“Purpose is a goal toward which we are always working. It is the forward-pointing arrow that motivates our behavior and serves as the organizing principle of our lives. Second, purpose involves a contribution to the world.”
—E.E. Smith1
- Understand your own values and purpose to reimagine your own life.
- Hard skills are useful; soft skills are essential.
- Recognize market reality: the emergent world of work.
- Know how to ask the right questions for self-guidance.
- Communicating, networking, lifelong learning, and flexibility are necessary to your success.
- Reimagine career paths.
Values to Guide You: Find Your Authentic Self
Too many of us go from job to job, and fall into a career that seems “to have happened to us.” Others may have followed a career track, and succeeded at their jobs, but find they are unfulfilled, stuck, and seeking a better fit between their values and work.
You can take the entrepreneurial approach to a career just as well as to a start-up. You can begin with exactly the steps the entrepreneur follows: a process to identify your own values and how they can align with your career. Understanding yourself and how well you work with others are the best places to start in becoming an interconnected individual.
As Satya Nadella suggests, this “humanistic approach” to self and others is a core value to harness AI for the benefit of all: “how we experience the world is through communications and collaboration. If we are interested in machines that work with us, then we cannot ignore the humanistic approach.”2
Vision Matters
Let’s begin with a simple question. Who influences, mentors, and inspires you? Is it an author, teacher, family member, boss, peer? What did you learn or what impressed you about them? If you had never been inspired by anyone you can think of, then watch Randy Pausch: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams3 on YouTube. Pausch, dying from cancer, presents a lecture to an audience who knew him. He describes his life so his kids would know who he was, and in the process teaches the rest of us how we can approach fulfilling our own dreams.
We previously cited Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, as a visionary creating a future in which he can help to connect all entrepreneurs to markets through equal access to the global marketplace. His focus is on customers and employees—a refreshing alternate to the short-term quarterly profit motive of too many corporations, who put the stock trader first.
Each of us can have a vision.
Start with Your Authentic Self
Daniel Pink has developed a set of values that can be a start for your self-exploration.4 Determine how important each is to you. Then, assess which career goals align with your values (Table 5.1).
Table 5.1
| Autonomy | Our desire to be self-directed. It increases engagement. |
| Mastery | The urge to get better skills. |
| Purpose | The desire to do something that has meaning and is important. |
Derived from Pink, D.H. 2011. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.
Your goal should be self-efficacy: to make your career happen rather than let it happen. Knowing yourself and what is important to you are necessary first steps in taking charge of your life.
Chart Your Own Journey
You can improve your market value by understanding the market reality, and improve your capability to compete to get values-aligned work as you define it. Begin to chart your own journey, because you are going to have to navigate your own career.
Here are four questions you can use to help guide you:
Who Are You?
Start with a self-examination to ensure your values and activities are aligned, and how well you are “walking your talk”.
Jeff’s coach training school, the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (www.iPECcoaching.com), has a values assessment (Figure 5.1) that allows you to examine how your values are aligned with your actions.
Figure 5.1 IPEC Values Assessment
Assess your “lived experience”—the experiences you have accumulated that make you a unique knowledgeable actor. Mine those golden insights and start to compile those experiences that most satisfied you. From those experiences, create a list of your preferences and proclivities.
We have included Knack as one of our resources. Take the Knack game assessment (free to our readers on Jeff Saperstein career assessment) on your mobile device to determine your skills and aptitudes.
knack.it/bbddmm
Code: am22
You will receive scores that are indices comparing your strengths with a global database as well as show how you align with different career paths.
Who Do You Know and Who Knows You?
Networking enables you to connect with others to up your game, open mutual and shared opportunities, and to develop business. By business, we mean a very broad category of ways people work together to do things, enabling society to move ahead for the common good, enabling a business to grow, or enabling you to sustain yourself.
Aaron Hurst suggests that one can find purposeful work through the purposeful connections that platforms enable, connecting us to the world irrespective of geography or our individual circumstances. “The Internet has created a platform that has made it so easy to find people, products, and services that, in a sense, we are able to create the village again—though this time, we are not limited by our geography or social class.”5
What Do You Know? How Do You Keep Learning and Training?
It is essential to your career plan to establish a personal commitment to lifelong learning and training.
