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Staying Smart: Advice on Navigating Your Career
Millions of career changes occur each year. Some are natural, but many more occur in adverse circumstances. Other forces at work today further alter the work environment. The Internet tidal wave destroys existing business methods and creates new ones. Many jobs get shaken up in the process. In 1998 the momentum of the Asian economies went from fast-forward to reverse. With their appetite for new products and services, these countries had fueled economic growth all over the world. The change in their fortunes has affected and untold number of careers throughout the world.
Clearly, environmental changes like these beget strategic inflection points for companies. Even more acutely, however, they bring career inflection points to the employees of those companies.
Your Career is Your Business
Every person, whether he is an employee or self-employed, is like an individual business. Your career is your business, and you are its CEO. Just like the CEO of a large corporation, you must respond to market forces, head off competitors, and be alert to the possibility that what you are doing can be done in a different way. You must protect your career from harm and position yourself to benefit from changes in the operating environment. This business of one often encounters a defining point where an action you take will determine whether your career bounces upward or slumps into decline. Let’s call it a career inflection point.
A career inflection point most often resets from a subtle but profound shift in the operating environment in which you work, a shift that demands that you respond with action. This action will not necessarily introduce an immediate discontinuity into your career, but it may unleash forces that in time will have a lasting and significant effect. A strategic inflection point reflects a wrenching moment in the life of a company, hot the effort of navigating through it is spread among members of a community. Career inflection points are more intense, because everything rests on the shoulders of one individual — you.
Career inflection points happen to everyone. Consider the case of a business journalist I know. This man used to be a banker. He was happily and productively employed until the day he went to work and learned that his employer had been acquired by a larger bank. In short order he was out of a job. He then became a stockbroker. For a while, things went well and the future looked promising. However, a short time before we met, online brokerage firms started to appear. Several of this man’s clients left him, preferring to do their business with low-cost online firms. The handwriting was on the wall.
This time our man decided to make his move early. He had always had an interest in and aptitude for writing. Building on the financial knowledge he had already acquired, he found himself a job as a business journalist, a less lucrative position but one less likely to be done in by technology. This transition was not as traumatic (痛苦而难忘的) as the move from bank to brokerage; this time he had initiated it rather than waiting for change to be forced on him by outside forces.
To know whether you’re facing a career inflection point, you must be alert to changes in your environment. Working inside an organization, you’re often sheltered from the world at large. In some ways you tacitly relinquish (放弃) responsibility for your we[fare to your employer. But if you take your eyes off the environment in which your company operates, you may be the last to know of potential changes that could have an impact on your career.
The Mental Fire Drill
You should train yourself to look for strategic inflection points that may affect your career. Simply put, you need to be a little paranoid about your career.
One way to do this is to go through a mental fire drill: Act as if you were the CEO of a large company, a CEO who is open to outside views and stimuli. Read newspapers. Attend industry conferences. Network with colleagues in other companies. Listen to chatter from colleagues and friends. When different sources all reinforce the idea that change is afoot — whether in your industry or another one — it is time to sit up and ask yourself a series of questions like these:
◇ Do these anecdotes indicate changes that might somehow apply to you
◇ What would you do if you were affected by such a change
◇ }tow likely is your company to be affected by changes in your industry
◇ If you think that developments originating in other industries could have a ripple effect on your job, are you confident of learning the new ways If not, what should you do
Only through this kind of vigorous debate with yourself can you determine whether you’ve reached a career inflection point. The only way to hone your ability to recognize and analyze changes is to question the tacit assumptions underlying your daily work.
Timing Is Everything
Success in navigating a career inflection point depends largely on a sense of timing. But you have invested a lot in getting your career to where it is and you’ve got great hopes of rising further along the current trajectory (轨道) of your career. So it’s more than likely that after asking yourself the kinds of questions listed above and deciding that a troublesome shift is underway, your whole being will probably work to try to deny that this is so.
Denial can come from two wholly different sources. If you’ve been very successful in your career, the smoothness of success may keep you from recognizing danger. If you’ve just been hanging on, fear of change may make you reluctant to risk what little you have. Either way, denial can cost you time, causing you to miss the best moment for action.
As in managing business, it is rare that people make career calls early. But the truth is that a change made under the benign bubble of an existing job will be far less wrenching than a change made once your career has started to decline. If you are among the first to take advantage of a career inflection point, you are likely to find the best pick of the new opportunities. Simply put, the early bird gets the worm; latecomers get leftovers.
Get in Shape for Change
The period between an early sense of foreboding and an actual career inflection point is valuable. Just as athletes get in shape for competition, this is your time to get in shape for change. Picture yourself in different roles. Talk to people in those kinds of jobs. Conduct a dialogue with yourself about how suited you are for a new line of work. Train your brain for the big change.
Experimentation is a key way to prepare for change. This can take several different forms. For the stockbroker-turned-journalist, this meant dusting off his writing skills and contracting potential employers early. You might consider moonlighting (兼职) or going back to school part-time. You may want to ask your current employer for a new and entirely different assignment.
As you experiment, avoid random motion. Don’t take blind steps just to head in a different direction. Guide yourself by your understanding of the nature of the changes that are upon on you. Look for something that allows you to use your knowledge or skills in a position that’s immune to the wave of changes you have spotted. Better yet, leek for a job that actually takes advantage of the changes. Go with the flow rather than fight it.
When a corporation navigates a strategic inflection point, the CEO is called upon to describe a clear vision of the new industry map and to provide the leadership to get the organization across this valley. As CEO of your own career, you must supply the vision and commitment yourself. Arriving at the clarity of direction through a dialogue with yourself and then maintaining your conviction when you wake up in the middle of the night filled with doubts is not easy. Yet you have no choice. You have just one career. Your might take control of it with full focus and energy, and with no wavering. When you experience and observe your inflection point, you should stop your career at once.