Chapter 6

Creating a New
Career Path

Not only to survive but to experience success in the rapidly redefining, reshaping, and restructuring world of work it is necessary to control your career path-way and your professional progress. And, considering the probable length of your work lifetime, you want to feel passionate about what you do and where and under what circumstances you do it. Your training, HRD, or workplace learning and performance work should challenge you to grow, to learn, and to expand your professional horizons. It's important to your professional success to create a vision that focuses on your future career direction and enables you to identify the most practical path to reach it. When the time comes to reflect on your life's work and its professional outcomes, we hope it will be with satisfaction and a sense of completion about attaining your career dreams and fulfilling your potential. It's not enough to have a vision; you must transform it into something tangible by setting goals, objectives, and strategies for living your dream. How do you go about doing this effectively and efficiently? What is the key for being in charge of your career?

At the end of this chapter you'll find exercises that enable you to develop a vision for your life's work. Practical Exercise 2 prompts you to reflect on how and why your work is important to you and Practical Exercise 3 presents a framework and strategy for making the life's work you envision a reality.

The Professional Design Plan Defined

The key to directing your professional life is to lay out the larger career picture and then fill in the details of your professional goals and the means to achieve them. A professional design plan (PDP) is a blueprint for how, when, and where you can build your career from the dream in your head to an action plan. And just like an architectural plan it is revised, modified, reduced, or expanded depending on changes in needs, interests, and circumstances. A PDP is a plan in progress—adaptable, flexible, and reflective of whatever your situation is at any moment as you move through work and personal life experiences. In addition, a PDP can evolve and shift with relevant changing marketplace and business trends and issues.

To be able to design your own professional path, you must

• understand your life purpose and align your career goals with it
• know your strengths and weaknesses
• write out your plans
• set accountability checkpoints
• concentrate on reaching your target and be aware of barriers and difficulties
• track career movements and progress
• demonstrate your attention to detail and organization
• indicate a level of commitment to achieve your ideal position.

A PDP provides a structure in which to accomplish these tasks and enables you to control your career direction and professional activities for ultimate personal success.

You want your work to produce high-quality results but it's easy to fall into a rut when you know the job thoroughly, your boss is satisfied with your performance, and your work environment and culture are comfortable. Developing a PDP will motivate you to take responsibility for your career by seeking challenges and doing what you want to do rather than doing what is easy and convenient. A PDP establishes a strategic plan with a long-term perspective on your career. As a working document, it focuses your attention on your goals and the everyday tasks you need to do to prepare, improve, and advance effectively and efficiently toward your purposeful and successful work.

Importance of the Plan

Thinking about what you'd like to do, brainstorming about possibilities—What if I did this? or Can I actually do that?—is quite a different experience from writing out specifics and detailed action steps. Suddenly, in committing a concept to paper, what was once vague and idealistic becomes a workable possibility. A PDP is a tangible document that

• gives you the means to refine and work out an overall strategy to manage your career destination and professional experiences
• allows you to develop a workable, comprehensive, practical action plan to accomplish your professional aim
• empowers you to individualize a design to reflect what you want and when you want it, and to declare your intentions to yourself and others
• spotlights what you need to do to fill in the gaps in competencies and skills to prepare for your move to the next work stage
• pinpoints a set of related tasks and allows you to arrange them in logical order
• commits you to action by providing a format to turn your ideas and dreams into substance
• targets the priority tasks for placement at the head of your to-do list
• serves as a measurement tool for monitoring your progress and assessing needed revisions.

Being able to create a PDP is a career management survival skill that helps you fill your professional life with purpose and success and establish a way to balance work and personal lives. Remember that the plan isn't static. You must revise it as you grow and develop professionally, adapt to unexpected situations, and take advantage of opportunities. Keeping the plan up-to-date helps you hold sight of

your career vision so things don't fall through the cracks. And, most valuable of all, it acts as a deterrent to feeling that you've lost control. It's central to managing your career and your professional choices.

Defining Fulfilling Work

Much emphasis has been placed on having an ideal career vision that encompasses what you consider to be fulfilling work. You should feel good about your work, its outcomes, and the rewards you receive. When the time comes to look back at your professional life, what is it that you want your career to reflect about you and the work you did? Whether entering the training, HRD, and workplace learning and performance arena or contemplating a career move or professional shift within the field, if you haven't written out your definition of fulfilling work, now is the time to do it. Practical Exercise 2 at the end of this chapter will guide you through a comprehensive description of your ideal work scenario, and through that effort you'll discover the characteristics of your fulfilling work.

