You had heard the traditonal advice about how to plan your career
even before you had one: Determine where you want to be in five (or 10
or 20) years and work backwards from there, figuring out what courses to
take and/or what assignments you should fill in order to get the job
that you covet.
The advice used to work well when the economy was stable; the rate of
change was far slower, and competition was far more localized.
That, to state the obvious, is no longer the case.
If you don’t know what the world is going to look like five years
from now, it doesn’t make sense to try to predict potential external
factors in planning your career.
All you are doing is making guesses and you could end up looking
pretty silly. (“Let’s see, it’s 2009 and I am associate marketing
manager for the Eastern regional of a company that makes stand alone GPS
devices The world is always going to be willing to carry or deal with
an extra device like a GPS that plugs into the cigarette lighter of a
car. No car manufacturer is going to want to go to the trouble of
offering ‘navigation’ as a feature and who could possible come up with
an app that does what we do? My future is secure.)
“So, I am going to plan on being a regional manager in two years and
head of marketing for my company in five. Yep, that’s my plan.”
In an environment of high uncertainty traditional career planning is
both potentially a waste of time quite frankly, dangerous. A career plan
can lead you into a false sense of confidence, where you fail to see
opportunities as they arise and miss taking smart steps you otherwise
hadn’t planned for. You can be so committed to the plan that you miss
the opportunities around you.
You need an alternative. Let us suggest one.
Instead of trying to predict the perfect job and the best path to get there, begin with a
direction in which you want to go (“I never want to manage people again.”)
and complement that with a
strategy to discover and create opportunities consistent with that desire.
In an uncertain world you can’t even come close to saying what a
specific job might be, but you can say what’s valuable and important to
you. Who are you? What matters to you? Is it working in a specific
industry? Does it involve a lot of travel or none. The answers will
point you in a definite direction.
Having considered that, what are your means at hand, your talents and
skills, who you know, what you know? And how do you get started on
concrete actions that are consistent with these desires? Some of those
will take the form of looking for a job, but others might simultaneously
entail starting something of your own. As you act, different
opportunities will present themselves.
So, the process looks like this:
1. Determine your desire
2. Take a step toward it
3. Incorporate what you learn from taking that step
4. Take another step
5. Learn from that one
6. Repeat until you have a job, your own business, or have achieved your goal
It’s not career planning. It’s acting your way into a future you want.
Putri Dinar Setyani
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