Six career tasks

The best time to work deeply on your career is when you are going well. But that’s exactly when you’re busy, so you don't think you have time. 

Fix that by weaving strategic career tasks into the time that’s usually crowded with transactional tasks.

Here are 6 career tasks that you can address no matter how busy you are:

1. Build your confidence

Career uncertainty renders us diffident. It makes us feel like we’re going cap in hand to a potential employer begging for a job. This needs to stop. Tackle your transition with confidence by identifying and testing the facts about your abilities.

2. Get more information

By its nature career strategy highlights gaps in your knowledge. Without enough knowledge, a career is a series of accidents, sometimes happy, sometimes disastrous. Stop throwing dice and instead run a well-designed career machine based on knowledge of yourself and good research into your career possibilities.

3. Control the agenda

Coming second in the interview process is as bad as finishing last. An answering strategy is not enough. Avoid getting pipped at the post by creating a robust questioning strategy to uncover the key aspects of the role or context of the hiring process that you’d otherwise miss.

4. Both think and reflect

The right mindset for crafting and pursuing a good career strategy is both intuitive and analytical. Reflection generates the truth about what you want, how you feel, and what you are capable of. This underpins the logic that enables you to make the right decision about what to do. Keep your thinking/reflecting scales in balance.

5. Engage your community

Your next role will arise from conversations. The best conversations go deep and point you to other conversations. This means continuously engaging with the professional community who know and trust you. These conversations are not transactional. They are reflective, open, speculative, emergent and creative. Start with an invitation, set up the right environment and let the conversation evolve.

6. Aim for the bullseye.

Career change is like being in an archery range. You need to select your own target, know where your own bullseye is and keep it in focus. What are the three most critical factors that define your ideal role? Use them to express what you're looking for concisely and reject irrelevant targets.

These tasks form part of the structured approach to career strategy for partners that I help firms and individuals build. Contact me directly for a free exploratory conversation on how you can integrate career strategy into your busy work life.