Threshold Consulting: It's Your Life, Own It!

Starting Anew: Tips for (Truly) Managing Your Career!

This is the first post in a series of monthly advice in association with the Career Collective, a group of professionals who collaborate to provide guidance for job seekers and careerists. This month we advise job seekers on how to make the most of the new year.

A New Year brings new resolutions, and experts in a wide variety of areas offer up their advice for how to have a better life starting this year. My expertise centers on career development, which, in many people’s minds suggests I’d be offering advice on how to land that dream job...or, in this economy, a job! But that’s not what I want to do. Instead, I want to get you thinking about and taking steps to truly manage your career – for the long run.

From what I’ve seen, too many people approach career management and transition from a purely job search perspective. This means they tend to focus on short-term tactics: pull together a resume and cover letter, get business cards, surf the job boards, “apply” for jobs, and attend career fairs and networking events. Goals in this process can often be very limited, and often revolve around getting a position similar to a recent one, but maybe with more responsibility and better pay and working conditions. Well, or so it seems. In fact, without managing your career, you can really get stuck in “same old, same old,” and be looking again.

Of course, adding to the challenge is the fact that the world has changed – and stubbornly continues to do so. For starters, technology has brought big disruptive changes to the way companies get work done – and to the way they source talent. Add to that the competition brought on a deep recession and “jobless” recovery, and you begin to see why using a job search model of change just won’t do.

To succeed in this new environment, you need to have great personal clarity about what you want, what you offer, and who needs to know about it. Said another way, it’s all about cultivating a personal brand and gaining visibility as well as credibility. It also means having the ability to build trust, in communities of shared interest with people who matter to you and for whom you’re relevant!

Surround Yourself with Smart People

Recently, my friend, mentor, and colleague Carol Ross pointed me to a blog post about the advantages of surrounding yourself with smart people. Certainly, Carol is a very smart person and I am fortunate to have her in my circle of friends and colleagues. Yet, in stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, I realize that I’ve made it a good habit to connect with and be surrounded by smart people – and from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Of course, I’ve connected with lots of career professionals who bring lots of smarts to what they do. Interestingly, I’ve meet many of them online – mostly on Twitter. Over time, I’ve learned what they do for their clients and valued their shared expertise. In many respects, they have stimulated my own thinking and contributed to my own professional grow. That’s the value smart people bring to you, they help you grow.

So, imagine my pleasure in learning that several of these great folks have formed a group and asked me to join. Called the The Career Collective, this group of 21 professionals:  “…help job seekers via a new online community …[by using]… his or her own blog to respond to a timely question that vexes many job seekers. Career Collective participants will then link to other members’ responses so readers will have easy access to a variety of viewpoints.”

So, once a month, I’ll be addressing career management questions here on my blog, and linking to colleagues’ posts. I think this is important and timely. In the words of The Career Collective: “It’s not a “come as you are” job market. Today’s successful job hunters must be armed with information and the ability to use tools that may not have existed the last time they were vying for a new opportunity. The news reports that there are anywhere from four to six people for each job and the Bureau of Labor Statistics marks the average job hunt at 25 weeks, with many highly qualified professionals in much longer searches.”

So, yes, timely and critically important. I hope you will join us for great career advice from some of the smartest folks you can surround yourself with.

Self Absorbed is Not a Personal Brand

Recently, I happened upon a Twitter conversation in which there seemed to be agreement that personal branding is flawed and self-centered. Since there were resume writers in the conversation, I wanted to add my view that obsessing about getting one’s resume right can also be self-centered. But I didn’t. The fact is, I could actually see their point. When personal branding is used merely as a self-promotional tool, it does come across as egotistic.

 It is an unfortunate misconception that personal branding is “all about me,” when virtually all brands put emphasis on some promise of value delivered to a target audience. As I observed in a prior post, if you work at defining your brand without considering the people to whom you can deliver some clear benefit, you don’t really have a brand. Put another way, if you promote yourself in ways that don’t show your relevance to a specific brand community, then you’re simply being narcissistic.

My reading over the past year, has clearly reinforced the idea of community:

• Seth Godin, in his book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, discusses the importance of being “part of a tribe [where you] ...contribute to (and take from) a group of like-minded people.”

• Pam Slim, author of Escape From Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur, makes the point that to be successful in business, it’s critical to identify “your people.”

• Chris Brogan and Julien Smith have pointed out in Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, one of the characteristics of a trust agent is to be seen as "one of us," - that is, as belonging and therefore credible. 

Clearly, these thought leaders see relevance and belonging as key to success. As I see it, if you want to be able to point to your personal brand, you need to mention the people for whom you matter.

Cross-posted at The Personal Branding Blog