When professional contentment and doing fulfilling work come together, your ideal job situation has become a reality and that is wonderful! Only you can determine if a position or work situation is a good fit and meets your work values. What does fulfilling work mean to you? People who are happy to go to work every day feel they are

• contributing to society in a general way
• meeting organization or client needs
• fully using their skills and abilities
• receiving compensation and benefits that meet their needs and are fair rewards for their efforts.

Values and sources of satisfaction change at different stages of your life and with different specific life experiences, including work ones. Therefore, how work fits harmoniously into your everyday world will vary at specific points in your life-time. What was fulfilling at one phase of your professional life may not be so at some other time. A smooth transition from one career move or professional shift to another depends on how clearly you can express how and why your values and

sources of satisfaction from the workplace have changed. Those two factors, values and sources of satisfaction, should be connected in your life. When they're out of sync at work, conflict, stress, frustration, and unhappiness result.

It's important to be aware of when your work situation does not dovetail with your present or future lifestyle and to know what is needed to rebalance them. For example, if you're planing to make a career change into training, HRD, or workplace learning and performance, be certain you know why you're dissatisfied with your present profession and position. If you're intending to change jobs within the field, why? Are you burned-out or in a rut? If yes, why? Have your priorities in life changed and, if so, how does that affect what you'd like to do professionally? Do you have vague feelings of discontent with your life in general and, if so, how will changing jobs help? Is it enough to be earning a living, contributing to the support of your family, and doing your job well? Or do you feel that there should be more to a fulfilling work life?

To answer situational questions like these, you first have to define fulfilling work for yourself. You probably will define this quality more than once in your lifetime. With changes in your personal or professional situation, different combinations of definition criteria emerge, and shifts in your thinking should appear in your PDP.

A statement of fulfilling work includes the following qualities:

• your ideal job description
• your ideal clientele
• your ideal scope of your impact
• your ideal work environment and culture
• your ideal compensation and benefits.

Turn now to Practical Exercise 2 on page 87 and discover the characteristics of work that you would consider fulfilling.

Elements of a Professional Design Plan

With a PDP, your overall career path and its details can be examined. You draft and redraft your plan as often as needed until it accurately reflects your career vision. Think of the PDP as a template for spelling out your career plans and professional activities. Its elements provide a format and the space to think about what you need to do, what you're willing to do, and what you can do to achieve your career dream. They're aids for filling in the details. The PDP comprises the following seven elements:

1. career calling statement
2. description of professional niche
3. long-term and short-term goal statements
4. practical considerations
5. action plan
6. interim measurable success milestones
7. adjustments and revisions.

Career Calling Statement

What kind of work defines your career calling? How does it meet your definition of fulfilling work? What sort of responsibilities really get you excited on a daily basis? A PDP starts with a statement describing your ideal professional training, HRD, or workplace learning and performance life. This statement should be written clearly and specifically so that there is no mistake about

• what you want to do
• why you want do it
• what tasks and activities you'll be doing
• where you'll be doing it
• what other people will be involved
• what it will feel like to be doing it
• upon achieving it, how your life will be different from the way it is presently.

A career calling statement explains how you will use your abilities and skills to benefit others—individuals, organizations, or society—and to benefit yourself and your family. It shows that, from your perspective, your work makes a difference for you and for others, and that when the time comes to reflect on your professional accomplishments, you'll feel that you left your mark on society. Here's an example of a career calling statement

I want to be an independent consultant working with executives for their own professional development and career success as leaders. I believe this will allow me to reach my fullest potential as a human resource specialist and to do it in my own way, at my own pace, and with flexibility of schedule and hours to spend time with my family.

Writing out a career calling statement stimulates you to move forward and energizes you into action. It's both a guiding image and a baseline for establishing your goals, objectives, and activities. You may need to revise and refine this statement more than once to make it clearly communicate your point of view so others can know exactly what you're aiming for. Without setting down a career calling statement that focuses your professional desires, it's hard to create your unique place or professional niche in the work world.

Professional Niche

When you bundle specific professional competencies, skills, experience—your individualized expertise—you create your customized place in the work world. Think about your career calling and what type of background and abilities it will take to turn that vision into a real work situation. What technical and transferable qualifications and specific knowledge are pertinent to your career and professional goals? It's important to be as specific and comprehensive as you can be, particularly giving thought to what you lack and need to obtain or develop. The missing qualifications become part of your short-term goals and plan of action development.

To illustrate this plan element, let's return to the consultant/coach example we used for our career calling statement. This customized professional niche includes seven years spent training mid-and senior-level managers and administrators in leadership, communications, and facilitation; a BA in psychology; an MBA in HRD; and experience in the telecommunications and computer industries.

