A practical guide to landing jobs and loving your career.
Thoughtful planning and targeted action can make loving your career a reality. This book shows you how. Living Your Best Career is packed with practical, proven strategies you can use immediately to make your work life more fulfilling and meaningful. Whether you are just entering the job market or are an experienced professional, this book will equip you with specific tools to put your career on the right track – and keep it there.
Book Overview and Career Compass Process
Living Your Best Career empowers you to manage the full life cycle of your career. Each chapter is rich with examples and stories to bring your future career journey to life. When engaged with a Career Counselor we use a refined version of the insights from the book in a process we call Career Compass. Coupled with a simple, easily accessible software management tool the Career Compass process collects, manages, and automates the core networking activities required to move from Taking a Job to Owning your Career.
Career Narrative Development
Owning your career future requires understanding your unique journey so far. We work with our Clients to develop and deepen their career journey understanding and unique story. This highlights how each professional has arrived where they are through the jobs they have taken. Then we use the Career Compass process to build the career they will love.
Chapters 1 and 2 anchor this part of the process.
Paradigm Shift from Jobs to Careers
Understanding how leverage your job skills to create a great career is the most crucial paradigm shift our Career Compass Clients have to make. Internalizing why jobs are just options for your career forms the basis for this paradigm shift. Building from past jobs, creating a career vision and then engaging to make it happen requires planning, advocacy, and input from both yourself and others. We work with our Clients each week to ensure this process happens smoothly and effectively and that each Client is empowered to capture their career vision.
Chapters 3 through 7 cover how to do this.
Networking Redefined shifting from Contacts to Advocates
Who you Know (Contact) and who you Need (Advocates) requires a redefinition of networking and shifting of Contact to Advocates. Over time the biggest shift for managing your career is understanding the changing dynamic from What you know to Who you know as you move from taking jobs to making your career.. Our Career Compass process will show you how to capitalize on What you know and leverage it with Who you know according to your career interest over time. This will allow you to shape-value added conversations within your network. We use networking to refine the career story, to define the issues that will shape your career future and that will ensure you are truly better off after your next move.
Chapters 8 through 12 refine relationships, issues, and how to plan your career.
Engagement
“Issues-based advocacy conversations” form the basis for engaging with your redefined network. By focusing on mutually interesting value-added conversations with contacts from your network you will encourage Contacts to become Advocates thus greatly leveraging your network. We will work to define “issues” and then to refine interested parties to engage with from your network. This includes collateral development that supports a coherent story and vision of who you are and what you want to accomplish in the market with your career.
Chapters 9-18 cover this through to the offer stage.
Integration and Maintenance
Converting the great job you have found into an even greater career requires rethinking what your new job really is. We work with our Career Compass Clients to realize that every new job is really a two year option period for your career. This means each Client has a separate set of activities that start day one of the job they have worked so hard to get. By building Capital in three areas we help our Clients create stickiness and reduce the two year half life risk of most jobs. We organize this by focusing on building Capital in three areas: Political, Social, and Intellectual. Doing this has lead to great success and can make it far more likely that you will successfully convert the job you earned into the career you love.
Chapter 16 outlines the main points here.