John Linton
....or do most of us just try and find a way to meet our current financial obligations and have a good time?
I would be one of the latter types who have put no planning in to my career at all and changed jobs in my first twenty working years based on 'boredom' or 'frustration' or by seeing an opportunity to earn more money for doing the same or a similar thing. I doubt that I ever worked very hard for any of the companies that gave me a job and my working days were spent 'having an enjoyable time' rather than spending every last minute doing things for my employer. As I was always in sales jobs in that period of my life I could get away with that way of working as I always achieved the sales quota's set which, essentially, meant that you could pretty much do as you liked - at least in those antedeluvian days.
As Exetel has grown we have put in place a six monthly 'career planning' process for any of our personnel who want to use it. It's pretty 'non-intense' process which consists of circulating a questionaire that needs to be completed befor the individual has a meeting with his supervisor/manager, a meeting with the individual's manager/supervisor which is minuted and then a second meeting with one of Exetel's directors to ensure that all reasonable aspirations can be met and that there are sensible plans in place for those aspirations to be achieved.
The questionaire agenda changes over time and this time it was:
Did you have a career plan in place for the past 12 months?
If you did:
What career goals did you achieve?
What career goals did you fail to achieve?
What parts of your current job do you enjoy most?
What parts of your current job do you dislike most?
What do you want to do within Exetel over the coming twelve months?
What do you need Exetel to do to help you do that?
What do you need to do to help you do that
Do you have a position that you would like to see yourself in in three years time?
I have used this sort of process for most of the last 20 years with varying degrees of success in different companies. It may not achieve its ideal levels of success but it puts some sort of realistic planning framework for early career development for those people who choose to take advantage of its benefits and certainly does no harm to those people who don't see any value in it.
Personally, I think people are better off making sure their aspirations are understood and just what opportunities, in terms of work tasks and directions as well as financial reward are realistically achievable in terms of their employer - I can see no downside in that scenario. Sometimes it will create a negative reaction that would not have been caused if this process was not in place but, from my direct experience, those occasions are very rare.
Looking back, I think my 'career' would have achieved a great deal more if the companies I worked for (with the exception of IBM which had an excelent program) had some sort of career planning process for their employees. No matter how bright and, more importanty, how mature a young person starting a career may be they clearly have little or no idea of what they are capable of and probably have even less idea of what their current employer may be able to offer them. I regret some of the opportunities I lost because of my own impatience and immaturity and I regret, perhaps even more, in later years not helping people who worked for me understand that going on to 'pastures new' wasn't in their best career and pesonal interests at the times they decided to do that.
It's a very difficult process and I would be the first person to understand the difficulties and 'dangers' of one person attempting to advise another person on what they should do in their working life. However, if there is no such 'mentoring process' within commercial companies what is a sensible alternative?
Even if the advice from another person is inadequate or perhaps on occasions even completely wrong the process of formally attempting to think logically and make logical plans for your career would seem to me to outweigh never thinking about developing a career by talking it through on a semi-formal basis with other people who would know, if not more about what opportunities may be available or what longer term goals may be achievable, they might well act as at least some sort of sounding board or feedback mechanism.
I think if I'd been able to have this sort of process I would have made fewer bad career decisions and would have achieved more in my working life. I suppose it may be necessary for some people (of which I am clearly one) to let too much time go by before regretting that they never took advantage of this process on the few occasions in a working life that it's sensibly offered.