I met a lady at a dinner recently who, asked what her biggest career achievement was to date, said, being at my employer ever since graduation and rising up for 16 years. She had to be 34, max.
“Time for a more exciting goal maybe?” I silently wondered to myself. But then, I know why better work isn’t risky to pursue, even in a recession.
So I warmly asked my tablemate what the company likes a lot about her work, to promote her like that. She fumbled and after a few moments was able to garble, she handles their money like it’s her own. That’s fantastic, I nearly yelled, I was so glad about her. She needs to highlight that useful value she contributes at all times, rather than think or say her worth is that she must’ve done something right for 16 years.
Here’s the secret truth about what kills career progress the most in recession times: working without career literacy. There has never been an era when career questions people were never taught how to answer in a deep yet practical way, could help them confidently move past so many difficult life events – downsizings, belt-tightening, foreclosures – or fear.
The illusion that employers govern what happens for you is all too prevalent in good times and floods the news in bad times. Everyday career thinking can cost you months or years of painful paralysis, fruitless job applications, thankless under-earning and postponed dreams.
In a good professional system for maintaining a stable yet fluid, ever-more-remunerative career today, you start by figuring out, as we do, what it is that your workmanship always gains for organizations – what they value that you already know how to get for them. You are endlessly versatile and relevant when you realize that the value you supply your current or next employer is your repeatable, predictable, fundamental pattern of strengths behind your best achievements, not your current job description. When you think and communicate about yourself in terms of what you can produce or contribute, not your raw history, you don’t even need to invest in extra education to command the company’s best pay.
Your value yesterday, today and tomorrow comes down to what is your work all about? Absent the job you’re in now, or were just got let go from - what’s your workmanship like? What do you make happen? What comes easier for you to see or do than for some other people? How do you always go about doing anything? What do you strive to give to others through your performance? How are you smart? These are clues to the enduring pattern of strengths behind all your best times, your best stuff. Observe what the common denominators are between the 10 best peak moments of your career, and you’ll have a saleable, proven set of benefits to help almost any type of company deal with its business situation.
You do not have to stay where you are or keep doing what you’re doing. The pattern behind all your best achievements is your ticket out and onward.
I point out Jeff Rubin, the bank chief economist who is leaving today because his book on the energy shortage, Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, is coming out. (Mr. Rubin is not a client here). He knows his talents and why he has relevance, and can now see he doesn’t need a bank executive job to deliver this exciting vision of his. Much like you, he’s been evolving his thinking for 20 years while on payroll. Now he is going to be an author, speaker and consultant, and later could entertain offers from other organizations because by sharing his thinking and dropping a job framework that no longer fits, he evolves into an even more advanced, valuable and visible player.
The lesson here is, notice what’s your talent and what’s just their job description. Tease those two apart to see more clearly what it is that you supply; how you operate differently than your peers in that same role. Do you, like the first lady I mentioned, budget a company’s money as if it was your own? Do you, like Rubin, ‘get’ why skyrocketing resource prices will change everything about how we live? These are evidence of a special pattern in you that has permanent, flexible value. What’s yours? Once you discern your brilliant pattern, it’s your solid proof you are already qualified to contribute what a new type of job or industry needs achieved, even help organizations get through their very worst economic problems.
There’s plenty of need for the real you, your best work, at all times. But the lack of career literacy to answer the epidemic of career problems cropping up right now, is getting in so many people’s way.
So how to make job offers happen to you? Know your pattern. Then ask what they need done before communicating what you can do. Tell stories to show you did that or can do it. That means being slow to divulge all your raw history, its irrelevance will lose you their attention. Talk about your pattern, and tell your stories so you stream their perception of you and build shared understanding of why you can do the new role you desire.
This approach is way cheaper than adding another degree or certification. Way faster. Often way higher paid. Way more uniquely, satisfyingly, you. And way more under your creative control.
These are some of the unique, tested methods of the proprietary Career Equity™ system from Mary-Frances Fox, for making your career and income be how you now need it to be, months to years sooner. For more informative articles, see http://maryfrancesfox.typepad.com/career_equity/.