Career Development – perhaps not step-by-step
People don’t resist change. They resist being changed. Peter Senge
What you do today reflects how your future will look. Mike Radel
Whilst traditional career development often focuses on tangible steps like education, self-assessment, planning, and skill-building, and an order to doing it, this step-by-step approach models a way of thinking and working that suggests a beginning, middle and end – it speaks of order when careers and developing at work may be anything but linear. Steps suggest a given strategy to a current issue, and yet we know that previously successful strategies are breaking down as the structures we have trusted melt into air.
If your career future is conventional, than step-by-step may be for you.
We see career pathways as increasingly unique to the person. A generative process that embraces shifting priorities, reconciling with those impacted by our needs, working with conflicting requirements and understanding the significance of intangibles as well as more visible ingredients.
Ask yourself if the context of the world you are working in reflects a fluid and uncertain future, calling for more flexible and agile approach, an approach that matches the realities of the future or it is more ordered where a pre-determined framework models what the future will be.
In a more generative and fluid future, career development might start with understanding your reality or focussing on a decision you’ve already made. It might be initiated by considering your biography or exploring the options for the future. You might be immersed in the stuckness of a career issue that is better to grapple with, or rehearsing a meeting that could change your choices and provide more possibility.
I spent years at the beginning of my own career applying batteries of tests to others. They gave me a routine, an order, a safety net for the work I was doing with others. I found profiling a curious tool that despite their application by good practitioners still had a tenancy to create fixed mindsets in those who hear the results. It’s not that profiling might not have a place but rather, like the other ingredients, its place is to be considered in the bigger picture of meaning and possibility – not a given to be applied slavishly.
For more experienced career developers who bring a whole person stance, the questions are less about the techniques and the methods, and more about establishing what I’d call a developmental alliance, considering agreements about purpose, shaping what might prove helpful, and a warm and deepening bond of relationship.
What level of flexibility of approach for your future most attracts you?
Until next time, travel light and be well
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