It’s a comforting metaphor. It’s
a pity it’s bull.
So often, the mistake we make as
professionals is to look back on our career path and see a logical progression.
It’s easy to do this when you look back on things in retrospect. It’s easy to believe
that this led to that, which led to the other and so on.
But this is all post hoc ergo procter hoc. Seeing a thing as the result of something else, simply because one followed the other.
Let’s call me John Q. I was
working as an assistant manager at Circuit City from 2005-2007. I was made the
manager in 2007 and held the position for two years before moving to join Best
Buy as the regional sales manager. Obviously I’ve done well for myself; my
career shows a clear progression. A consistent, linear progression from junior
to senior, from low wage to middle management.
Well done me.
I’m leaving some things out of
the story though, things that have been edited out of my career history. These
were random catalytic events that shaped the whole thing. Because they’re not
on my resume, they’re not part of the accepted narrative of my career – but they
change everything.
Firstly, I became assistant
manager at Circuit City almost against my will. I was young and ideological. I’d
only taken the gig so I could get the rent paid while I was trying to get a job
in music. I reluctantly accepted the extra responsibility for an extra five
bucks an hour. It wasn’t a career decision. Nor was it a career decision a
couple of years later, when the manager I worked for suffered a heart attack
and retired early, effectively disappearing in a puff of smoke on a Tuesday
morning leaving me to take over. I took the job and I did it well, I expected
to retain the management job for a few more years. But then, as we all know
only too well, Circuit City went to the wall. Suddenly facing the prospect of
redundancy, I was forced to put myself out there again, talk to a recruitment
company and put my resume online. The result was a great offer from rival Best
Buy, to effectively take the level above the one I was working in. I wound up
with 20% more money and some stock. It turned out to be a great thing for me. ‘Turned out.’
Now my sensible linear career
progression looks like what it really was – a series of random and uncontrollable
events that bounced me around with no care for my plans.
Because the truth is that there is no such thing as career management.
There is no such thing as ‘planning your career.’ From the time you first
walked into the career councilor’s office at school and were told you should be
a chef because you admitted to being slightly hungry, through to this morning
when you surfed the internet for jobs for ten minutes because one of your
colleagues annoyed you. Your vague intent to push your career in the right
direction combined with your occasional decision to act when you were unhappy
or undervalued, do not constitute a career plan.
Your list of companies you would
most like to work for and your sense of what job title you probably ought to have, and in what time frame, are worth nothing to you.
We spend too much time trying to
shape our careers and not enough time trying to create the rounded professional
identity that will increase our chances of making progress when the inevitable
random catalyst presents itself.
Instead of sucking up to your
boss, make an effort to be respected by everyone around you. When her kayaking vacation
down the Nile ends in tragedy, it will be your peers and reports who are asked
what they think of you as a manager, not her.
Instead of surfing for jobs and
blasting out your resume, build a strong relationship with a good recruiter.
They can be your eyes and ears while you focus on your job.
Instead of chasing the money,
chase responsibility. The more you take on, the more qualified you become for
more advanced jobs and ultimately more money. Especially if nobody sees the
vacancy coming.
You can’t know what will happen,
and you can’t control when or where fate will strike. But you can create a
solid foundation that will see you right no matter what happens.
Strategy is not about predicting
the future, it’s about having a sensible framework around you so that you can
respond to anything. Experiences, references, training, qualifications – there’s
a reason these things tend to be headings on the resume – it’s because they’re
things you actually need. Take these
things off the resume, and think of them as real things that you arm yourself
with to create a promotable, hirable human being, it won’t be long before you’re
adding another level of advancement – whatever it is you want.
Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering jobs, staffing and marketing in the technical sector.
