Steering Your Career

Copyright © 2004 by Don Blohowiak
Don@LeadWell.com | www.LeadWell.com

"A career does not make a person -- a person makes a career."
-- Janet Hagberg

The word career comes from the French. It literally means road.

The road through the landscape of work is increasingly circuitous, bumpy, and unpredictable, with some dead ends along the way.

There are few certainties and fewer guarantees in any given sector, industry or organization. But you can still manage your career -- by choosing what work you pursue, who you work with, and who ultimately benefits from your labors.

For example, you can be an accountant doing accounting in private practice, or for a big international widget maker, or for a local hospital or symphony.

For many people, careers in today's world are less about promotions, titles and pay, and more about skills, experiences and fulfillment.

ACTION to Take

• Review your career to date. Assess your progress, your marketability, and most importantly, your longings.
• Evaluate your trajectory. Is it time to lay in a new course?
• Look at your skills. Will they take you to where you want to head? What new capabilities do you need to add? How will you develop them?
• Recognize that your career aspirations can change, sometimes radically and not very consciously, as you busily engage in your career. Give yourself permission to not be stuck on a road you set off on many years or decades before.

Your new options may trade you lower pay, prestige, or upward mobility for time, freedom and contribution to society.

Or vice versa. You're in the driver's seat.

Lead Well® helps organizations to improve measurable results by developing their current and future leaders. For more information, please contact us. By phone, toll-free in the USA: 1-888-LeadWell (532-3935), or 1-609-716-9490. By email, Info@LeadWell.com.

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Don Blohowiak, a management consultant and popular conference speaker, is the author of several business books. The executive director of the Lead Well® Institute in Princeton, NJ, he may be reached at http://www.LeadWell.com/.

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Copyright © 2005, Don Blohowiak, Lead Well Institute

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