Stop Letting Your Career Manage You!
As a 20-plus-year career coach, I have worked with over 2000 job seeker clients, most of whom have
been experiencing some degree of career crisis. The most miserably employed of them are quite angry,
and long past the point of reconciliation with their current state of vocational affairs.
This is because most people don’t manage their careers, they let their careers manage them. I call them
“accidental careerists.”
Are you an “accidental careerist?”
An “accidental careerist” is someone who embarks on a career right out of school that is in no way
related to what they have been taught to do. Studies have shown that over 70% of college graduates go
into fields that are unrelated to their primary area of study.
The dynamic may feel familiar! Upon completion of an academic pursuit, graduates are faced with an
immediate and binary decision to either return to school or go to work. For those who choose work,
economic urgency often drives the need to accept jobs that are available with little consideration for the
impact the job will have on a long-term career.
Once embarked on this accidental career, other life pressures start to pop up. Many workers stop
thinking about professional goals entirely. We only change jobs when an opportunity comes to us, we
are suddenly thrust into the market, or when things become unbearable at work.
Career Goals Take a Backseat to Other Priorities.
That is why workers change jobs less as we get older. Growing families and broader financial
commitments can make the risk of change less palatable. The family dynamic often leads us to put our
personal needs on a back burner to protect family time and handle other household responsibilities.
The reason that I built a career coaching practice that was focused on the 40- and 50-somethings is
because this is usually the stage in life at which we feel it is okay to think a little bit about our own needs
and prospects.
The upside to making a change mid-career is that we have a lot more data points than we had in our
20s. What makes it tough is that it is not always easy to sort that data objectively on our own.
The Ideal Career Must Satisfy TWO sets of Criteria
Making a confident career change requires an understanding that there are two sets of factors that will
indicate if a career is a good fit or not. The more obvious factor is that we should enjoy the work. I will
cover the best ways to identify that part in a future blog post.
But gratification (or non-gratification) with the job itself isn’t usually the greatest cause of career misery.
Indeed, I have seen many people enjoy a great life in a less-than-perfect job because the other terms of
engagement with their career are great. Truly, most people don’t hire me because they hate their job
description; they hire me because of this:
Poor work-life balance: not enough time with family or for outside responsibilities and interests
Work overload: piling up of duties outside of the original job description
Organizational instability: constant change, or a scary impending one
Bad boss: micromanager, abusive, disengaged, unclear expectations
Stagnation: stuck in a job with little chance of moving up or over; no professional development
opportunities
Socio-economic factors: too much regulation or social factors that interfere with success
Culture: employer acts in a way that is incompatible with their values
Poor pay or terrible benefits
Most Job Seekers Don’t Think About What They Need from a Career
Note that the list above is all about the terms of engagement with a career, not the job itself. Most
people don’t’ take any time at all to define what they need as terms of engagement beyond the single
thing that made them miserable most recently. This makes most of us hyper-focused on what we are
trying to escape rather than what we are trying to achieve.
Step One in Taking Control of Your Career is NOT to Look for a New Job
January is a great time for everyone to evaluate our career, not in terms of what we are providing our
employer (the job description), but rather on how well our career is satisfying our immediate and long-
term needs. Some questions to ask ourselves are:
How would I define my ideal boss?
How does my current chain of command line up?
How stable is my employment situation?
What is my comfort level with this (un)certainty?
Does work interfere with other life priorities?
How will those priorities change going forward and how will my career path match up?
If I could evolve my job in any way, what would it be?
Is that evolution possible with my current employer?
Are there factors outside of my industry that are changing how the work is done?
Do I think that I will be happy and successful down the road as trends play out?
Is there a risk that my responsibilities will expand outside of my comfort zone?
Is the company or industry culture changing in a way that is uncomfortable?
How does my salary align with the job market? What are my salary needs going forward?
Not only are these questions great for assessing your current career, they need to be taken into account
big time when assessing the next opportunity.
It is always a good time to define what YOU need from your career and never become a victim of the job
market.
