|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Current careers are almost unrecognizable compared to those of previous generations – from increased fluidity in workplaces, a change in the value of formal education – to the introduction of sophisticated technology. If predictability and stable career ladders disappear, we need to change our career management approach. I suggest we look at career management as a process where we make strategic and intentional career choices on a regular basis. The process is based on self-knowledge, understanding of the environment and self-determined measures of success, while requiring us to proactively direct our careers throughout life, continually matching self and environment and adjusting to changes in both.
The suggested view of career management provides the foundation for the 4S Career Management Framework: Situation – Success – Skills – Steps as an organizing system. This framework helps individuals navigate uncertainty with clarity, capability and intention.
Moreover, we need to be clear about how our immediate environment – sociocultural norms and family values – might have shaped our core beliefs that may either limit us or give us confidence in moving forward on the career paths we want to shape. Understanding the situation helps us see constraints and opportunities. However, environmental awareness without a personal interpretation of success may lead to imitation. Hence, career management requires clarity about what success means to each of us individually.
Once we understand how we define our career success, what enables us to pursue it? The answer is career management skills. Defining success gives vision. Skills provide capability. Without capability, success remains a dream. In unpredictable environments, career management skills provide more stability than technical skills.
The suggested 4S Career Management Framework focuses on the nine critical career management skills.
These skills are meta-capabilities that guide us across roles and industries. Self-awareness fuels strategic thinking. Strategic thinking informs strategic planning. Intentionality ensures that planning translates into purposeful action. Proactivity moves those intentions into motion. Adaptability sustains relevance in unpredictable environment. Cultural intelligence enables effectiveness across diverse contexts. Collaboration expands opportunity through developmental relationships. Storytelling communicates personal value and alignment to others.
While these meta-capabilities are presented sequentially, in real life they work as a system. They reshape and strengthen one another while we navigate evolving career contexts.
To respond effectively to a changing situation and to pursue an evolving definition of success, career management skills must be translated into action. The 4S Framework does this through an iterative process of steps: Me, Market, Match and ongoing Self-Management. Three initial steps were suggested by Klassen and Menges (2019). I believe it is critical to add a fourth – self-management component – due to a constantly changing environment and self.
Step 1: Me
The steps start with the “Me” step – a deep understanding of self by leveraging a skill of self-awareness – as a foundation for a successful career based on self-determined career success. Clarity about self-identity acts as a lifelong anchor for effective career decision-making.
Step 2: Market
Next is the “Market” step – determining professional opportunities through understanding environmental trends and identifying systematic constraints within macro situation.
Step 3: Match
The intentional alignment of “Me” and “Market” provides the foundation for career fit – the “Match” step. Greater compatibility between us and our jobs leads to higher job satisfaction and performance, as well as overall success of organizations in which we work.
Step 4: Self-Management
However, the situation around us evolves. We evolve. These sometimes self-initiated and sometimes unforeseen changes require us to actively engage in ongoing self-management by exercising agency in three interconnected domains:
Who we surround ourselves with
Current career management requires building and maintaining developmental networks – relationships with various mentors, coaches, sponsors, peers, family members – as opposed to fragmented and unintentionally built individual relationships. By consciously targeting diverse relationships, we can capitalize on the strengths of various people characteristics and the synergy that often comes from diverse opinions and knowledge. A collection of developmental relationships provides a variety of perspectives that can enrich our view of old problems while also providing potentially exciting and novel career opportunities. Developmental relationships may also contribute to other benefits, such as higher salaries, social support, increased life satisfaction, lower stress and overall life enjoyment.
2. Energy management
How we generate and protect our internal resources
An internal resource that many ignore but can really leverage as they have full control of it is energy – the capability to do the work. If we become more aware of how different thoughts, feelings, situations and actions impact our physical, emotional, mental and visionary energy, we can be more intentional about managing it. Learning to manage energy can have a unique, transformative power in our career management and beyond.
3. Job crafting
How we shape our work within constraints
Job crafting is a process in redefining and reimagining job design and the perception of it in a personally meaningful way to achieve various benefits. The potential benefits are a stronger feeling of security and control over our lives, ability to express our identity through job personalization, the feeling of belonging, enhanced motivation and energy, increased competence and contribution, improved health and well-being.
These domains reinforce one another. For example, developmental networks provide the support needed to craft jobs effectively; job crafting increases meaning, which enhances energy; higher energy improves collaboration.
Career management in the current world of work is not a one-time decision. As environments become less predictable, we can no longer rely on traditional career ladders to provide direction and security. The 4S Career Management Framework suggests a different source of stability: the ability to understand ourselves, interpret changing environments, define success intentionally and continuously adapt through action. In this sense, career management becomes less about finding a fixed path and more about developing the capability to navigate change with agency throughout life.
