Looking back, around and ahead). Alternatively, for more bad analogies keep visiting this blog!

The value of career conversations - Update!

New evidence continues to suggest that companies are realising the benefits of their involvement in the career conversation and how it can deliver value to employer and employee. This recent article from Personnel Today (Retention improved by talent management for seniors) is a great follow up to the post on this blog a few days earlier (KEEP Consulting: The value of career conversations...)

In this employer's example, focusing on the career conversation and clarifying the "goals and ambitions" of senior staff has meant, "they're motivated to join in with new opportunities, more productive, more likely to stay, and we get a bigger contribution from them."

Being critical of this article for a moment, it is written more for the employer than the employee but the positives described above do appear to be derived from the greater sense of purpose and reward experienced by individual employees following a conversation that targets their personal success.

Try not to be too put off by the fact that senior management are the immediate beneficiaries either. With the benefits a programme like this can deliver, it won't be too long for staff at other levels to be included.

What a pleasant change to read a positive headline too!

What would you like to be doing 5 years from now? - Revisited

A previous post on this blog (What would you like to be doing 5 years from now?) suggested that the most successful answers to this question place genuine career knowledge ahead of what might get you through an interview. For that reason, it is probably worth considering that the most successful answers have two main components:

1) Relevance to their audience (company, job, interviewer, etc.)

2) Relevance to the future of the individual's career

A great deal of effort is expended to ensure that our answers are relevant to their audience, particularly the interviewer. Of course the most successful answers do not forget this but they also do not forget the importance of the individual's career.

Understanding a preferred direction for the future of your career offers insight into both areas. With greater insight into what is important to you, what you are good at and what keeps you going, your answer begins to resonate with interviewers for its clarity and depth.

Whether you are interviewing for the role of a chief executive or an administrative assistant, an answer based on your values, talents and goals is arguably the best method of creating a link between this question and your personal success.

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Learn how your answer to this question can evolve over time at exploreyourcareer.com

Where do you want to be in 5 years time?

Career planning: Handle with care

In his best-selling book Blink, the author, columnist and occasional blogger Malcolm Gladwell (gladwell.com), makes a strong case for decision making that leaves room for understanding in the moment. The cues that we take both consciously and sub-consciously from a situation are as valid as any pre-conceived intention or conditioning, in some cases more so. In other words, any plan or conditioning with little or no room for 'live' action and reaction can hinder rather than help.

For the same reasons, a successful career plan should not limit opportunities by being too prescriptive. It does need to answer questions convincingly on the subject of where we are heading and why but it should also be flexible enough to take into account the opportunities we encounter, need to process and manage every day.

Adopting the habits of successful people will get you so far but only so far as they apply to the situations you are in, or how much you agree with the role model you have chosen. A much stronger case presents itself for a career plan based around the core components of each individual's relationship with work. Only a plan that has been individually authored in this way has the ability to define a meaningful direction for the future and allow the freedom to act and interact in the moment.

I hope Mr Gladwell would approve.

Looking back, around and ahead

We all want something different from our careers. Some prize the creation of wealth above everything else, others are satisfied by the security that comes with a profession or trade. More still work for necessity or view their careers as a means to an end, whether that end is providing for their family or financing next year's holiday.

The individual aims for our careers are further complicated because for most of us they change with the changing circumstances of our lives. For example, when you got your first job you might have been single, after 10 years you might be in a relationship, possibly married. After 25 years at work, whatever your partnership status, your motivations and needs are likely to be different again. A multitude of events and factors, either at home or at work, contribute to this change. Change that every individual needs to respond to and manage if their career is to deliver personal success.

This blog started with a challenge to the way we manage our careers. The intention of that challenge wasn't to provide all of the answers, it was to try to understand if a better way existed to deliver success from our working lives. I'm not a professional writer and sometimes I don't think I have done this subject justice but I have continued the challenge, learning from my mistakes along the way.

Looking back over this blog (the other career related blogs and the opinions and experiences of the people I have encountered along the way) there is more evidence today to suggest that independent, forward-looking career leadership is not only possible, but also within the reach of more people now than any time previously. The moment anyone has a decision or choice related to work (e.g. Which company do I join? What skills should I learn? or What do I want from my next year at work?) they also have the opportunity to make that choice alongside a preference for where it might lead their future career.

The best and simplest method of ensuring that the decisions we make today are connected to what we would like from the future, lies with an understanding of our individual values, talents and goals. Asking three simple questions, "What is important to me?", "What am I good at?" and "What do I want more of?", brings values, talents and goals and our relationship with work into view. As this understanding develops, for the first time decisions can be made in a context that looks beyond immediate factors and needs. A connection between the decisions we make today the opportunity they create for our careers in the future.

Although supporting evidence has grown, this conversation needs to face new challenges today if it is to deliver value to anyone else in the future. Its future relies on the ability to make a difference to individual careers and that future was never in the hands of this blog. To use a personal example, a great deal has changed in my own career since this blog started but responding to this change and continuing in a direction that makes sense for my career is down to an understanding of my values, talents and goals and what they define as my personal success.

There is some risk to considering this conversation in your own career decision making but if this blog has achieved anything to date, it is demonstrating the rewards for doing so.

What outplacement did next

The next few years present outplacement consultancies with a once in a generation opportunity to respond to what some commentators have called once in a generation economic conditions.

Outplacement has an opportunity to deliver greater value to individual careers and contribute more positively to the health and success of their clients' organisations.

Working with individuals who have experienced outplacement at various levels illustrates the need for a new process that delivers career long benefits. Academic and customer satisfaction studies over the last few decades highlight this. For example, outplacement is challenged for focusing only on re-employment [Davenport, D. W. (1984). Outplacement counseling: Whither the counselor? Vocational Guidance Quarterly, 32, 185-190] and for having little or no interest in studying the results from the perspective of individual clients [Wooten, K. C. (1996). Predictors of client satisfaction in executive outplacement: Implications for service delivery. Journal of Employment Counseling, 33, 106-116].

More recent studies offer new insights but the example of the challenges above best illustrate the need for innovation in the aims, delivery, results and measurement of quality outplacement services. Why? Because the need for change highlighted in 1984 and 1996 has had enough time to sink in.

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Have you gone through an outplacement process as an individual? Has your company engaged an outplacement consultancy? What were your experiences? What were the results? What were the longer-term outcomes? If you have an opinion please comment here or email me at worklifefusion(at)googlemail(dot)com