Strategies for Career Engineering
Do you have a well crafted strategy to charter your career? or Are you a person who would take what comes in life as it is? Having a strategy is something that is very important for every business and every organisation; no matter how big or small it is. A well thought-out strategy helps in keeping the focus on-target and ultimate goals.
But, when it comes to professional careers hardly very few have clear strategies, plans and dreams in place. If you ask, “Is it possible to strategically engineer my career?” Yes, absolutely. Let’s look at Career Engineering Strategies in this article.
What is strategy and why is it important?
Strategy is a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim in a long term perspective.
Strategy is the direction and scope of an organisation over the long-term: which achieves advantage for the organisation through its configuration of resources within a challenging environment, to meet the needs of markets and to fulfill stakeholder expectations.
Strategy is significantly important for the following reasons:
- Streamline the long term goal
- Define the priorities to be executed
- Decide how the resources are to be developed, allocated and put in to action
- Determine where you are, where you want to go and then how to get there
What are Career Engineering Strategies?
Have you ever thought of turning some of the business strategies into a great career strategy? If strategy is so important for business and organizations, why not for career advancements? Remember no one other than YOU are keenly interested in your career progression. Though companies have various career development programs, but it is YOU who should take charge of your career by yourself. Here is a strategy that will help you to start taking ownership of your career.
3M Strategy for Career Engineering:
Measure: Measure your career progression carefully from where you were and where you are now. Keep in mind where you want to go. As you move along, take some time to assess your progress in regular intervals. Plan to have a career tracking meeting with yourself, to measure and evaluate your short term and long term career goals. Sit with yourself, carefully evaluate your advancement, look at what you’ve decided in your last meeting and measure where you are now. Ensure that the measurement happens based on clearly defined metrics without any uncertainty.
Monitor: Do you monitor your performance, do you monitor you professional development regularly? Be sincere to yourself while you closely monitor your career progression. Most often people tend to justify what they’ve not done and boast for what they’ve achieved. Other extreme is excessive self criticism, which is even dangerous for your morale. Send out your emotional feelings away for a short while, just be practical and think logical in your monitoring process.
Modify: Take immediate steps to do course correction if required. Though organisations have a clearly formulated strategy they pursue, they are also becoming agile in today’s fast changing world,. They must accommodate necessary changes quickly to do a course correcting by responding rightly to the market and other changing conditions. Changes are inevitable in career strategy as well based on changes in your personal interests, market situations, career opportunities etc. Be ready and willing to accept constructive changes and new challenges.
“Better you decide your destiny or someone else will”
There are number of corporate or business strategies that could of great use for personal development and career advancements. Another excellent model that I am great fan of is “Blue Ocean Strategy”. Watch this space for a detailed article on this topic soon.
Brilliant Article. I especially liked the mnemonic and the quote. The article has good flow of thought and it is informative. thanks for sharing