Vint Cerf suggests,
There is an intrinsic value of work and sense of self-worth: we all want productive, contributing, meaningful activity. Innovation both destroys and creates jobs, but most people who lost jobs will not be able to learn the skills necessary to do the new jobs. Many people born today will live to 100 and may work 80 years, but they will not learn everything they need to know in the first 20 years of life. Keep learning to stay productive and useful; learning to learn is more important than learning fast. What can you do with what you have learned? 6
Where Do You Fit?
Where you fit today is not where you may fit 10 years from now. The responsible role you play today in the current stage of your career may not be what you are responsible for 10 years from now. The winning strategy is to cultivate the awareness of where you prefer to fit, what environment suits you, and where you add value. With this knowledge, you can always work in a way that elevates you and makes you more sought after, without your being fixated on a particular field, job type, or skill.
Start from where you are now. Build your experience on what you know, but expand your comfort zone in terms of the region, field, or industry that you may choose in the future. The career path is no longer a straight line.
Choose Your Region Carefully
You may choose to work in varied regions such as the SF Bay Area, Denver, New York, Ireland, Bangalore, or any number of places during your career. Different regions expand your experience, making you more valuable because you have different contexts to bring. If you can be “an anyplace person” you can still live in one region and work virtually with several others. Being a geographically dispersed worker is becoming more the norm and the Internet enables both work mobility and living stability.
Regional clusters (as discussed in chapter 9) are magnets for the “Creative Class” of online-based professionals. They are now known as “superstar cities.” Richard Florida has described those superstar cities—such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles—and how they have become even more attractive in this technology-driven era:
They generate the greatest levels of innovation, control and attract the largest shares of global capital and investment, have huge concentrations of leading-edge finance, media, entertainment, and tech industries, and are home to a disproportionate share of the world’s talent. They are not just the places where the most ambitious and most talented people want to be—they are where such people feel they need to be. 7
Interconnected regions that are linked with superstar cities (such as Denver and Seattle) through the web will continue to thrive as they build regional wealth through the co-creation of ideas, businesses, and start-ups based on the adjacent possibilities of new technologies.
You Are Free to Cross Sectors
There is a permeable wall between sectors: government, universities, corporate, nonprofits, and start-up/entrepreneurial enterprises. Experience in each sector broadens your outlook and increases your professional contacts. You can employ different strategies. You could work simultaneously in two sectors, such as adjunct university teaching while conducting a private consulting practice or business. You can work sequentially in a large multinational corporation or government sector to learn the systems and then spin-off a start-up or become a vendor to that sector. You may choose to work in life phases: start in the private sector in your early-stage career and transition to education or a helping profession in your later-stage career.
Find a Culture That Fits You
There are different business cultures. Go to any company or organization and in a very short period of time, you will see the way they manage and treat each other, and how work gets done. You must develop a sixth sense, which you only get through lived experience, to know whether any one place is right for you. Can you identify the people who have spent 10 years in this company or this organization? Is that who you would want to become? Because that is the mold that is expected in the culture. You will not change that culture. That culture will change you. The more aligned your values are to the culture, the better suited you will be, the more successful you will be, and the more comfortable you will be. To see how past employees view a company or organization they have worked for in order to get a sense of the culture, visit Glassdoor, 8 a site that aggregates reviews from former employees.
Make the Transition to a Better Human Environment
Success in a transition may depend on your fit with the boss and the organization’s business culture. How can you tell if you will thrive or diminish? Sometimes, we are so eager to take a new job, close the deal, and “win” the offer, we may ignore signals that can predict whether the next opportunity will be a great career move or a regretted choice.
Perhaps, we may even make a good choice, then find the unit we were hired to work in is disbanded; the boss with whom we had great chemistry leaves; or our work description, project assignment, and role change.
Given that most of us will make several career and job transitions, it is important to “sniff out” problems that can derail us. Since no situation is perfect, be prepared to pivot and be flexible, but also become more discerning in judgment. If you know your own work style and preferences, then it will be easier to understand how you fit and can thrive within a work culture and management team that suits you. Inquire, research, and recognize signals that a boss or a company may be wrong for you. Develop relationships with clients, associates, and professionals, who can help co-create or introduce you to opportunities. Go for the longer-term match for your career development.
