Do you have a career growth strategy that maximises your potential? (It’s now time to intentionally create and not react to your future) - Page 2 of 2

What’s your vision for your career?

When you begin any road journey, you will subconsciously have inner conversations around these three questions:

“Why am I going to a particular destination?
“How will I get there?”
“What will it be like when I arrive?” (Or “Who will I see when I arrive?”)

Without realising it, you are working within a purpose-driven framework. This framework can also be applied in your career.

My purpose-driven framework:

Why do I exist? (My purpose is to make a positive difference in people’s lives.)
What will I do? (My mission is to encourage, challenge and guide people towards achieving their vision and goals.)
Where am I going? (My vision is to see people living purposefully according to who they are.)

Write a vision statement that relates to your career.

Would you like to make changes in the following:

What is your greatest life vision for your career right now?
What are the long-term career goals that will lead you to fulfil your greatest life vision? What needs to be done and by whom? When do these long-term goals need to be completed by?
What are your medium-term milestone goals? What needs to be done and by whom? When do these medium-term milestone goals need to be completed by?
What are your short-term mini-goals? What activities and tasks are needed to be done, by whom and by when?

Ruthlessly prioritising your activities will lead you towards achieving your greatest life vision and long-term career goals. Eliminate those activities that are not important or not urgent.

The four common types of career goals

Yourgreatest life vision can be broken down into long-term career goals, medium-term milestone goals and short-term mini-goals.

There are generally four common types of career goals you can set for yourself:

Goals focused on productivity — Productivity refers to the results you can produce for your employer within a given time frame.
Goals focused on efficiency — Similar to productivity, these goals focus on efficiency. They refer to your ability to achieve results. It also focuses on the speed, accuracy and consistency by which you deliver those results.
Goals focused on education and training — Continuing your professional education will help to be at the forefront of developments within your chosen career. Seeking out opportunities to develop or improve your skills and knowledge can help put you ahead of the competition. It ensures that you remain current and relevant within your field and profession.
Goals focused on personal development — Just as important as education, continuously improving yourself can only help you in the long run. It includes improving personal skills like communication, networking, teamwork and leadership. These are evergreen skills that you will require to navigate life.

Career goals are commonly found in the following areas:

Improving your networking skills and abilities.
Switching careers or starting new careers.
Starting your own business or side gig.
Getting a promotion.
Becoming an expert in your field or profession.
Reaching a leadership or managerial position.
Earning a degree, certificate or professional qualification.
Closing more sales.
Landing a huge account.
Learning a new skill.
Winning an award in your field or industry.
Publishing a research paper.
Becoming a mentor.
Improving the bottom line.
Becoming more proactive.
Growing the size of your customer base.
Intern with an organisation to gain experience.
Improving your productivity numbers.
Increasing your performance metrics.
Creating a personal or professional website.
Improving your communication skills.
Improving your leadership skills.
Feeling happier at work.
Building your personal brand.
Improving your professional presence.

Do you have SMARTER career goals?

For each career goal, ask the following questions to determine whether they are SMARTER career goals:

Specific — Are you specific with your goals?
Measurable — How will you know when you have reached your goals? How will you know that you are making progress towards achieving them?
Action focussed — Do you have a good idea about what’s required to achieve these goals?
Relevant — Why are these goals important to you? How do they fit in with your greatest life vision or long-term goals?
Time-specific — When do you want to have achieved these goals by?
Exciting (and enjoyable) — Why are these goals exciting to you? Why will you enjoy working towards them?
Revisable — How will you monitor, revise and review the progress you are making?

Examples of SMARTER career goals:

Start a private medical practice in eight years by completing medical school in six years and apprenticing at a family medical practice for two years that is within 10 km of where I currently live.
Publish 15 management books that are targetted at the female employee market in five years by spending 10 hours a week writing 10,000 words. Sell 300,000 copies of these books and earn $2.1 million in ten years.
Start a software application business in three years that lets users make online animated videos. Build a prototype within one year by committing 15 hours per week to build it. Get an investor within six months. Hire a team to do the rest within one year.
Get a promotion to lead a team within one year by completing all required training and certification in three months.
Start my first money-making website in six months by working 15 hours a week to build the products and write the copies. Hit $800 in revenue within two years.
Raise my sales figures by 20% in three months by taking three sales courses and growing my sales contacts by 20%.
Build a small sales team with over $5 million in annual sales within three years.