Long- and Short-Range Goals

Goals are targets that point toward a predetermined desire or want. They transform your career calling into functional declarations of what you want to achieve professionally. They are specific, realistic, outcome oriented, and measurable intentions. Long-term goals, presenting the broader picture of what is to be attained, are those to be achieved in three to five years. They represent your future and act as a lodestar to motivate you to act. Short-term goals, giving you a more manageable timetable for ensuring that your ultimate goals will happen, are those to be achieved within 12 to 18 months. They keep you focused and clear about what you need to do and prevent you from getting confused or sidetracked. For instance, the independent consultant/coach example lists the following goals:

• long-term: start a consulting practice within three years
• short-term: complete a success-coaching certificate program within the next year.

Don't view your professional goals in isolation. Rather, view them in the context of your life goals and current personal situation. This is very important not only for keeping a balance between work and personal lives, but also to have the best chance for achieving the career success you want. If you don't take into account such practical matters as resources and limitations, you may not be able to move toward your ultimate career vision in a timely, productive fashion. Not giving thought to practical considerations when setting your professional goals can lead to stress and frustration at both the work and home fronts.

Practical Considerations

A beautifully clear set of goals isn't enough. You also must think about the impact that practical matters can have on your chances for success. Otherwise, problems may occur when you try to implement your plan of action (the next element). Without practical considerations factored into your strategy for accomplishing a set goal, you risk delays, setbacks, and failure.

Practical considerations consist of two factors:

1. needed resources
2. realistic limitations.

Resources are assets—support people, available funds, physical space, and equipment needed at hand to make a set goal happen effectively and efficiently. For instance, continuing with the consultant/coach example, these resources are required: budget/capital funds for start-up costs, an office, and professional services (that is, an accountant and a lawyer).

Realistic limitations are aspects in your life that can restrict the amount of time, energy, and resources you can devote to a particular goal—family responsibilities, financial obligations, long work hours. Unless you are aware of these limiting elements and how they can act as barriers to your plans, you can't make the necessary adjustments and accommodations. In our consultant/coach example, attention has to be given to the following realistic limitations: travel required for current job, a recently acquired mortgage, and two children under five years of age.

Your Action Plan

Career management is a mindset whereby you stop, reflect, and decide on your best course of action for achieving a set of goals within their given practical confines. When you've weighed the practical issues that bear on your career goals, it's time to create an action plan. The action plan is the heart of a PDP. This is the “How do I get there?” part—what puts the PDP into motion. Most of your time and energy will be spent carrying out the steps and activities you outline here.

Strategize carefully so that the result will be what you want as effectively and economically as possible with little disappointment.

Think of each short-range goal as a project that you need to coordinate and complete. What are your procedures and tasks? What are your limitations, resources, and deadlines? Lay out the steps and activities logically, chronologically, and practically with timelines to track progress. The stated steps and activities are your objectives.

Your action plan keeps you focused on your destination and its route, preventing you from wandering too far off course. For instance, a plan of action to accomplish the short-range goal of being certified as an executive coach might include these steps:

1. research five coaching institutes by (date)
2. submit application to chosen institute by (date)
3. start course of coaching training by (date).

Once you've accomplished all of your short-range goals, you're ready to initiate your long-range goal and begin another cycle of steps and activities. A PDP plan of action is dynamic and flexible, allowing you to update it as needed. It should operate at a level of proficiency that's within your comfort zone.

No matter how well you think through all the aspects of your plan of action, however, if you don't have the required measurable success benchmarks, you won't know how far you are from achieving your goals.

Interim Measurable Milestones of Success

You need to establish regular checkpoints in your plan of action for monitoring progress toward your goal. It's critical that you don't head too far along a particular pathway without determining what is working and what isn't. For instance, in our consultant/coach plan, specific calendar dates are set for a review. Tasks are checked off when completed or modifications are made for uncompleted activities or unmet deadlines. Sub-milestones are important to a review of whether your plan of action is on track and on time. They allow you to determine which strategies and activities are satisfactory and which are not working to meet your needs. Milestones let you confirm that your invested time and energy are producing the intended results, and help you decide when and how to modify your PDP.

Adjustments and Revisions

Finally, periodic reviews of your plan help you stay focused, committed, and motivated. Did your scheduled activities and tasks actually happen since you last reviewed the plan? Check them off as complete. For those items that you didn't

finish, give reasons why you didn't. Think about how satisfied you are with the status of your action plan. Decide what you can do to improve your efficiency and success levels before the next scheduled success milestone check-point date. Can you reschedule all or any of the missed tasks? Do any of your short-term goals or their activities require modification? Look ahead to the next few months and note what tasks should be happening. Think carefully about a possible domino effect caused by what didn't take place in this last checkpoint period.

There will be other times when you need to refer to your PDP and its success milestone results for guidance and information—as part of a yearly life management assessment, for a job search or marketing project, or when volunteering with a professional organization.

