1,110 Days - Your Long Term Career Plan

August 27th,2008

Author: Rowan Manahan
Final Year: 1982
Biography: Rowan Manahan (1982) is the founder of Fortify Services, a Dublin-based consulting and career management firm. Author of Where's My Oasis? Speaker, trainer, husband, father, storyteller and dancing bear.
URL: http://www.fortifyservices.com

Is it important to have a long term plan for your career?
Common sense dictates that setting out on any journey without a destination in mind, or at the very least, heading out without some idea of where you are going, adequate provisions and a good map is a baaaaaad idea.

For the vast majority of us, our career is our sole source of income , all your eggs are in your career basket. This would be fine if the 'Job-for-Life' covenant between employer and employee were still in situ, but it hasn't been for some time now. Hence, your career needs nourishment, care, thought and lots of attention. You plan so many other things in your life, holidays, weddings, parties, Christmas  why not apply some of the same thinking for your working life?

How many people in your opinion actually have a yearly career plan and are these the people who generally find success and happiness in their job?
Experience shows me that there are high numbers of people starting out each year with great intentions, but very low numbers still thinking that way as the year comes to a close. At Fortify, we have two days that are crazier than all others  January 2nd and September 1st. These are the two days in which job melancholy seems to peak and large numbers of unhappy people lift the phone and call us. Now, it is true that those two dates also coincide with the biggest surge in the recruitment business, but the tenor of the calls we get centres more on "I can't take another day/week/month/year of this  get me out of here!" rather than a response to spotting a good opportunity in the market.

The literature suggests that approximately 3% of the population are naturally gifted career-planners and that the rest of us are playing catch-up on those lucky few. That would be about what you would expect to see if you were to grade everyone on a Bell Curve for this, on any one thing you care to measure about 2-3% of people will be extraordinarily bad and 2-3% will score extremely highly. What interests and surprises me is the upper quartile; those people who are capable of putting a plan into place and yet don't. On the surface, this seems to be a foolish and possibly self-destructive contradiction, but of course, the human species engages in lots of foolish, self-destructive and short-sighted behaviour.

The impediment that I most often hear raised to career-planning is a fear of failing. If you don't specify, to yourself or anyone else, what you want out of your working life, then you can't fail per se. Of course, you are highly unlikely to succeed to any great extent either. When it is put baldly like that, you can see this for what it is irrational, unevolved, circular thinking.

I have long contended that modern human beings are basically cave-men in good suits, that we have a thin veneer of civilisation pasted onto us. Back in the caves, life was much simpler and you didn't have to do much planning. As long as there was some meat in the coldest corner of the cave, you could pretty much relax. When the meat ran short, you hunted. In the globalised, 21st Century, knowledge economy, we need to get past this kind of reactive, cave-man thinking and use our opposable thumbs to pick up a pen and start planning!

Can you give us suggested steps to create a career plan?
To put a medium-term plan in place, you need to take it in three stages and it needs to encompass all the aspects of your life.

Stage 1: 10 Days
I would start by setting aside a little bit of time for the next 10 days. In that 10 days, you are going to take a small number of hours to delineate exactly what is making your personal and professional life less than perfect. On the working side, maybe your unhappiness stems from the fact that you have to work at all. Perhaps it is the nature of the company that you work for or the nature of the work that you do? BIG difference here. One needs a job move, for the other you are looking at the (fortunately rarer) circumstance of a career transition moving into a new line of work altogether. People are rarely clear about what exactly is making them less than chipper. So step one is to clarify that to the extent that you could explain it to a visitor from Mars. Then you can start thinking about what to do about it.

Stage 2: 100 Days
At the end of 100 days, you should have clarified what steps you are going to take to remedy the deficiencies and build off the strong points in your life. These need to be written down, concrete and timeframed. So, on your personal side:

* You may decide to do a baseline health screening and to improve your measure on weight, fitness, blood pressure or whatever.
* You can look at your family and friendships and decide who to devote more time to and where to cut out the deadwood.
* If a personal relationship is going somewhat sour for the want of some time and attention, you can re-invigorate it by placing real value on it and making real time for it.
* Have a passion that's just for you. This can be something physical, something cerebral or something social. Maybe you always wanted to get a black belt in Karate; to read all of Shakespeare; to take your love of cooking to the next level and enrol in a serious cookery school ...