What is your career narrative?

Start the development of your career goals by articulating a career narrative. Note that personal stories are powerful motivators of success.

A career narrative can be defined as a professional story outlining both long- and short-term career goals. It elaborates the specific steps that you will need to achieve all your goals.

Here’s an example of a career narrative:

“My immediate goal is to secure a position at a public listed company within three months where I can continue to grow and improve myself both personally and professionally. I enjoy challenges and look forward to opportunities where I can increase my sales revenues by 20% within three months of joining the organisation. Ultimately, I’d like to move into management within four years with a focus on strategy and development. Right now, I’m focusing on improving my communication and leadership skills by completing a communications course and a leadership development program by December. While I’m very happy as a member of any team I’m on, I’m looking forward to being able to take on small leadership roles within a year, eventually working my way into a position as a manager and team leader within two years.”

Let us start with the end in mind

Here’s a key trend that all job seekers must understand. They must show, not tell or brag about how good they are. They must produce verifiable accomplishments that are quantifiable.

Recruiters and hiring managers are looking for quantifiable numbers in your resume to quickly tell them whether you are a performer or not. This also applies to soft and hard skills and experiences.

How many times have you seen these sentences in a resume?

The answer, “many times.”

The question for me is, “so what?”

So what if you tell me that you are a “high achiever”.

Says who? Where is the evidence to back it up?

Focus on the employer, not you

The focus of your resume is NOT on you! (There are too many “I”s and “my” statements in the example above.)

John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address inspired children and adults to see the importance of civic action and public service. His historic words, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” challenged every American to contribute in some way to the public good.

Likewise, don’t ask how much your employer can pay you, but ask what value you can create for the organisation. Seek value creation first and money will follow!

The focus of your resume is on your future employer, not you!

Creating value for the employer

Let me reiterate. It is all about what you can do for the employer.

The focus should be on what key accomplishment you can produce for the organisation with your skills, experience and qualifications. You have to effectively translate your skills, experience and qualifications into future successes and accomplishments for the employer.

The reality is that employers buy on future value creation, not on past personal subjective assertions about yourself. They want tangible evidence to show that you can accomplish their work in return for the salary they will be paying you. Employers must justify the salary they pay each employee. For them, it is a return on investment. You must prove to them that you can give them a positive return in investment!

Quantifying your past accomplishments

When you can quantify your past achievements and results, you can effectively demonstrate future value creation and worth to your employer.

If you are receiving $100,000 per year in salary, then you should be creating value over $140,000 per year for your employer! (It includes salary cost plus benefits, taxes, etc.)

At job interviews, don’t just say to the hiring manager, “I wrote articles for a local publisher.”

Instead, quantify your achievements by saying, “I am writing ten 2,000-word articles per week for ABC publisher. The publisher as 100,000 readers located in five districts. Their average reader satisfaction score is 4.7 over 5.”

Focus your achievements on how many, how often and how much.

Here’s another example. Don’t say, “I do fundraising for cancer research.”

Instead, quantify your accomplishments in fundraising. Say that you have “increased fundraising contributions for cancer research by 30% over the last two years and have raised a total of $100,000 in the last financial year.”

Numbers easily quantify success. They quickly give the hiring manager the motivation to hire you!

No more BS or fluff.

Subjective assertions about yourself are eliminated.

Numbers separate you from the other job seekers.

Reverse engineer the outcome you want and close any achievement gaps in your resume

Always start with the end in mind.

Working backwards from what employers are looking for, you can ‘accumulate’ achievements that you can then use in your resume and job interviews in the future. But if you do not intentionally plan for these achievements to occur over your working life, your resume will NOT be compelling for future employers.

When there are achievement gaps in your resume, it is time to do something about it!

Here’s the thing. You cannot turn back time.

Do not be regretful.

This is where a career growth strategy comes in. When it is done early, it sets the roadmap for you to intentionally build up your achievements, job-by-job, over time.