Turn to page 88 and begin Practical Exercise 3. Complete as much as you can at this time. Remember that this is a work in progress and that for some items you may need more reflection time.

As you put your PDP into action and begin to undergo career moves and professional shifts, you'll experience the ups and downs of transitioning. Moving from one work situation to another—whether it's taking on a new job or new authority level, or becoming an entrepreneur, or switching to a different role or function in the field—will require a change in your mindset about your place in the profession. It's important for you to experience a successful and easy transition stage and to be positive about the change in your status. The next chapter will discuss professional development and its role in building your career.

 

Practical Exercise 2: Defining Fulfilling Work

Directions: Describe what fulfilling work means to you in terms of ideal work goals you would like to reach: position; audience; workplace; work scope; and earnings and benefits. Be as specific as you can.

 

A.  What would I like to be doing? Describe your ideal position. Include the skills and competencies you'd use, the responsibilities you'd have, and the activities in which you'd engage.

 

 

 

B.  Who would I be serving? Describe your ideal audience. Include the type of organization, industry, and clientele or customer with whom you'd be working.

 

 

 

C.  Where would I like to work? Describe your ideal work conditions. Include the organization type, work environment, organization culture, geographic location, and organization size.

 

 

 

D.  What would be my ideal scope of work? Describe how narrow or wide the impact or results of your work would be. Include whether you would work with individuals or groups; locally, regionally, nationwide, and/or globally.

 

 

 

E.  What would be my compensation and benefits? Describe your ideal yearly salary, bonus, vacation and sick days, medical and dental coverage, plus other benefits that would meet your needs (for example, day care, life insurance, education tuition).

 

 

 

 

 

Practical Exercise 3: Drafting a Professional Design Plan

Part One: Calling Statement, Niche, Goals, and Practical Considerations

Directions: Describe each of the four elements listed below in five or fewer sentences.

 

Career Calling Statement: Include in your statement what you want to do, why you want to do it, the tasks and activities involved, the geographical/physical location, other people involved, feelings it will generate, and its impact on your life.

 

 

 

Professional Niche: Describe the professional competencies, skills, expertise, and accomplishments you plan to bundle to create your customized place in the training, HRD, or workplace learning and performance field. Include both the technical and transferable qualifications specific to the career and professional goals that you'll describe below. If there are particular qualifications that you lack but plan to obtain as part of your short-term goals, include them here.

 

 

 

Goal Statements: Describe your professional goals in terms that are specific and measurable, including a date for completion and the expected results. Show how they fit into your life goals.

A.  Long-term goal (three to five years):__________________

B.  Short-term goals (one to two years): List as many as you need to prepare for initiating your long-term goal:

1.
2.
3.

Practical Considerations: List all the needed resources and realistic limitations you can think of that will affect your strategy for accomplishing your set goals and lessening your chances of delays, setbacks, or failures. Be as specific as possible.

A.  Needed resources

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

B.  Realistic limitations

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Part Two: The Action Plan

Directions: Think of each short-term goal as a project you need to manage and complete. For every goal statement you listed above, lay out in chronological order the requisite steps or activities, including deadline dates. Take into account the practical considerations that you spelled out above as you start this listing.

 

Part Three: Interim Measurable Success Milestones

Note: Complete this part each time you measure your success milestones.

Directions: Set an accountability checkpoint schedule to monitor your progress in achieving every one of the short-term goals you listed in Part One. It's best to set your checkpoint frequency at not less than monthly and not more than quarterly.

 

Part Four: Plan Adjustments and Revisions

Note: Complete this part each time you measure your success milestones.

Directions: Review input from Part Three. Complete the following questions to record your thoughts about your progress in completing short-term goals and moving toward your long-term goal. Assess what adjustments and revisions are necessary to keep your PDP on track.

 

A.  Am I satisfied with the status of my action plan? Why or why not?

 

 

 

B.  What specifically can I do in terms of practical considerations to improve my efficiency and success levels before the next checkpoint date?

 

 

 

C.  What specifically can I do in terms of my own mindset to improve my efficiency and success levels before the next checkpoint date?

 

 

 

D.  Do I need to make any adjustments or revisions to my PDP to keep it realistically on target and on time?______________

If no, why do you feel you shouldn't change the PDP?

 

 

 

If yes, describe all of the adjustments or revisions needed. Why are these changes necessary? How will they improve your situation and make it easier for you to accomplish your goals?

 

 

 

Reward: After completing each interim success checkpoint and making any necessary adjustments and revisions to your PDP, reward yourself in a fun way for sticking to your planned evaluation schedule and for your accomplishments. If a project has been completed, do something special and share your success with family and friends.