Managing Your Career in a Changing World of Work
How to thrive and grow your career in a world of constant change
A few weeks ago I got a frantic text from a friend. “I’ve got a career conversation tomorrow and I don’t know what to say. Help please!” I laughed, not because it was funny, but because it was a message and feeling that I can relate to and that I’ve gotten over and over again.
Many well intentioned companies and managers put a priority for career conversations in their performance management process, and that is net-net, a good thing. But it can also be a challenging thing because the reality is, nobody really teaches you to manage your career.
Furthermore, a challenge I’ve noticed when I talk to employees about their career development is that that often arises is that when it comes time to talk about your career, either with your manager or someone else, someone asks you one of the following questions:
What are your career goals?
What is your 10 year plan?
Where do you want to go?
What’s the next role you want?
Who’s someone you want to be?
In the moment and on the spot, a lot of us struggle to find the answers to these questions. And even if we have thought about it, not everyone has a well baked idea of a response. These are not necessarily trivial things, but in a rush to check the box to say we had a career conversation we often mention something that isn’t what we want, or say that we’ll answer it
I’ve thought a lot about why we struggle to answer these questions. Many of us have ideas about what we like doing and what we want to do, and many of us are ambitious or have goals. Even if you don’t want to prioritize career growth, most of us still want to do a good job and all of us are humans which means we are wired for autonomy, mastery and purpose and want to at a very minimum, be doing something that we like or enjoy.
To answer this question, I’ve come to the conclusion that my colleague and fellow career strategist Julie Winkle Giulioni has. In a blogpost, she writes:
“When leaders engage with employees in candid conversations aimed at deepening their understanding of the individual, they frequently discover that the problem isn’t that these people lack ambition. Instead, it’s that we all have lacked the language. The concrete ways to talk about career development. The ways that aren’t inextricably connected with promotions, positions, and moves that don’t interest all employees.”
Julie’s point is spot on - when we don’t have a language or model for talking about our career development or growth, it’s hard to answer those questions. Moreover, what we look for, are things to latch onto that we can associate with that allow us some sensemaking. Promotions, job families, career pathways are concrete things that when we are in an abstract thought are super helpful, however, they are not the only thing that matter.
This is not to say that those things don’t matter, they do, and if they are actually what you want, then that is important. But for far too long we’ve only relied on those to be markers of career development and I think that’s a miss.
The Opportunity (and Paradox) of Career Choice
The opportunity in today’s world of work is that you really do have many diverse ways and options to think about how to build and manage a career. There are more tools and technologies than ever before to explore careers, find new jobs, or and connect with people who are doing interesting things that you might be curious about exploring.
There are tools to pick up freelance work to explore opportunities, spin up a business on the side, or turn a skill or interest into a business venture. There are platforms for on-demand and gig work, and it’s not uncommon for people to make transitions from one industry to the next.
Moreover, we also are at a point in society and culture in the western world, where it is much more common today to change jobs and careers, as well as to talk more openly about our work and careers. There is plenty of progress that still needs to be made, but compared to decades prior, there are many positive trends when it comes to building and growing your own unique career.
However, this is also what can be challenging and overwhelming. The paradox of choice can often be difficult to manage, and because there are so many ways to think about how to grow your career, it’s common to be overwhelmed by all the options. Not to mention, we tend to glorify or idolize certain kinds of careers and choices, and that often is reflected back in the career advice that is passed down and shared.
Most Career Advice isn’t meant for you
George Box, the statistician once said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” While he was referring to statistics and data, I often think this also applies to most commonly used advice for developing and growing your career. For example, take this research paper, which studied the efficacy of commonly accepted pieces of career advice, and found that many of them were actually not based in any verifiable data or science
Context matters, and what might work for someone, may not work for someone else. Take for example, the idea of the “career ladder.” It’s popular and maybe even fun to say and write articles where we say the “career ladder is dead.” (Example here) but in some industries that could be farther from the truth. It’s also popular to say “find work life balance” or “do a job you love” and that can be incredibly dangerous or damaging for certain people and populations.
So how then, in a world of choice and bad advice, can you figure out how to manage your career, knowing that the world changes, industries and markets change, and what you might want as a person/human being changes over time?
Activating Your Career Operating System
Just like a phone or a computer needs an operating system to run efficiently and effectively, we as employees in this future of work need our own operating system to manage your career. Enter the Career Operating System, which is the mindset, habits, and practices for managing your career in a changing world of work. I created this after working with thousands of employees and managers who were trying to build career development plans as means to help people make sense of a plethora of information. Think of your operating system as the infrastructure and systemic approach to managing your career. There are a number of elements to the operating system that you can focus on today to helping you think about your own career development and growth.
