Career Road Mapping / Career Management – Part 2

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It has been awhile! Back in April I published Part 1 of this series about career road mapping, an innovative approach that I offer to corporations and professional societies using one page career maps of successful professionals within a targeted functional area as a way of providing career guidance and ideas to junior employees. Here is a link to that blog.

I presented this approach to a standing room only crowd in October at the North Carolina SHRM (Society of Human Resource Management) state conference. In addition to presenting the career road mapping process, I also provided an overview of five career development concepts:

1. A good career development plan will have a mix of both short term development goals and activities to improve skills in the current position, and of looking out 3, 5 or even 10 years at long term development goals.
2. Ultimately, each employee owns and is responsible for his or her own career. Only the individual themselves know what they want out of a career, what they like and dislike, what really gets them enthused about their vocation. We can provide tools to help employees discover their optimal vocations, but they need to do the work and explore within themselves.
3. Give thought to whether you prefer to be a specialist with a deep expert knowledge in a specific area, or a generalist who understands more of the “big picture” and enjoys moving across different functional areas. Also it is possible to switch between being a specialist and a generalist during one’s career.
4. Analyzing the next position should not be an emotional decision, but instead an analytical one taking into account the importance of different attributes of a job, and comparing current position to the possible new position. See below for a tool to use to do this exercise.

5. Mentoring is one of the most productive yet underutilized tools to use in career development. In fact I recommend having multiple mentors that could include leaders in your current position, someone in the job you aspire to next, and perhaps someone in the same life situation. Link to my August 17th blog on mentoring.

If you would like to discuss how I can help your organization with a career road mapping project, or if you want a copy of my presentation on this topic, please contact me, [email protected]

Alignment and partnership between business and community

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In last week’s blog, I summarized a workshop I presented on September 22 at the Carolinas Conference on Diversity, Inclusion and Engagement. The workshop and blog reviewed the growing need for competencies around diversity and global awareness for leaders in today’s fast growing diverse global economy.

In addition to the workshop, I also was one of six panelists on a “Leadership Panel Discussion” along with other business and community leaders. One of the questions posed to the panel was “Is there a need for alignment or partnership between community and business organizations in our constantly changing local or regional landscape? Any recommendations for fostering these partnerships?”

I offered four points:

1. Traditionally, corporations have taken the lead in community partnerships and promoting diversity. For example, IBM provided equal opportunity and equal pay for African American and female employees at least a decade before it became federal law. Today, many corporations include sexual orientation and gender identity / expression in their diversity policies, as well as offer domestic partner benefits whereas our federal government has been unsuccessful in providing these protections and benefits. Especially with the log jam in Congress today, corporations will need to step up and lead.

2. In today’s economy, corporate wealth continues to increase while personal wealth is decreasing. A recent Associated Press article (link to article) reported that in the past quarter, personal wealth declined by 0.3% while at the same time corporate wealth (cash stockpiles specifically) increased 4.5%. It only makes sense that along with corporate wealth increase comes additional responsibility to lead within the community utilizing these resources.

3. A very important way for corporations to help the economy and local community is to focus on business development projects in traditionally poor areas with high levels of unemployment.

4. Finally, corporations, as they participate in corporate projects should continue to encourage employees to individually get involved in their community. This can involve not overworking employees so they have the time to get involved in their communities, providing additional time off for participation in projects, and continuing programs like matching grants where corporations provide matching donations to their employee community contributions.