In your professional life:

* You have clarified what makes you happy / unhappy in your working life. Now project that forward and decide what you are going to be and what you are going to be doing in the future.
* Start with desk-based research on the sector, and the organisations and roles you are interested in. Look at what the organisations say about themselves and look at what the sector (through a trade body or similar) says about the wider picture. Then you can look to the media and see what they are writing on this subject. Collate as many varying opinions as you can.
* If you don't have a thriving network, start laying the foundations. Re-kindle acquaintanceships with old colleagues, bosses, school and college friends. If your family is able to help, don't be shy about asking. Modern networking is not about nepotism or "Gissajob" thinking; it's about acquiring knowledge and, more importantly, foreknowledge of events in your working world.
* Identify what the people who operate at your desired level have accumulated in terms of experience, qualifications and training. Observe their personal approach and style. Be clear as to what makes them effective and successful in their working lives. And so on ...

Stage 3: 1,000 Days
This then, is the implementation phase. I think 1,000 days is a good bracket for a medium-term plan; it's long enough to effect meaningful changes and short enough that you are not having to crystal ball-gaze too far into the future economically, technologically or politically. The two things that you must invest during this phase are time and money, both of which are typically elements that people identify as making them unhappy in the 10-Day stage! Take a deep breath and invest.

I'm not talking about some Band-Aid, quick fix. Those don't work any more than fad diets , you always start out fired up and full of good intentions, but six months later you're still the same weight and mainlining chocolate! We all know that the answer to a weight problem is simple mathematics , take a few less calories in and burn a few more during the day and off comes the weight. Fitting that effort into a fast-paced, packed day is a challenge, so we all look for short-cuts or temporary solutions. You can't do that with your health and you can't do that with your career.

So what I'm talking about is a gradual, behavioural change. A slow-burn, slow-build approach to your career that improves your chances of success from every angle. By building it on the 10/100/1000 model, you are not rushing into anything, you are taking the time to think things through and you are introducing the changes that you need to make gradually. Effective career management is not rocket science. You don't need to be in Mensa to do these things. So I would say that it is simple, but recognise that it is not easy ...

What would be the main reasons a person would not pursue their 'Dream Job'?
A small percentage of the population are incapable or unwilling to pursue their dreams because they are not psychologically equipped to do so. Because consciously or otherwise, they don't fundamentally believe that they deserve happiness. The main reason I come across is an unspoken fear of failure. "I won't shoot for the stars in case I fall short and come crashing back to Earth."

This lowering of expectations and deferment of gratification is a very common human defence mechanism, but I think it is essentially defeatist and pessimistic. There's no reason to not go for it. There are excuses, pretexts and long-winded rationalisations, but there aren't reasons. Who on this planet cares more about you than you? Who on this planet is more deserving of happiness and success than you?

What advice would you give a person in regard to following their career dreams?
Come out of the cave. Lay down the skeleton of a plan. Flesh it out a bit. Don't chisel it into slabs of granite. Stay flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances. Go for it. Ready, aim, FIRE!

How would you promote a 'Just do it' frame of mind?
Confidence building is all about taking baby steps. I have two young daughters and when they have problems in the schoolyard and ask for help I, naturally, immediately give it. But I always try to let them discover the solution for themselves. The first question I ask is, "What would you like to happen?" so they are starting from a positive endpoint. Then we talk about what needs to be done to make that happen. If they are going way off track in their thinking, I usually say something like, "Can I make a suggestion?"

It's about letting people find their own way of sorting things out. If you set yourself some short-term, manageable objective and you achieve it, you will typically have a nice warm feeling of accomplishment. Get help on a few of those and then try one flying solo. Combine a few of those and off you go.

How important is it to be proactive in your job?
Professional market research and polling companies avoid emotive terms in their questions, unless they are deliberately skewing the reseach. If I asked 1,000 respondents, "Do you believe that cannabis should be de-criminalised?" I would get a mixed response. If I asked the same 1,000 people, "Do you believe that your mother, who has Multiple Sclerosis, should be sent to the pokey for smoking medicinal cannabis to alleviate her symptoms?" I would get a very different response. To my eye, the operative word in the question you asked question is not "proactive;" the operative word is "your". Your job, your life, YOUR happiness.

With the exception of the Public and Civil Services, job security is a thing of the past. Irrespective of your performance, of how well your department or division is doing; irrespective of the strides taken by your organisation on a local, national, continental or global level, your job can evaporate overnight.

Playing catch-up and reacting to a catastrophic circumstance like that is difficult and highly stressful. Job security today no longer resides in what organisation you work for, achieving targets or how well your department is doing; it lies in genuine employability (translation: transferable skills, knowledge, and attitude), connectedness and real insight into the workings of your sector. A small percentage of the population has got its act together on this. They have evolved an approach that insulates and insures their sole source of income. My mantra is that you need to come down from the trees, come out of your caves, and join them.

Rowan Manahan is a Consultant, Author, Trainer, Speaker, Blogger and MD of Fortify Services.

http://www.fortifyservices.com
Blog: fortifyservices.blogspot.com/
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/rowanmanahan