Part 1)Career Development Philosophy - A Career Development Philosophy is your own personal set of beliefs and ideas for how you are personally viewing your career in the context of your life. Just like a company has a strategy or overarching philosophy for how they want to run their business and succeed in their industry, you, as an employee, have your own unique philosophy and strategy for how you see your career.
The point of a company to build a strategy is to articulate their choices for A) how they see the world and B) how they will choose to operate in it. For you, developing your career development philosophy is about given that you and your career operate in a bigger world, how are you choosing to see it? For some, you may choose to get a ton of meaning and purpose in your career, and want to make it the central source of that in your life. For others, it may just be one of many important priorities.
Typically, I see that there are three modes of this:
Career as the centerpiece in your life
Career as a means to and end for other important priorities in life
Career as a portfolio of important priorities in your life
Businesses that copy other businesses philosophies and strategies often don’t get very far, furthermore, neither do other employees. And just as businesses evolve and change their strategy when their conditions change, you can too. The key though is to figure out what is important to you, and then to regularly revisit it.
2)Your Growth Mode
As Julie mentioned, we often struggle in career conversations about how we want to grow and develop because we don’t have a language. A Career growth mode helps provide the language for how you want to grow and develop at a given point in time. It helps you understand, given your philosophy as well as your own aspirations, how you can select the kind way to grow your career. Just as a company who is focused on growth might have a preferred way to grow, you too might have a different way that you want to grow based on your own philosophy and strategy that could be different from your fellow colleague or peers.
There are a number of different ways to think about career growth, but typically, I see four key ones.
Ladder: This is all above looking at career growth as linear, and growing as a means of getting higher up, getting ahead and in many cases, as fast as possible.
Lattice: This represents the multidirectional ways in which employees can find and progress in their own development within the organization and in their career.
Portfolio: The portfolio model means looking and investing in career development across a portfolio of investments or “bets.” This means using your skills in many ways through multiple “jobs” or income sources, rather than just one job at a single company.
Wave: This model encourages us to think about our careers just like a surfer would – in iterations and waves. Just like a surfer, we can catch a wave, ride it for the duration, and then once it falls, paddle back in, and look for another wave.
These are not the only ones, but often serve again as language for a starting point.
By identifying the preferred career growth mode, individuals can take their own current view of how they see their career as well as their ambitions and aspirations, and select the mode they mostly closely align with to use as a guiding light to make decisions about their career.
Finally, just to note, while growth is often seen as progress, it is also perfectly normal and acceptable to be happy and content right where you are.
#3)Your Career Habits and Practices
Just like your phone has an operating system to power its apps and software, you need an operating system to be the infrastructure that powers your career. The good news is that you already have one, you just need to develop it. Building a set of “always on” and “continuous” career habits and practices that function just like an operating system on a smart phone ensures that you are staying relevant but also enabling and guiding your career. The habits and practices ensure that your career development philosophy and career growth mode are in alignment and achieved. Some habits and practices that are common from people include
Iterative Career Exploration - Continuously exploring your career like a scientist in a hypothesis driven way
Internal Marketing - Championing and sharing your work to raise visibility and develop relationships
Organizational Acumen - Navigating the organization and cultivating social capital to find opportunities
External Sensing - Keeping an eye on the external world related to you to spot emergent opportunities
Intentional Relationship Building - Intentionally identifying the ways and methods for building relationships
Lifelong Learning - A curiosity to learn and share knowledge with others and for yourself
If you’re reading this, chances are, your next job won’t be your last one, and your next career might not be your last one. That may be scary but it can also be freeing in knowing that there is opportunity for you to build a life and career that evolves as you evolve.
Developing the philosophy, growth mode and career habits & practices for managing your career is an ongoing process. But learning how to manage your career is something you can take with you throughout your life to help you link your aspirations to your actions in building and managing a career that is right for you and keeps you relevant in today’s world of work.
Finally, If you’re looking for some help for your learning and development, team meetings or professional development for next year, I’d love to work with you: Here is how I might be able to assist:
Team Trainings & Professional Development: Happy to facilitate training or professional development opportunity for your team & organization - common topics include: career development, influence without authority, effective relationship building, and stakeholder management
Support Your Offsites & Meetings: Speak or facilitate at your team’s offsite. Need a guide to facilitate or speak at an upcoming offsite, QBR or all hands? Happy to engage here.
Leadership & Learning Programs: Formal training and leadership development in your company, such as new manager or new leader training, or skill-based programs.
Feel free to contact me directly for more details!
That’s all for this week. Have a great week!