This article on Career Planning can help to put things in perspective for you. I am in my second career – my first was in Information Technology, my second is in Executive Coaching. And in one lifetime, you might have several careers. The crucial thing is that you take responsibility for planning your own career. People often spend more time planning vacations than they do in planning their careers. Think about the age you were when you started to work. Now estimate the age you will be when you stop working. How many careers do you have left?
No matter which stage of your career you’re in, it’s time to begin planning. You should consider your values, interests, and skills. Think about where you started and where you want to be. In this chapter I’ll guide you through some aspects of career planning, so you’re equipped for whatever lies ahead.
There’s a second way to view this chapter. As a manager you can help your people shape their careers. Your team will look up to you as an (probably) older, (definitely) more seasoned mentor, and in that role, you can be a helpful guide to them in their career. You can help your team move into new, meaningful positions within the organization. That’s good for them. But it’s also good for you. Because when you act as a career mentor to your people, your reputation grows. You help them to achieve more, and more people want to join your team as they see how you help your people grow. So, see this article as good for you and good for the people you manage. There are plenty of exercises in here that you can use to guide you, and that you can also use in your coaching role with your team.
JOB EXPERIENCES
You can learn a lot from past job experiences. Maybe you’ve thought about which were satisfying, which were unsatisfying and why that might be. If not, there’s an untapped mine of data you can use in planning your future career.
To better understand what kinds of jobs work well for you, it is helpful to look at job experiences you’ve enjoyed. Below you will find a list of questions to help you really reflect on what you liked about the job, and why it was so satisfying for you. If you take the time to answer these questions for a number of jobs you have enjoyed, patterns will start to emerge.
Satisfying job questions:
- Why was this job satisfying?
- What skills or capabilities did you use? List some.
- What problems or difficulties did you encounter? What did you overcome?
- What did you learn from this experience?
- What did you like best about this experience?
- Did someone have an influence on you during or related to this experience? Who? How?
- To what extent did this experience provide the things you have identified as being important to you? Or was the job missing something that you would have wanted?
- Would you want to try for one more job like this? What would that be-can you describe it?
- What else stands out in your mind as making this a significantly satisfying job experience?
Maybe just as important, we need to consider the jobs that weren’t right for us, so that we understand why and what went wrong. This time, select job experiences that you did not enjoy, describe the job, then answer the following questions about the job. If you do this exercise for several unsatisfying jobs, you will begin to see a pattern of the types of jobs you do not enjoy.
Some people discover that it was not the job content itself but rather the people or the environment which negatively affected their enjoyment of the job. Often it is your immediate manager, but sometimes it can be things outside of the job itself, such as your stage of life, health, or other external life demands.
Unsatisfying job questions:
- Why did you find this job to be unsatisfying to you? Was it attractive to you at first? Did it change? If so, how?
- What problems did you encounter? Did you overcome them, or did they contribute to your reduced satisfaction?
- What did you learn from this experience?
- What skills or capabilities did you use? Which of your skills did you feel that you had but couldn’t or didn’t use?
- What skills did you feel you needed, but did not have?
- What are some of the things that you liked about this experience?
- Did some person have an influence on you or the activity to contribute to your feelings about the way the experience turned out?
- Could some changes have been made to make this more satisfying to you to turn it into a satisfying experience?
- What else stands out in your mind as causing this to be the kind of experience you found it to be?
By reflecting on both your satisfying and unsatisfying jobs and really digging into your feelings, you will help yourself tremendously in your next job search by more easily choosing certain jobs to pursue and eliminating others.
JOB RELATED SKILLS
Before you start a new job search, you need to know what your skills are – not the least so you can write an incredible resume! In evaluating your skills, consider the following skills categories: work content skills; functional/transferable skills; and adaptive skills.
Work content skills are the ones that are specific to the job you are going for. In my work it might include such things as use of Excel pivot tables, tagging metadata to documents, and esoteric searches on the Internet.
Functional or transferable skills include writing reports; making presentations (e.g., PowerPoint); solving problems; organizing; selling; and decision-making. It’s a good idea to think of examples where you have demonstrated these skills so you know you can identify them! Also, think about what sets you apart from the crowd – how are your decision-making skills better than the rest, for example?
Adaptive skills are those personal qualities you bring to the workplace. They might include things such as enthusiasm; patience; cooperation; flexibility; risk-taking; diplomacy; integrity; and initiative, just to name a few. Some are just part of who you are, some are made and nurtured. These take time to inventory, so again, you will need to take time to reflect on these.