Rather than reacting to circumstances, your career growth strategy can create a positive future for yourself. It also creates a compelling human story that you can tell about yourself. This is important as storytelling is becoming more mainstream. It also differentiates you from other job seekers. The story emotionally connects you with the work and organisation you want to work in.

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75 Ways to love your work (and be actively engage in your job without hating it!)

In summary, lay a solid foundation for your career growth strategy

Here are the practical steps you require to develop and implement your career growth strategy:

Know who you are and your purpose in life.
Establish a clear vision of what you want to achieve with your life by knowing your WHY.
Set goals that are personal and meaningful to you including your career goals. Do set goals in the other six areas of your life.
Develop strategies and plans for achieving your goals. These will realise this vision and purpose in life including your career growth strategy.
Understand your limiting beliefs and things that may stop you from achieving your goals. Overcome those barriers.
Staying motivated and committed by rigorously executing your strategies and plans without getting distracted by everyday challenges. It is easy to get caught up with daily work. We forget to look beyond our circumstances and into our future.
List down your non-negotiable criteria when evaluating which employer to work for. Do not waste time pursuing jobs that do not fit your criteria and career goals. It is best to walk away. Ideally, there should be an alignment between your values and purpose and the organisation’s values and purpose.
Update and optimise your cover letter, resume and LinkedIn profile. Project your specialised niche and skills and quantifiable accomplishments to employers through your keyword optimised resume and LinkedIn profile. These documents are your ‘marketing brochure’ about yourself, your career narrative and how you can add or create value for your employers.
Prepare job interview answers to behavioural questions. Behavioural questions are commonly used in job interviews.
Identify the industry you want to play in.
Identify the skills, experience, competencies and certifications required in that industry to achieve your career goals.
Identify the equivalent job titles that will utilise your skills, experience, competencies and certifications. You will need to understand the industry jobs titles and what they will be called.
Target and list down your ideal employers that require similar job titles and your skills, experience, competencies and certifications. Create a wishlist of dream job employers that you are emotionally connected to.
Network your way into these organisations. Once you have your career growth strategy, narrative and emotional connections clarified and defined, it now time to connect with like-minded people in the organisations you would love to work in. It could include people in the industry or people you admire.
Conduct informational interviews with people in the targetted organisations you want to work in to validate your assumptions and criteria. Set up 15-minute information interviews with people from your industry or with people with the same skills as you. Do so after you have done some preliminary research about these people and their background and experience.
Get around the hidden job market and the applicant tracking system. With more job seekers flooding the job market, many potential employers will avoid going into the open market to advertise for job applicants.
Curating and sharing relevant information on social media platforms, etc. When you know more about your contacts, you will know what they are interested in.
Serving people in your networks by giving them value. Indirectly tell them to remember you. Once you have made the connections, nurture them. Constantly keep your name and brand on top of their minds by giving value to them. Unconditionally serve your contacts by giving them links to an article of interest when you email them.
Continuously reading, upskilling and updating your knowledge. This is where lifelong learning comes in. You can’t serve people and curate and share relevant information if you have nothing to give.
Investing in yourself. The more you want out from your career, the more you need to invest time in developing and implementing your career growth strategy. This may also include spending money to increase your knowledge or to network with other professionals. It may also include hiring a coach or mentor.money in courses.
Enhancing your brand. In executing your career growth strategy, you are also enhancing your branding.

Enhancing your brand

Whether you like it or not, people will always define you and your brand. This is where you can intentionally control how people perceive you. If you do not actively control peoples’ perception of you and your brand, their perception will control you and define who you are!

The keys to successful personal branding are the display of the following:

Emotional intelligence — You need to be self-aware of people and emotions around you where you can react positively and with empathy. It is about ‘reading the room’ or thinking twice before you say things or do things.
Intellectual humility — This is about being transparent and authentic towards others and their views. You need to be grateful and appreciative of who you are. Be genuinely interested in people and what’s going on in their lives. Intellectual superiority is a big no-no. Never put people down.
Professional presence — Presence is letting the most powerful version of yourself shine through. It is a combination of gravitas, communication, and appearance. Together, these elements form an impression of trustworthiness, competence, and authenticity.