Tag Archives for " career development "

What is career development? Typically speaking, we only really think about our career in terms of job seeking and while this is certainly a large part of it, it’s not the only part of it. That rush of panic when you find a job that you want to apply for and you realise that your résumé hasn’t been updated in 15 years and you have no idea how to respond to selection criteria (we’ve all been there!) is not a pleasant feeling! Effectively managing your career can help you prepare for these unexpected opportunities.

Career development is a lifelong process and it combines managing your education and training, your work experience and career progression, your network and community interaction together with your recreational activities to ensure that your life is balanced between work and home. It takes effort but once you are aware of the importance of consciously managing your career, the fog surrounding your future begins to lift and you are able to identify your opportunities in work, education and networking more clearly.

Statistics indicate that we spend up to 75% of our time in work related activities – travelling to work, attending work, talking about work, complaining about work, worrying about work. When it takes up so much of our time, it’s really important that we get this right, and yet many of us have a reactive approach to managing our careers.

In order to stay on top of our career development, we need to be proactive. Instead of waiting for an opportunity to arise and then panicking, we need to be prepared for it and if possible, seek and create it. Instead of dusting off the résumé and freaking out over having to update it quickly, we should maintain it as we progress through our career: every time we achieve something at work, we should document it so we aren’t left racking our brains when we are trying to demonstrate our skills and experience.

I can feel your eyes roll at the administrative perfection that proactive career development seemingly demands. Perhaps this is a plan for the perfect world as life can get so busy it is difficult to keep up with the immediate demands. However, it is worth it to keep your documents up to date with your current achievements in the long run, as this doesn’t only make our résumé current, it also allows us to build a strong, conscious awareness of our skills and capabilities which actually improves our work productivity and performance as our confidence grows. This in itself can lead to new opportunities!

Moreover, this conscious awareness of your experience and skill development is important because when you are aware of where you are at professionally speaking, it allows you to be more mindful of opportunities for training and development, for achieving experience, and for building networks with people who may be relevant to the direction in which you are heading.

Debriefing is an equally important part of career development and it is often overlooked. Talking to a career practitioner (or trusted third party) about what is going on at work can help you work through any issues or roadblocks, help you transition through promotions and manage success, as well as  identify areas for improvement and seek opportunities for growth and building visibility. All that complaining about work can actually be really beneficial to your career development! Who knew?! Career counselling isn’t just for managing outplacement and for high school kids looking to choose a course (although it’s great for that too): talking to someone else about your career goals, frustrations, successes and failures is really important as soundboarding your ideas and verbalising your experiences – both good and bad – can help you to clarify what you want to achieve and how you can achieve it.

Career development as a lifelong process might be daunting or seemingly eye rolling in tedium, but it isn’t a journey we take on our own and it can lead to achieving the goals that we set out to smash.

As both a recruiter and a careers practitioner, ‘anything’ is the answer I have often heard when I have asked someone what they want to do for a job. People perhaps don’t want to appear to be picky in case you don’t consider them for a role that would mean money to them, or perhaps they are so desperate for work that they don’t stop to think about what they should do, what they want to do, or even what realistically they can do. Work is work and when there are bills to be paid, choice can be seen as a luxury that they simply cannot afford.

According to many online forums, ‘anything’ is also often the answer to what people should be willing to do but apparently aren’t when they are experiencing unemployment. Social media is rife with keyboard warriors spreading the idea that ‘anything’ is an appropriate, if not expected outcome for the job seekers in our community, set against the belief that people are experiencing unemployment because they are hanging out for a ‘better’ role. It seems that once you are experiencing unemployment, all bets are off and there is a social expectation that you will take the first job that comes along regardless of suitability.

There is a huge problem with this approach that needs to be addressed. Firstly, I understand the panic of feeling like you need to get into another job immediately regardless of what it is because of impending financial chaos with the debt collectors knocking at your door. However, you also need to consider the wider implications of this reaction.

Your mental health can be significantly impacted if you take a job that is a step (or a leap) backwards for you in your career – will you hate work every day? Research suggests that we spend up to 75% of our day in work-related activities and as such, it is so important that we get this right. Taking a job that you don’t really want can also damage the work chronology of your résumé, making it harder to get back on track. The stress (and sometimes resentment) you feel about taking this position can impact your personal relationships and cause stress in your personal life, and the longer you stay in the undesirable role, the harder it will be to break out of it and find a job that you actually want, resulting in you feeling trapped in the position that was only meant to be a ‘filler.’

