For decades, people thought that doing their job—and doing it well—was sufficient to ensure long-term career success, plenty of financial reward, and job security well into the future. Here is what that picture looked like:

In this model, managing your career was only a tiny piece of the picture—something that rarely came into play. You would only think about career management when it came time to stop working for a time (in the case of parents wishing to stay home with children, for example) or under extremely unusual circumstances (such as when someone wanted to actually change careers!).

Today, working professionals may change careers five to seven times before retirement. You read that correctly—they change careers, not jobs, an average of five to seven times! Many people are still only equipping them selves to deal with the old paradigm and are unprepared to navigate in the new reality of career management, which looks more like this diagram: