4 Ways To Create Your Own Career Opportunities Today
What to do when an employee 10 year career plan doesn't work
A common exercise in any kind of career development plan is to figure out where you want to go, and then to work backwards toward getting there. The general frame is helpful, but in a world that moves fast and changes so much, developing a 5-10 year career development plan can seem like a futile exercise.
But even proactive and forward thinking employees may struggle with knowing exactly where they want to be in 10 years.
Source: Wes Kao’s LinkedIn post
Organizations are waking up to this, and offering new modes of career models (ex: lattices, jungle gyms, and playgrounds) which offer opportunities like rotational programs, internal transfers, internal gig marketplaces, job shares, or 10% projects.
All of these are helpful and important steps to creating a culture of learning, and providing employees with opportunities to use their strengths to fuel performance and business outcomes. But if you are an employee, how do you know how to spot a career opportunity that doesn’t exist? How do you figure out how to read the room, or when it makes sense to speak up and take action to advance your career, versus continuing to work hard on the thing you’re on right now?
Over the years, the advice we’ve gotten for this is to embrace concepts and frameworks like continuous learning, experimentation, and “failing fast.” All of these are helpful and important, after all, if we want to lose weight, we cannot simply “think our way” into eating healthier, we gotta do the damn thing!
Creating Your Own Career Opportunities
But after talking with hundreds of managers who are trying to empower their employees to advance their careers and talking with even more employees who are pondering this question, a fact becomes increasing clear: Having the ability to proactively own your career or spot emergent opportunities is more than just experimentation and trying things - it requires a mindset, agility, and set of consistent practices, that allow to consistently monitor the world and changing conditions around you, deeply know yourself, and then to take action to create opportunities that don’t exist, and then to seize them in the moment.
So how do you develop this “spidey” like sense, in order to generate your own opportunities that don’t yet exist but that can fuel your career growth?
After working with hundreds of managers who want to help their employees find better opportunities and employees who want to be better at managing their careers and spotting things that don’t exist, Here are 4 pieces of advice, on how you can better create your own career opportunities:
1)Build Your Own Career Team
If you look at the most successful athletes in the world across any sport, you’ll recognize that while their individual prowess and accomplishments are a result of their talent and hard work, rarely do they work alone. This is true for most successful people in the business world - they have a team behind them and with them on their journey helping them advance and grow along the way.
Whether its through taking time to provide feedback on a potential new project or initiative, making an introduction to a new leader or sponsor, or simply providing in-context feedback to help them improve their performance, the people who are achieving their own success are constantly combining their hard work and soft skills with feedback and guidance from their career team so they can spot their weaknesses, see around corners and reach their goals.
2) Balance Thinking and Doing
You cannot think your way into a new career opportunity, but doing and execution without thought or intention can lead to choices and paths that don’t tie to your vision and values. The right thing to do is to balance your thinking and doing. Thinking allows you the time to evaluate your current role, market, environment and the outside world and assess where you are and what you might be able to do within it.
Doing, on the other hand, allows you to take action, try things, and fuel ideas, insights, collaborations and learnings that you can then use to reflect upon which can lead to further growth. This virtuous cycle is what often can lead to finding those opportunities and ideas that you can’t always spot in foresight but make sense in hindsight. One way to do this is to do what I call a “Career 10-Q” and each quarter reflect on your growth, and use it to fuel how you approach the next quarter.
3) Find and Cultivate Your Third Place(s)
In the 1970’s Ray Oldenburg coined the concept of the third place, and described it as a place between home and work (1st and 2nd place) where people exchange ideas, have a good time, and build relationships.
At the time, this was a concept meant to provide balance between “work” and “life” but today, as a result of our converging and intersectional world we live in, third places apply as much to our career and professional worlds, especially in today’s network and digital-driven age. For many years, networks and communities were thought of us places that simply
These “communities” whether formal or informal, online or in-person, not only shape and influence us, but provide us with ideas, opportunities and increase our surface area for connection, collaboration, and personal growth.
Jumping into an online community with peers with similar interests can help you solve a specific problem on a project you are working on, learn from others who are thinking differently than you, or connect you to ideas, concepts and best practices that help you spot opportunities and improve your thinking on your world, career and way that you see the world.
Oftentimes, innovative ideas or opportunities come from divergent thinking, and the ability to connect separate but adjacent ideas and concepts, so spending time with other peers and third places can fuel innovation in your work and career.
Finally, in a fast-moving and sometimes unstable world, having your own “third place” who can support and work with you can be a source of strength, stability and opportunity. They cannot only help you adapt, but thrive.
4) Facilitate Opportunities For Other People
Much of the career advice that exists is based on an individualistic approach - this is important and necessary to achieve our own individual goals. But, in our interconnected, diverse and large world, each of us as an individual is a part of a larger sum - the world is much bigger than just ourselves. In a big world, we are an individual person, but as an individual person, we are capable of doing big, ambitious things.
One way to scale your impact, generate ideas and fuel opportunities for yourself is to focus on facilitating opportunities for other people. While it may seem counterintuitive that focusing on others helps your individual career, what it actually does is increase your surface area and scale your ability to conceive of possibilities.
Instead of just looking at something through your own lens and worldview, you now have the chance to see it through numerous others.
To do this right, requires two things. Facilitation, and other people. Facilitation is the art of helping people work toward a goal, or outcome. All it means is that while you are convening a group of people, you play the role of asking questions, making inferences, giving feedback or connecting people together as they work toward a common goal, interest, or outcome.
Whether this is connecting multiple different people in your network together, convening a group of your peers within your company to give feedback to each other on the projects you are working on, or sharing learning resources to your colleagues and peers to help them do their job better, each of these moments when you facilitate opportunities for others is an opportunity for you as well, and further increases your surface area for your own opportunities where others might be able to help you, or facilitate something for you.
In our new world of work, companies are racing to improve their own operating system that allows them to navigate a world of constant change, technology innovation, and a faster time to market of ideas and projects - they must do this, in order to keep up and thrive in a world of constant change.
But employees can also do this too - by developing a mindset shift around their career that blends inner-reflection, outer awareness and networking thinking that gives them the ability to sense and respond to a new and emerging opportunity they may not have been on the roadmap as well as the intelligence for how to create their own unique opportunities for yourself. These four steps are a great way to do just that.