Looking Beyond Today’s Job

By Florence Stone

Given today's fast-changing world, it is as important that you be prepared for advancement as you are qualified to handle your current position.

It is easy to get so caught up in the day-to-day job that you forget about developmental and career advancement needs, particularly if there are few chances right now for job movement. But when opportunities arise—and they will even in the leanest of organizations—they will go to those who are best prepared for them. That means not allowing the pressures of your current job to distract you from your professional development and career planning for the future. At the very least, you need to keep on top of the changes in your field. They are occurring so rapidly that it is easy to suffer from professional obsolescence.

Your Responsibility

It is up to you to fight against obsolescence, be adaptable to changes occurring in your field and your organization and create a career development plan that provides the competencies you need for today and prepares you for the competencies you will need tomorrow.

Personal development has two aspects—change and learning. The change is very personal because it is about changing yourself. The learning is finding out about yourself—how you do things now and what could be more effective in the future. One of the strongest barriers to overcome will almost certainly be that you have self-limiting beliefs about yourself.

These can be changed through positive affirmations, visualization and a determination to succeed. The question to ask yourself is: “Am I prepared to invest some time in myself in order to build the kind of career I want—whether I continue in a professional track or move into a management track?”

Personal development plans are designed to help you make your response to the above question a reality. Usually included are elements of planned study as well as experience, frequently supported by someone who acts as a coach. This is where a mentor—either within your organization or outside—is particularly useful.

Your First Step

Before you can achieve your personal development plan, you need to take the primary responsibility for what you learn. You choose what you learn, when to do it and what suits you. You also decide when to complete one topic and move onto something else.

A great help in this process is receiving the insight, feedback and ideas of others. Both honest feedback and constructive criticism are needed to overcome your blocks and blind spots. If you have ever been videotaped as part of a training program, you can understand how much you can learn from seeing yourself as others see you.

“Thank you, but I don't need advice from you about my career,” you tell me. To determine how much care you are giving your professional development, answer “yes” or “no” to the following questions:

1. Have you attended a volunteer training program offered by your company or association over the last 12 months?
2. Have you volunteered to be a part of a self-managed team in which you can develop your leadership or management skills, make contacts that may prove valuable in the future and demonstrate your capabilities?
3. Have you attended an industry conference or joined an association related to your industry? How about attendance at a meeting for individuals in your field? Are you a member of an organization that is related to your field?
4. If someone asked senior management who was on top of the newest technology in your field, would you be named?
5. Have you looked for opportunities to perfect your oral and writing skills? Maybe written an article for that association's magazine? Offered to speak at an industry conference? Perhaps taken a committee membership position that allows you to influence industry trends?

So how did you do? If you haven't done any of these things, include them as a part of your career development plan. Admittedly, self-development requires an investment of personal time, but organizations are constantly changing, and you will need to change just to stay even, let alone be a part of your company's and industry's future.

All right, let's begin to write your career plan. Take a piece of paper and list those skills in which you have greatest proficiency, your favorite tasks, the work climate in which you are most comfortable and the like. Given the realities on that piece of paper, what next job would be most satisfying to you? Or, on a broader scale, if you are right now a specialist in a field, would you like to rise in that same track or would you prefer to become a manager and ultimately an organization leader? Or, maybe, would you like to be your own boss in time?

Whatever your goal, the next question you need to answer is: “What should be my next step to achieve that objective?” What is the next job you should work toward? How likely are you to get such a job now? Over what period of time? Does getting this job entail a move outside your current job? Or will you have to job-hop from one company to another to achieve your objective?

If your goal entails leaving your current position, then your career plan would contain the following information:

• The position you want
• Short-term jobs (assignments you might have to take to achieve your goal)
• Internal and external network contacts to inform (they can pass the word about your interest in working elsewhere through the industry or field)
• Headhunters to check with

If you hope to advance in your field or become a manager and move up that track, you need to keep in mind that advancement in either will be the result of a successful mix of three characteristics: competency, visibility and opportunity.

Having the right skills, abilities, knowledge and attitudes isn't sufficient to get you a new position. You also need to be visible to those who make a career decision important to you. And, even more important, you have to be in the right place at the right time (although you may be able to set up circumstances so you create the right place and the right time).

Over the next few months, we will offer you some skills to help you advance your career—including further help in building your career plan. You'll learn about building a backup plan, how to seize opportunity when it arises, how to get the most from a training opportunity and, more important, how to put your learning to use to bring about positive change in your career as well as for your organization.

Consider these AMA seminars for additional career development:

• Communicating Up, Down and Across the Organization
• Moving Ahead: Breaking Behavior Patterns that Hold You Back

AMA On-site: Every one of AMA's 170+ public seminars can be delivered on-site. This flexible, money-saving option allows you to train ten or more people, when and where you choose, at a low cost per participant.

Author Bio: Florence Stone is editorial director for the American Management Association and author of numerous books, most recently The Mentoring Advantage (Dearborn Trade).