Drive Your Career Development

Abstract

We are fully responsible for our own career management! That is the main message from this chapter, where you will find a range of tips how to ensure that you can fulfill that duty diligently. You owe it to yourself. This should not be done alone, but with people you trust and who can bring valuable perspective based on their own professional experience. Implementing your career advisory board is a great way to draw on the knowledge and on the support of people who you have confidence in. You will find out here how to set that up.A well-managed career is based on constant learning. That should not be left to others to manage. Take the lead growing your knowledge base and leverage on what is most efficient: on-the-job learning. There is a large pallet of opportunities to do so that is not always well known and rarely full leveraged. By doing so better than others you will gain a tangible competitive career advantage. A section is therefore dedicated to this topic which will help you understand what on-the-job learning tools exist and how to implement them.Succession planning is used to forecast who will take leadership roles in the future. Should you leave it sole in the hands of others to consider you for some of these positions? Certainly not if you consider yourself to be the CEO of your own career. Even if succession planning is still very often a black box, where HR and top management discuss backfilling candidates behind closed doors, there are opportunities to make this process more participative. I have formed the concept of reverse succession planning which I will outline here. The key idea is that you should position yourself as successor to those roles that you aspire to. One of the reasons to do that is to be more specific about your development needs. A section in this chapter is dedicated to that topic of your development. Furthermore, a section is dedicated to on-the-job learning. On-the-job learning is by far the most powerful development mode. You will find a range of on-the-job development opportunities that are easy to activate.Timing therefore plays an important role in your career management. You might have the perception that your career is long and that you have lots of time ahead. That is very often quite wrong, especially if you are already well advanced in your professional development. You need to be mindful of the different phases of your career: the phase where you can still expand your experience base and the phase where you need to be much more focused and target your ultimate career aspiration in a very determined way. Not doing that with the right timing in mind may mean that you end up missing your ultimate aspiration just by several years because there is no time left to make that last career step. The diamond principle outlines the two main phases of your career and how to manage those successfully.A particularly important moment are the first 100 days in a new job. There are two schools of thought. The one is saying that any action that has not been taken in those first 100 days is likely not to happen. That is an action-oriented school. The listening-oriented school is claiming on the contrary that you should do nothing in those 100 days except listening. As soon as you have positioned yourself with an action plan people will no longer be completely objective in their way of interacting with you and their messages will automatically be biased. Which school to follow? You will read more about it in this chapter as well.Social media presence. Finally, I want to help you think out of the box. Writing your life CV can help do that. You will learn more about this approach here and I hope that the baby elephant story will convince you of the fact that we need to break out of certain mental models in order to think differently about our career development.