“When making career choices, we need to consider which factors are more important to ourselves”
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account ” Fudan School of Management “(ID: fudanguanyuan) , author: tubules.
01 Two new ideas for career growth
Do you think career development is more like a marathon or a 100-meter race? According to the consulting company’s report, 58% of people worldwide are very eager for a good job or occupation, and the proportion of people aged 21 to 35 is as high as 64%. In all ages, 53% want to learn new skills to improve themselves. So the first new thinking I want to share with you is: vision thinking.
When we are planning our careers, we need to first take a long-term view, and train ourselves to see the perspective and the overall situation first, and then look back at each step of our feet. There is an idiom called high vision, which means that we should look farther, not just focus on the gains and losses of our feet.
When I used to be a management trainee instructor in the company, I often heard that they had such career confusion. After graduation, I found that other people developed better than myself (such as a better title, more generous income, etc.). There will be anxiety. At this time, I usually make an analogy. Everyone ’s professional journey is a marathon that lasts for 30-40 years. The first 10 kilometers you run into the top ten does not mean that you are still at the finish line. Can keep a smile, there will often be someone surpassing, someone falling behind, or even someone can’t finish the game. There are also a lot of such examples in the workplace. If you abandon the bottom line of professional ethics because of blindly pursuing the so-called success, the entire career will collapse. So we can’t just look at our eyes, but need a long-term preparation and planning.
The second way of thinking about drawing a career curve is: a growth mindset.
People with a growth mindset usually think that any professional ability and skill can be developed through acquired efforts, so they are more willing to accept challenges and actively improve their abilities and skills. People with growth thinking are usually more resilient. They think that encountering challenges can help them learn and grow, which means that there is more room for improvement, so these people will continue to contribute to the new era or continue to be external. Change to change and challenge yourself.
Toutiao founder Zhang Yiming once said that he has come to the conclusion from interviewing thousands of people in the past decade. Well-developed people usually have two characteristics: the first is curiosity. They take the initiative to learn new things, new knowledge and new skills; the second is that they remain optimistic about uncertainty. And these are the classics of growth thinkingType characteristics. Therefore, people with growth thinking prefer challenges, but also have the courage to jump out of their comfort zone and continue to expand their professional radius.
In contrast, people with fixed thinking tend to be more afraid of failure, fear of being denied, or fear of being laughed at, so they refuse to challenge. Such people’s growth space, or development space, will be greatly restricted. Although they also know that hard work will bring success, they are more afraid of failure, so they usually avoid active change.
In fact, everyone has these two aspects of thinking, just because the individual is different, the degree will be different, some people tend to grow thinking, and some to fixed thinking. In today ’s rapidly changing era, everyone must pay more attention to changes in the general environment and megatrends-how to find new tasks suitable for themselves in the times and organizations and actively participate in them to create more opportunities for new skills for themselves -This is something we have to think about from time to time throughout our future career.
02 Three key issues for career development
First question: what is your career vision?
Usually when we think about the future of our profession, the first thing we must determine is: what is our position? We can also call this positioning a career vision and career goal. The setting of a career vision is often related to the broad horizon of each of us or the level of knowledge.
When thinking about a career vision, we can first understand Herzberg ’s dual-cause theory, which believes that everyone ’s motivation factors include two:
The first is the basic factor. At work, due to some basic factors that fail to meet our expectations, we are usually dissatisfied, including money, working conditions, company policies or systems, team or department relationships, etc. If the basic factors are not good enough, job satisfaction will not be high, but this does not mean that satisfying these will make you love a job, just don’t hate it. This is like we do not hate a person, does not mean that you love someone, this is two different things.
The second is motivational factors, including challenging work, gaining recognition in the work, or that this work makes you feel that there is room for growth, personal development, and future. Motivation is often related to our inner pursuit and the meaning of our work.
Through the dual-cause theory, we can easily understand why some people are willing to work in non-profit organizations or charities. Although their remuneration is not high, we rarely hear the management of these non-profit organizations. People come to complain that employees have no motivation to work, because the social significance of work will bring them more personal satisfaction. Therefore, money is not the only criterion for measuring value. When making career choices, we need to consider which factors are more important to ourselves.
Under constructionCareer goals, in addition to taking your own interests and needs as a starting point, also combine your own organization’s goals and needs. If you can find the intersection between the needs of individuals and organizations, it will be a more practical setting of professional goals.
The planning of a career vision is actually a strategic issue. There is a saying in the business world, “Do n’t use tactical diligence to compensate for strategic laziness”, and setting our career vision is a very important one. Strategic starting point, we need to spend more time on this point.
Second question: What kind of workplace fuels do you have?
The essence of this question is what do you have? This includes what kind of knowledge, skills, professional experience, and interpersonal relationships you have … These are the workplace fuels that build our career curve.
The first aspect is about skills. In the context of the era when artificial intelligence is advancing very fast, what we need to have is transferable skills. I learned from a leadership report that the current transferable skills in the workplace mainly include four aspects: self-knowledge, communication, influence others and good learning (good learning is continuous learning). No matter what kind of position we are in or what kind of industry we are in, these four abilities are necessary, not outdated, and will not be eliminated by the influence of the outside world. This is transferable skills.
The second aspect is about workplace experience. We need to exercise more meaningful workplace experience. The famous Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell mentioned a point in “Alien”: the reason why the masters in people’s eyes can be remarkable is not that they are super talented, but that they have made continuous efforts Ten thousand hours of deliberate practice is a necessary condition for anyone to change from ordinary to excellent. Many people also agree with this view and are working hard for their 10,000 hours.
