Career moves strategy for managing your career better
Posted on 4:13pm, 14th April 2010 • No Comments
Planning your future career moves is your responsibility because no-one else will take as much interest in your progress and job satisfaction. Why should your manager or HR dept care anywhere near as much as you do about your career?
If you plan your career moves strategy, you’ve better than average chances of enjoying job security and of being able to find new jobs if the current one ends. You’ll avoid the potential career disaster of becoming a highly qualified professional with lots of specialist experience … in a sector with almost no job vacancies!
More positively, you’ll be able to make the career moves you want, rather than scrapping around trying to find any job you can get hired for that has a decent salary attached. You’ll also stand out from the other candidates at interview as one of the very, very few applicants able to explain their career path and future ambitions convincingly.
This DIY career moves strategy needs you to do some hard thinking but nothing more complicated than that. It calls for a bit of research and data collection (not much) and enough confidence in your analytical ability to take important decisions about your future without having perfect information.
As the first step in planning your career moves strategy, take a long, hard look at the job you’ve got. This exercise is easier to do if you can consult key documents such as your job description, recent appraisals, personal training records and any information you’ve got about loved and loathed work assignments. You’ll still be able to go ahead with the exercise, though, even if you can’t get hold of these documents.
Ask yourself is the job a “good enough” fit for you, do you enjoy it and do your bosses see you as having at least average potential for further promotion? If any of your answers are “not really”, the most urgent of your career moves is to home in on the precise nature of the job problems and sort them out before your career development suffers worse damage or you need to look for another job. Providing you tackle career problems early enough, it’s often possible to sort out what look like major difficulties without a great deal of upheaval.
For example, suppose you’re constantly overlooked for the high prestige tasks that would help you in future career moves. Instead of suffering in silence, turn detective and find out why these tasks are offered to your colleagues. Perhaps your colleagues grab the good career opportunities because they’re better than you at monitoring what’s going on in the workplace? Perhaps they’ve completed particularly relevant training courses that you could also attend? Find out the special reasons that give your colleagues an advantage over you, then use what you’ve discovered to put yourself on an equal footing.
If the job problems facing you are bigger than you can tackle on your own, consider working with a career counsellor to review your present position and work out your best career moves from here.
Having reviewed your current job, investigate what would happen if you had to find a new one (everybody needs a Plan B). Go online, tap in [your job title] jobs. The jobs market isn’t good at present but do you see a reasonable number of vacancies offering salaries and career moves that you’d find acceptable? If not, you’ve had the wake up call to investigate your career path further.
So there’s a reasonable number of vacancies at your level – but are you a competitive candidate for them? The online job ads will soon show you if you’re short of an essential qualification or need to top up your achievements in particular areas of your job. In career planning today, it may be as helpful to be a good candidate for sideways career moves as for promotion.
Last step in planning your career moves strategy …. Go online again and check the availability and requirements of jobs more senior to your own, those promotion spots you might aim for in the next 10 years. If all’s well, you know you’ve reasonable prospects for enjoying a good and secure career. Congratulations and good luck in making future career moves!