During the last few days of 2010 and the first week of the new year I began providing tips on how to become Career Fit. I did this because I kept seeing and hearing about New Year's resolutions with the inclusion of losing weight, getting healthy and stronger physically, but I felt that something was missing and may have a greater impact. I have spoken with hundreds of job seekers in the last year and in my assessment I believe that many of us are not career fit.
Lets look at Career Fitness as we would look at a health fitness, please pardon me as I am not a health guru, but I am speaking on the general terms of a fitness plan. When starting out on a health fitness plan we first set some goals such as weight loss, toning, or physically stronger. Then we being to look at ourselves in terms of diet (what we are eating), our activities, our weight, and our capacities to function; skills, strengths, cardio, stamina, etc. From here a plan is created either by you or, if you have the resources, a personal trainer. This is just the beginning of your fitness plan; now you have to put the plan in action, go to the gym, work your muscles, lungs and joints.
With this being said, are you career fit? How is your career "fitness"? As you make your resolutions for 2011, look at developing a Career Fitness plan in the same fashion you would develop a health fitness plan. The following are some helpful tips that are easy to use in helping develop a career fitness plan.
Identify Yourself: What are your skills, abilities, strengths and personality? Do this by examining your best/most fun work. Include your attitude to what you do. Simply ask, "who am I?" and "what do I like doing?" Break these down to get to specifics and the very foundations of what you LOVE to do.
Assess Yourself: Examine how well you perform your tasks using your strengths. Look at your demonstratable skills and abilities. How you perform is important. Assess your abilities based on 1) how frequent you perform a skill, 2) how confident are you in using the skill, and 3) how important is the skill in the performance of the task?
Engage Yourself: Have discussions with yourself about your goals, plans, what you REALLY want to do, the skills and competencies you want use. Ask when and how you perform and use your best strengths; its good to talk to yourself! Question what you do an how you perform to break down the process to see the inner workings of your performance.
Assess Your Career Environment:Look at available mentors, coaches and how you interact with them in a formal or informal environment. They may be right in front of you and you don't even know it. Examine internal and external opportunities to grow and learn. Our skill usage and talents are not restricted to "work", they are being used wherever you are. You also have to assess your work environment; do the company goals support your own career goals? Are you receiving performance feedback regularly? Your motivation begins and ends here professionally and personally.
Assess Your Career Resources: Examine your contacts, opportunities, and networks to see how they fit to your career goals. What are you doing to get you where you want to be? Then ask yourself if it is working. If not, you may have to retool your plan, job, company or other areas of your environment.
Analyze Your Educational Resources & Opportunities: Take a look at your educational accomplishments; degrees, certifications, and accreditation. Look at the availability of training in your company and outside on your own, up-learning, OJT, and/or higher degrees as they apply to your goals and plan. These educational resources opportunities can be formal or informal. Make sure they correlate to your career goals.
Assess Your Culture: Examine your personal and familial culture as well as how it fits into your career fitness plan. Would it be in your future to move for a new position, would you have support and resources to continue your plan. Would it be acceptable commute, spend longer or shorter hours, and/or travel.
To help you meet your goals and achieve career success, we recommend that you document your career fitness plan and set a timeline. Use your mentors and coaches to help keep you on track as well as motivated to keep moving. As with a health fitness plan, your career fitness plan is a new set of performance behaviors; when you engage these new behaviors you are using your skills, building them each day, and generating positive stronger performance.
This career fitness plan can also be used from an organizational career development planning aspect to generate positive business goal achievement.
Think of HRPartner Consulting as your Career Health Center. We provide Career Education, Assessments and "Fitness" Training to help exceed your goals.
