Career Management and the 3Cs
There are three key areas of career management that you must address in creating unstoppable momentum in your career :
Clarity
Discovering what you are best suited to do
This requires some deep thinking about what motivates you, the culture and role that best aligns with your task and behavioural motivators. If you are like 95 percent of our clients, starting with a blank sheet of paper to establish what motivates you can be challenging. Checklists can help, particularly in capturing a summary of your functional and technical competencies, but we find they do little in identifying your greatest motivations. The Birkman Method can be of a great help here with a list of careers that you are likely to find satisfying as an added bonus.
One of the greatest benefits of focusing on Clarity first, is that valuable time and energy is not wasted in exploring career paths that won’t motivate you over the long haul.
It is important that we have realistic expectations of ourselves. It would foolish to use a road bike on a mountain trail and it would be equally foolish to use a mountain bike for a road race where lightness rather than ruggedness is required. The road and mountain bikes are designed for different purposes, so are we, unique in our interests and behaviours.
Clarity allows you to have realistic expectations of what you can and cannot do and more importantly over the long haul, what you will find most satisfying.
Congruency
Aligning what you do and where utilising your Birkman profile
It’s one thing to know what you are designed to do, but it is another to do it.
When it comes to congruency, most of us are out of alignment career wise. You may need to make some adjustments. Most will be incremental, but some may be radical, such as changing professions.
The goal is to spend more time using your strengths. That will be where performance and satisfaction both peak.
Consistency
Careers have momentum, stay with it
Career momentum is achieved by practicing Clarity and Congruency over a long period of time. How long will depend on the career, but most roles have a development period of between 6-8 years after training. Some subject matter expert careers may take 20 years or longer to reach world class performance.
In these cases, it is unlikely you will get there if you keep switching careers.
The secret to gaining momentum in your life is to do what you are designed to do over a long period of time.
Career management starts with Clarity, and Clarity starts with the Birkman Method. Check it out, talk to others that have completed the Birkman or contact us to have an no obligation discussion about achieving world class career alignment and performance.