Research tells us that less than half of Australians are happy with their job, and our work-life balance is getting worse. It’s so important to pay attention to our career development and look at how we can make decisions to better meet our broader needs.

We all need money to survive, but it’s not the only thing that we need. We need to be smart about how we plan our next step – even through the haze of panic that experiencing unemployment can stir. We need to be strong in our convictions and be able to truthfully answer the question ‘why do you want this job?’ demonstrating that we have thought about it and specifically want to attain the role. Considering a lower level job in a company that we want to work for or in an industry we’d like to be in, can be a way of side stepping without creating too much damage to our careers along the way.

We also need to remember that ultimately, these decisions are rarely in our hands; being overqualified is a leading cause of failing to be shortlisted for a job. It’s not always about being willing to accept ‘any’ job that comes along – it isn’t a matter of snobbery – it is very difficult to convince a hirer to hire you when they believe you are overqualified and will leave the minute a better role comes along. The assumption that people are experiencing unemployment because they won’t accept ‘any’ job is based on the premise that they are being offered jobs and declining them. Many of us in this situation never have that opportunity.

Remember – while unemployment is rarely a choice, how you go about searching for work is. It’s not snobbery to look for work in a company, industry or career that you want. It’s not about waiting for a ‘dream job,’ it’s about being smart about what you do with the fresh start you’ve been given.

Life can sometimes throw the most unexpected curve balls. When I was a school kid (here, in Albury in fact), I can honestly say being a Career Development Practitioner was never my response to the question ‘what do you want to be when you grow up.’  It doesn’t seem to be the kind of career that a person aspires to as a child – it tends to be something we fall into along the path to other destinations.a

When I was in high school I wanted to be a palaeontologist – just like my 8yo son, I was fascinated with dinosaurs and loved learning about them, although to be fair, my 8yo would have put me to shame in a battle of knowledge of these prehistoric beasts! Then I wanted to be a sports journalist – I thought that travelling the world and being paid to watch sport was pretty much the best gig a person could imagine. Then I wanted to be a teacher. Given that both my parents were teachers, this is probably the most predictable outcome and off I went to university to study a Bachelor of Arts to be followed by a Diploma of Education.

But somewhere along the way I fell off the path well-planned and thought about post graduate studies and PhDs and the romance of studying in the UK so before I knew it, my Diploma of Education turned into an Honours year in History instead (studying witchcraft trials because there is such a calling for that sort of thing in the current labour market!) … and then I met a man in uniform. An Airforce uniform.

I ended up moving to Katherine in the NT for the most eye-opening, naiveté-stripping experience of my life at that point where my partner was stationed at Tindal before he got out of the ADF and we moved to Perth. I ended up working in the Public Sector and found my way into Recruitment where I discovered a passion for helping people find work.

And then I fell pregnant. Like many women, I felt that this meant my career was over, or at least my days where my career was so centrally placed in my life. Little did I know, that the birth of my son would also birth the opportunity to build the career I didn’t know I always wanted – the freedom to create my own path on a daily basis, limited only by my imagination (and capital!) and flexibility to allow me to attend my son’s school assemblies while also meeting my clients’ needs. They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade, for me it was a case of when life closes a door, build another one.

This is an example of chaos, quite literally – the Chaos Theory of Career Development. My own experiences have taught me that it is important to have a plan, but it is even more important to be open to variations and tangents, opportunities and risks because our labour market is so changeable (and becoming more so) that we need to be able to adapt and change as the needs of the market evolve. With unemployment being so high in parts of Albury Wodonga, creativity and innovation in our approach to career development is vital to designing opportunities to build meaningful careers.

Self-employment might not be for all of us, but taking the approach that we are a company of one, that we are selling our brand to prospective employers creates a new perspective on the career experience that often makes us stand out from the crowd. Have you created a personal brand for yourself? What does it say about you? Do your social media profiles and career documents (such as your résumé and cover letter) reflect that brand?

We are in an era where innovation and entrepreneurialism is currency, but you don’t have to be an entrepreneur to innovate your career path. It’s all in the way we perceive ourselves and then portray our brand to those around us.