Strategies for Career Management 

If you actively manage your career it will be easier to make a job or a change when you are ready because you will have focused on what type of career growth is best for you. As you can imagine, you will do a much better job of this if you are not in a crisis: not traumatized, not panicky about your job or your financial resources or with a pending deadline.

It is important, of course, that you know yourself well. Think of career management as marketing management. You have a product to develop and manage and that product is yourself. And, just like any other marketing function, you can't really do a good job with it unless you are clear about  the strengths of the product and what message you want to get out to people.

For many people this is a challenge. In fact, many of our most talented clients at The BrownMiller Group have a difficult time developing a clear voice that positions them well for their next career move. This is because many of these clients have been ushered along in their careers...either by the changing needs of a corporate structure or by people who have invited them to "come work for me." The result is that many clients have never really had to market themselves: they've never had to do the hard work of inventorying their skills and experience in order to write a strong resume or of inventorying their work related accomplishments so they could do well in an interview.

Perhaps the most important task in career management is to sharpen your thinking about best fits and work environment, to manage your career from the "inside" rather than allowing others to do this from the outside. Developing this vision of yourself enables you to develop a "marketing voice" to promote that vision. Here are six things you can do to develop your strategic thinking about your career path.

1.  Keep track of the details of what you have accomplished at work. Be thoughtful about your productivity and document the skills you have developed and the scenarios under which you have contributed. This tracking will certainly help you during performance appraisals, especially when you need to negotiate something (like salary!). It will also help you when you need to update your resume. This is a fairly easy thing to do on an ongoing basis and, as you can imagine, much harder to do after significant time passes.

2. Another helpful strategy is to keep an "ideas" file to help you develop your sense of the types of jobs and functional areas you are drawn to. This file can include clips from the newspaper of articles about people or companies of interest, business cards with a note or two about someone you have met, or want ads and job descriptions that capture your imagination. Not only will an ideas file hone your thinking about career areas of interest but an added bonus is that it will be a very helpful resource if you decide to start a job search.

3. A third strategy is to learn how to work with your boss. Whether you believe your boss to be a gifted leader or not, your job is to become your own personal expert on how your styles mesh and what you can do to strengthen this working relationship. Some of your best learning may come from your most difficult relationships. For instance, if you are a big picture thinker and your boss tends to begin and end with the details surrounding a project, learning how to gather the information necessary to gain credibility with your boss will be a skill that will help you in future working relationships.

4. Put deposits in the networking bank by staying in touch with people when you don't "need" them. Develop these relationships by participating in informal office functions, professional associations, and larger organization-wide functions.

5. Look for mentors. Though it would be ideal if there were a formal, agreed upon relationship, this is not absolutely necessary. You can learn a lot about observing someone that you admire. You can also ask for advice or feedback on a one-time basis without having an ongoing relationship.

6. Finally, when you decide to make a job change, honor your intuition. In career counseling we find that those who end up in difficult work situations can usually recall a sense of the potential negatives during the interview. Interviewing for a job is a lot like getting married. If things bother you when you are dating, they most likely will drive you crazy when you are married and the romance has worn off.