Organizational Structures
Are you more comfortable in a situation where you are creating structure in an innovative way or do you prefer systems where you have a clear role with dependable support? Writing as an independent blogger is different than being a journalist at the Financial Times, because there are certain standards and ways of doing business in a large organization. Consider working in a large organization early in your career, because then you learn best practices and industry standards. If you eventually jump off as an entrepreneur, you are transitioning based on understanding systems, and then adapting them for you. Your chances of being a successful independent contractor or entrepreneur are greater if you have some organizational experience.
Consider working at a large organization or the leading company in an industry, learn the practices, and make the human networking contacts, and then find a niche where you are servicing that company or you are servicing that industry.
Choose from Various Workplace Styles
Today, there is much greater flexibility for workplace styles, and more opportunity for people who want to fit their work into their life. Idiosyncratic people who do not like to be around other people can get work just as easily as people who are gregarious. The interconnected era enables virtual workers to be independently employed far more easily than was true historically in centralized, hierarchical workplaces.
An emergent trend in spontaneous order for workplace styles is workspace shared by independent workers who can be matched to create a revolving community, configured to create common experiences among individuals engaged in separate endeavors.
How Do You Add Value?
Your ongoing, lifelong education and training creates value for others as well as yourself.
What discipline do you master? You should master what the marketplace recognizes and values.
Develop a T-shaped profile to see how your breadth of experience and depth of expertise can be charted so you can understand and present your lived career experience in a way that can enhance your perceived value. The vertical bar on the T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a given field; the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own.9
Use LinkedIn Learning to see what you can learn in high-demand skills customized to your experience, and where to find thousands of recommended courses offered online.
What do you know how to do? Do you know how to create an app? Do you know how to run a meeting? Do you know how to take good meeting notes? Can you apply data to problem solving and decision making? These are specific skill sets that will help build your perceived value.
Do you understand other disciplines so that you can work on multidisciplinary teams and contribute to geographically dispersed work teams? If you know how to use platforms and you know how to work with geographically dispersed workers, you will be in demand, because that is how future work is going to happen.
How good are you in understanding other disciplines, so you can communicate with them? You do not have to do their job, but you have to be able to understand enough of what they do to be able to be a valuable player.
How well can you work with AI and cloud-based platform tools such as salesforce.com Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Amazon Web Services, Google Analytics, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Bluemix? Those interconnected platforms are going to be valuable for your future.
Learn to Compete to Collaborate so You Are a Valued Team Member
In school, you are graded on your own writing and test scores; it is your own work. These values are flipped in the work world. You do not get a lot of credit for what you do alone. You are valued in terms of how many people really want to work with you. Many major companies are evolving, organized around project teams. If you work in enough project teams, people know who you are. They are going to choose you. It is like sandlot baseball. You get chosen to be on a particular team, because others want to recruit you.
Other people bring you in and this is a very important part of work. How do you learn to share success? How do you learn to share credit? How do you learn to be a good helper? These become very important skill sets, because you will be successful if a lot of other people want you to be successful.
Become a Good Communicator: It Is Essential for Leadership
Can you learn to both give and receive signals in order to be an intelligent communicator and listener? Communications—informal and formal spoken, written, and “Netiquette”—is a generic skill you can work on to improve for the rest of your working life, regardless of sector, job type, function, or how you evolve your career. Be a good communicator. Consider how much more valuable you will be if you understand how to read signals in a meeting; read and give signals in a professional relationship, be it with a client, a colleague, or a manager. Know how to listen and respond to each of those roles. Know how to check on assumptions; and how to constructively critique others’ work.
Being an intelligent communicator and listener is a phenomenal skill. How do you translate that skill into being a valued team member? Understand how to follow directions and guidance. Know when to ask questions if you do not know what you are supposed to be doing and do not assume that you know the right answer.
Pivot and Be Flexible, so that When Circumstances Change, You Can Change with Them
Reid Hoffman advises:
Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges . . . your Plan A is what you are doing right now . . . You pivot when you need to change either your goal or your route to getting there . . . Career plans should leverage your assets, set you in the direction of your aspirations, and account for the market realities (p. 35, 59).