YOUR NEXT JOB
You’re getting closer to the next big thing. But before you start scanning the ‘want ads’, you need to be really clear on what matters to you. What is most important to you in considering your next job? You should consider what is most important to you personally and what is important to you work-related.
Here are several things to consider personally:
- Work-life balance – more time for family and relaxation
- Working remote
- Company culture
- The team you will be a part of
- Office hours
- Overtime
- Travel requirements
- Work location
- Commute
- Benefits
- Perks
Here are several things to consider that are work-related:
- Your boss
- The team you will be working with
- Company culture
- Promotion/promotability
- Increased salary
- Increased salary potential
- Increased job responsibility
- Increased job challenge
- Opportunity for career change
- Increased job security
- Increased status
- Increased power
- Opportunity to perform work from which you get a personal sense of accomplishment
- Greater freedom to use your own methods in performing your job
- Less pressure/stress
- Opportunity to use more of your education and abilities
- Opportunity for professional growth and development
- Opportunity to acquire new skills for future jobs
- Becoming a manager (or a higher-level manager)
- Increased involvement working with others
YOUR IDEAL JOB
Once you have looked over the lists above, it’s time to sit down and do some real introspective work. Take pen in hand and freely write your answers to the questions that follow. It will be surprising how much you already know about what it is you want!
What will your ideal job look like? What do you want the work content to be? With what kinds of people do you want to be working? Is the environment important to you? (This could be the office itself, whether the job is indoors or outdoors, commute, travel, the pace, and/or the surroundings). How about location? Could it be in a foreign country, a warmer climate, or closer to family? What about working hours, salary, or benefits? Any other considerations? What would you be doing on a typical day if you were to get this ideal job?
Since the Covid pandemic, many workers prefer working from home to commuting and being in the office. Many companies are introducing a hybrid model of WFH (work from home) 2-3 days a week and in the office the other 2-3 days. Zoom and the like helped us all through the pandemic, yet many workers have complained of Zoom fatigue. How did you work through this critical period? What did you learn about yourself and what is important to you? In your ideal job, many of these questions may be answered for you by the company and its WFH policies. In other companies, there may be flexibility for you to set your own hours and work locale.
DON’T OVERLOOK YOUR CURRENT EMPLOYER
In considering your ideal job or your next step in your career, don’t overlook your current employer. You’ve worked hard to establish yourself at your current company. When you change jobs, you need to start all over again to establish yourself. This is not necessarily an impossible or even difficult thing to achieve, but it does take time, work, and energy.
I was an Executive-in-Residence at UCLA and in that capacity, I coached graduating MBA students in sorting out their career goals and next steps after obtaining their degrees. I often encountered the situation where for the graduating student, the MBA was going to be their steppingstone to a career pivot. For example, a student who was currently employed as an engineer in a large aerospace company obtained his MBA and wanted to move into the world of mergers and acquisitions. To achieve this goal, he was planning to leave his current employer to find a role with a firm that offered that kind of work. I asked a very simple question – “Does your current employer have a mergers and acquisitions department?” I asked this question anticipating that this large aerospace company often acquired other companies in their industry. He said that he thought that was the case but was not certain. I encouraged him to find out if there was such a department and to see if he could get an informational interview with the head of the department. He could then use that informational interview as an opportunity to see if there was the possibility of him joining that group. This could be a win-win for the employer and for the employee – the company gets to retain an excellent employee and the knowledge he has gained in his career while there, while the employee is able to pivot in his career without having to change employers, thus retaining the benefits of his tenure there.
DEVELOP YOUR CAREER PLAN
You know that I am keen on having a well thought out tangible plan – where that’s a plan for the workday, or a plan for the whole project. We should think of career planning in the same way. You wouldn’t try to build a house without planning it first, so don’t let your career ‘just happen’.
Let’s look at how you can develop your career plan. Career plans first start with a time frame, then a determination of your developmental needs to achieve your career goals and a plan of how you would achieve those developmental needs. The following is a template you can use in developing your career plan:
DEVELOPMENTAL IDEAS
That plan should lead you to be clear on what you need to do to develop so that you can reach those long-term and intermediate career goals. You have to take that on and make it happen.
Here is a list of developmental ideas that will enrich your current job experience, allow you to develop new skills, and provide you with the opportunity to build new relationships.
- enriching your current job with variety or other ‘extra credit’ activities
- taking on temporary/special assignments
- heading up or actively participating in task forces
- leading a project
- making presentations
- standing in for your manager
- getting rotational assignments
- developing departmental budgets
- conducting courtesy interviews
- attending conferences/seminars
- visiting other companies
- taking outside classes
- serving on volunteer boards for outside companies/organizations
Developmental needs can often be met through training. There are lots of low and no-cost development opportunities if you seek them out. Internally within your own company there are job-related training and assignments, rotational assignments; personal development courses/assignments; lunch and learns; and cross training within a department. Externally there is courseware; conferences; educational degrees (BA, BS, MS, MBA); and readings, just to name some.
One of the better developmental opportunities includes Task Forces. A task force is where your company pulls together a group of individuals from different business functional areas and has them focus on solving a critical business problem. Often these task forces are full time for a specified duration – sometimes 2-3 months; sometimes until a solution is reached. Being on one of these task forces gives you a lot of visibility and executive exposure as you are part of a team presenting your solutions. You are given the opportunity to use your critical skills and to be exposed to others on your task force with whom you might not have otherwise had the opportunity to engage.
While at the IBM Corporation (where IBM stands for ‘I’ve Been Moved’), I moved from New Jersey to California for my next career opportunity within the company. I thought California was the cat’s meow, with beautiful weather year-round. My wife did not view that assignment through the same lens that I did and soon after wanted to return to the east coast. At that time, IBM was the kind of company that if you were a good performer and made a request for a special assignment, they would usually find a way to honor that request. I was heading up a Project Management Office (PMO) at the time when for the aforementioned personal reasons, I requested a special assignment back east. My management found me one in Harrison NY working on IBM mainframe software strategies. The benefit to this 2-year assignment was that I had a return ticket back to California at the end of the assignment. When the assignment was completed, the team in Harrison NY offered me a permanent position there AND I still had the option to return to California. It’s nice to have choices. When my assignment ended, my wife and I decided to return to California. Although she’d been reluctant to move there initially, we both fell in love with the lifestyle on the west coast. Upon reflection from a career perspective within IBM, I would have been better served to stay on the east coast where Corporate and Divisional headquarters offered many more opportunities for growth and advancement. But sometimes you have to choose your life over your career – and this special assignment gave us time to take stock and work out what mattered most to us both.
In your role as manager, when it comes to training your team, you should consider training for contingency. No one is indispensable. In order not to be held hostage or to be entirely dependent upon a single individual with specialized skill sets, cross training is an activity that you should strongly consider. You should have a primary person and a secondary backup identified for every job function or skill set within your department. If you are lacking that backup person, identify those people who can be cross trained to be able to fill the shoes of your primary person when they are on vacation or at training classes to become that secondary person.
This all becomes more relevant when you need to deal with a situation when an employee receives an external job offer. You could choose to a make a counteroffer, although that is something I do not recommend – that’s where you find yourself in the hostage situation. Instead, if you have cross trained others, you will not be held hostage for a critical job skill. Of course, when faced with these situations, it is best to work together with your human resources department to resolve these situations. And always make your final decision based on what is in the best interests of the company, not necessarily in your own best interests.
WOULD YOU HIRE YOURSELF?
I use the following exercise when I’m coaching managers and leaders. It’s a really useful task that helps you reflect on how you’re doing. Pretend that you are an employer. Read the list and in column A check those qualities that you would like your employees to have. In column B, mark the qualities you think would be important for you to improve upon.
Look at the list. For those attributes where you’ve filled in both columns, you’ve built some good input for focus areas in your development plans! These are the intangibles. Of course, there are the requisite skill sets for the job that cannot be overlooked.
For those skills identified in column A, think about previous work assignments where these skills were utilized. Which of these assignments did you perform in an outstanding manner? Write up a description of this assignment highlighting the skills that you utilized that made the performance outstanding. Try to develop as many as a half dozen and refine them to be no more than 1-2 minutes if read or spoken. You can then use these when interviewing to highlight your accomplishments.
For those skills identified in column B, which are holding you back? What skills do you need to develop to be more competitive for the jobs you are interested in or the career path you want to pursue? Seek out assignments that will help you to develop these skills. In addition, or in lieu of an assignment, research and read up on how to improve the chosen skills. There may be courseware available that can help you with your skills development. Be creative. Find a way to help yourself, so that you can be the best candidate, one that you would consider hiring yourself.
FAIL TO PREPARE – PREPARE TO FAIL
Hopefully now you have all the tools you need to plan for your coming career, or careers if that’s what you want! It’s a truly reflective task, which takes an investment of time and some deep thinking. But it’s one that I urge you to reflect upon periodically. Come back to your career planning as things move and change in your current role. There will be assignments and projects that help to shape how you think of yourself as a worker and that add to your toolkit of skills and experience.
Whatever you do, spend a little more time on this than on your vacation planning and you’ll be well on your way to a happy and fulfilled career!