Any Road Will (Not) Do: 6 Tips for Successful Career Management
By Georgia Adamson
One variation of the saying goes, “If you don’t
know where you’re going, any road will do.” Or, as
another puts it, “If you don’t know where you’re
going, you’re likely to wind up somewhere else.” When
applied to establishing a successful career, not knowing where
you’re headed or how you’re going to get there spells
trouble with a capital T.
Sometimes people luck-out and easily get what seems like a
good job early in life, only to find years later that they have
gone from job to job with no clear sense of purpose and have ended
up on a dead-end road or one that leads somewhere they really
don’t want to go. In other cases the individual might start
with a career path carefully planned out and pursue it diligently,
then run into a situation where the rules of the game have changed
practically overnight because of technology advances or other
events that were difficult to anticipate.
Obviously, there are few (if any) easy answers to some of the
dilemmas you can encounter in trying to map out your career and put
your plans into action but here are six tips you might find
helpful:
1. Don’t depend on
someone else to take care of the career decisions for
you.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t consult
experts, such as career coaches or counselors, who may be able to
help you identify information and resources you might not otherwise
discover. It just means that, ultimately, you are the one who has
the most at stake in making the right decisions—you
can’t hand that responsibility off to other people then sit
back and relax while they do the work for you.
2. Desperation may be a strong
motivator for change, but it can seriously cloud your ability to
think effectively.
By far the best time to investigate possibilities and consider
potentially major career or job changes is when you don’t
have to. It’s somewhat like applying for a loan or line of
credit with a bank. You’re more likely to get one when you
don’t urgently need it, because you can readily demonstrate
your ability to repay it.
3. Consider who else might be
affected by your career decisions.
While the final choice is still yours—at least in
theory—any unilateral decision you make (without consulting
other people who will be impacted by it) could create some serious
repercussions for you. If you’re unattached and unencumbered
by responsibilities, that’s one thing. On the other hand, if
you have family members who depend on you or others who will
somehow have to live with the results of your actions that are a
much more complex situation and needs careful thought.
4. “Look before you
leap” may be a cliché, but it still has validity when
you’re talking about something as significant as choosing a
career that could take up years of your life.
Victims of the 2000-2001 dot-com fiasco can certainly attest
to that. Swept along by the understandable desire to parlay their
strengths into a high-paying, sky’s-the-limit job in the
booming high-tech, internet explosion, many of them overlooked the
fact that most of the new companies weren’t making money and
had little or no chance of making any in the foreseeable future.
When reality hit, it did so with a vengeance.
5. Relationships play a
critical role in your success, even in the present era where
technology seems to control so much of what we
do.
Work on developing a resource network that you can trust and
depend on to provide you with the right kind of help when you need
to investigate, evaluate, and choose a career direction. Nurture
that network, keep it healthy, and expand it whenever you find a
new resource that would make a useful addition to it.
6. Flexible choices give you
more room to cut your losses if you make a wrong
decision.
Think long and hard if you’re considering a career move that
doesn’t allow much margin for error or that requires a major
investment of time, energy, and/or money that you might be
reluctant or unable to toss aside if your choice turns out to be a
disaster.