Flexibility and ability to pivot come more easily when you master something, and you have autonomy because you can work anywhere for anyone. If you know account management and project management, you have a better opportunity to fit in almost immediately in many teams, because most work now is on projects. Most projects need to be handled like accounts. While your title may not be account manager or project manager, knowing what those skills are and how to do those jobs help you become a valued team member. Recognize that going off on tangents or creating extra work that does not get your project where it needs to go are a negative. Complicating rather than simplifying is not valuable. Simplifying the complex is.
In summary, focus your game plan on these things in order to be a good team member: lifelong learning; being able to read and send nonverbal and verbal communication signals; and critical thinking, writing and speaking, and being flexible and able to pivot.
How Do Others Perceive You?
Some of the most important questions are: How do others experience me? How do I interpret others? Because how you show up and how you interpret or maybe misinterpret what is going on will be instrumental to determine what is going to happen for you and what is going to happen to you.
If you have curiosity, if you ask questions that are legitimate questions because you are really curious, particularly, if you are curious about what somebody else has done, you will be endeared to that person. Asking good questions is really important.
Develop a genuine interest in people and have a desire to serve and help others. If you can combine those elements in a single purpose, then you will be successful even if the external marketplace changes, and it will.
New Directions for Careers
Thomas Frey has developed 162 new job categories that are continually evolving and new ones are emerging. Consider some of these hot new skills and how they can be applied to you as you navigate your career.
Fourteen Hot New Skills10
- Transitionists—Those who can help make a transition.
- Expansionists—A talent for adapting along with a growing environment.
- Maximizers—An ability to maximize processes, situations, and opportunities.
- Optimizers—The skill and persistence to tweak variables until it produces better results.
- Inflectionists—Finding critical inflection points in a system.
- Dismantlers—Every industry will eventually end, and this requires talented people who know how to scale things back in an orderly fashion.
- Feedback loopers—Those who can devise the best possible feedback loops.
- Backlashers—Ever new technology will have its detractors, and each backlash will require a response.
- Last milers—Technologies commonly reach a point of diminishing returns as they attempt to extend their full capacity to the end user. People with the ability to mastermind these solutions will be in hot demand.
- Contexualists—In between the application and the big picture lies the operational context for every new technology.
- Ethicists—People who can ask the tough questions and develop standards to apply moral decency to some increasingly complex situations.
- Philosophers—With companies in a constant battle over “my-brain-is-bigger-that-your-brain,” it becomes the overarching philosophy that wins the day.
- Theorists—Every new product, service, and industry begins with a theory.
- Legacists—Those who are passionate and skilled with leaving a legacy.
Navigating your career is a lifetime effort. Focus on understanding yourself and how you relate to others, commit to transitions, and make ongoing effort to build your network through your reputation and contacts. Please check out Jeff Saperstein’s video for a brief explanation of career navigation.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXaoZU371fc
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1E.E. Smith. 2017. The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters (New York, NY: Crown), p. 78.
2S. Nadella. 2017. Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (New York, NY: Harper Collins), p. 204.
3R. Pausch. 2007. Really Achieving your Childhood Dreams, Video (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University). https://www.ted.com/talks/randy_pausch_really_achieving_your_childhood_dreams
4D.H. Pink. 2011. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us (New York, NY: Riverhead Books).
5A. Hurst. 2014. The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire of Impact, Personal Growth and Community is Changing the World (Boise, ID, United States of America: Elevate), p. 48.
6V. Cerf. 2017. “Institute for the Future,” Conference on Human Centered AI. http://www.iftf.org/future-now/article-detail/vint-cerf-presents-at-iftf-about-ethics-and-ai, (accessed July 29, 2017).
7R. Florida. 2017. “Why America’s Richest Cities Keep Getting Richer,” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/richard-florida-winner-take-all-new-urban-crisis/522630, (accessed April 12, 2017).
8Glassdoor. “Find the Job That Fits Your Life.” https://www.glassdoor.com/index.htm
9“T-shaped Skills,” Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills
10T. Frey. May 15, 2015. “162 Future Jobs—The Video,” Futurist Speaker Thomas Frey. http://www.futuristspeaker.com/business-trends/162-future-jobs-the-video