But when everyone focuses on 10,000 hours, they often ignore another word: deliberate practice. Taking the IT industry as an example, if an engineer is only satisfied with five years (10,000 hours of working time) and persistently writes code in a certain language, this is actually a low-level simple repetition, rather than continuous breakthroughs in his deliberate practice. Therefore, the experience gained by this simple repetition cannot be called meaningful experience. Especially in today’s era full of change, we must also pay attention from time to time, is there some work that can bring deliberate practice to ourselves? If you can let yourself acquire more and more work skills, your workplace experience will have a sublimation.
The third question: how to achieve a career vision?
If you have set your career goals and counted your current workplace fuels, the next question is how to achieve them? The essence of this problem is the career path.
The usual career path has three dimensions: width, depth and height.
What is width? The requirements for talents in the new era haveAfter switching from the original I-type talents to T-type talents, this is a trend of diversified capabilities. This means that we must try our best to create some experience and opportunities for us to have new skills to improve our career gold content within our work scope. For example, rotation, participating in cross-functional projects, and even acting as a slash in our organization.
As China enters a middle-income country, opportunities for job promotion will slow down. In developed countries such as Europe, the United States and Japan, a college student from graduation to retirement will basically have two opportunities for promotion, which is what we often say about the career ceiling. What should I do if I encounter a professional ceiling? The solution I agree with comes from Boya Education. We often call people who are constantly improving in the workplace “spiritual people”. They usually have a broader perspective and need to maintain the habit of continuous learning, which comes from their own knowledge and liberal education.
In the U.S., those with a relatively high income just after work are often engineering students, while graduates from Harvard or Princeton tend to have relatively low incomes at the beginning of their careers because the humanities and liberal education they receive are not in the workplace Work skills that can be directly applied. But if we pull the timeline to ten years later, you will find that people with a good humanities education background tend to come later. The current Internet era is an era of interconnection of all things and collaboration. We need to broaden our horizons and expand our thinking. This is the growth thinking just mentioned, so that we can work better with people.
What is depth? Depth is to continue to learn in depth in your own profession or professional field, have your own views and problem-solving skills, and at the same time establish your own professional image and label throughout the career development process. This dimension is not only applicable to some highly specialized functions, any profession has the value of embodying professionalism.
What is height? Height actually has two meanings: one is generally easier for everyone to understand, such as job title, position, and social status. As long as there is enough accumulation in the width and depth, and you are willing to take the responsibility of leading the team, so that others can see your ability and willingness, it will naturally come naturally. No one is born to be a leader. Most of his career begins with the accumulation of his own strength.
But I want to remind everyone that not everyone likes it and is suitable for leading a team. Some people think that it ’s good to be a leader, but they do n’t consider whether their traits are suitable for leading a team. Because taking the team to face many people’s heart and humanity issues, it is not simply 1 + 1 = 2. Do n’t follow suit when determining your career goals. It is recommended to do some assessments of personality or traits to understand your leadership potential in advance, or you can talk to HR and listen to their suggestions. Usually they are in this regard. More professional and rich in resources.
What is the meaning of the second level of height? Means to others orThe person has a continuous impact on society, which is internal and invisible. For example, Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE who passed away last month, is one of the few examples of promotion from the bottom to the top. After he retired, he still went to various places to give lectures and tutoring and write books, which enabled his management practice. Guide the latecomers. In many cases, the external things will gradually fade away with time, and the height and thickness of the quality of thought will last forever.
03 How to realize your professional development plan
After thinking about two new ideas and three key questions for career development, you may say, “I understand the truth, but what should I do?” Here is a story to provide you with an OKR approach.
I once worked as a high-potential talent coach. I met a high-potential talent who is engaged in project management. His personality is very outgoing and he is good at dealing with people. His professional vision for himself is to become the sales leader in a certain area. In order to exercise his social ability and influence in different groups of people, he set himself an action development plan to participate in the company’s community similar to Take talk. In less than half a year, he became the leader of this community Moreover, the entire community has also become a popular community of the company.
His O (Objective Objectives) is to become the leader of the sales area, and his KR (Key Results) is to enhance the social ability and influence of different groups of people. One of the actions he took was to join the company’s community and become the leader of the community. In this process, he not only established his work and social circles in different departments, but also created his own IP, and also improved his professional skills and personal influence. So as long as you work hard, you can definitely find your own growth path.
Some people will ask, when planning my career future, do I need to take advantage or should I make up for the shortcomings? I believe this answer is different for different people. If it is a long-term development, it should be based on advantages, and short-term goals can use shortfall strategies. Work that is done with innate qualities or talents will definitely be more enjoyable and achieve good results. If you are born with some aspects that are not very good at it, or if you are mediocre, no matter how hard you try, you will have little effect, so it is difficult to persevere. Therefore, when planning our own career path, we can look at the three angles of height, depth and width, and combine our advantages and available resources to formulate a relatively feasible action plan.
Summary Summary
First of all, a career is a journey of 30-40 years, it is a marathon, we need to make a long-term preparation and maintain a state of continuous improvement to achieve.
Second, workplace fuel is the foundation of our journey, and we need to continueLearn, practice and accumulate.
Third, some accidents will occur at any time during the career journey. When encountering accidents, actively face the changes and use growth thinking to look at all the uncertainties.
Career life is a big part of life. We should try our best to integrate it into a broader life pursuit and extend our horizons, so that we will be more calm, not just looking at short-term gains and losses.
Finally recommend a How Will You Measure Your Life? This book is from Harvard ’s famous professor Clayton Christensen, who talked about the uncertainty of career planning and combined himself His growth experience shows how he constantly adjusts his career goals, and finally achieves his satisfaction, which has certain reference significance for many professionals.