Master Career Counselor

Carla Hunter, President of Career Span, Inc. is a Master Career Counselor (MCC) by the National Career Development Association and a Certified Career Coach by the National Board for Certified Counselors. She is an expert in writing resumes, effective job search strategies and interviewing success. Most recently, with over 20 years of navigating the complexity of today's world of work, she published "Finding Your Place in the World of Work", a career interest inventory (2014) and CareerView, an iPad app. As a private practice career counselor and a workforce development consultant, this blog is Carla's trove of ideas, trends, forecasts, and career tips for finding meaningful work.

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Shift the word career into a verb...

To fully understand this blog post, it might be helpful to read the previous one about how the noun form of "career" must become a verb to be successful in your work.

To career your career is another way of saying it.

Intentionality is the catalyst for change

Today's job market demands an intentional posture of developing and growing your skill-set. When you are in the process of learning, you are treating the word "career" as a verb.   When you think you know everything, you've reverted it back into a noun. To say you will have a career in ________ in today's 21st century world of work can never be based solely on your knowledge or expertise.

Career in our new work paradigm is not only what you do but how you direct, own and are responsible for your work success.  Career is the active lens by which you view life and work in the midst of constant flux and radical change.

To career your work life means developing skills that aren't easy to quantify.  Experts have called these abilities "soft" skills.  They are anything but soft. They are the hallmarks of solid careering in a work world you can never treat as a lounge chair.

If you don't career, you will certainly careen. Even when you do excellent work.

Workers can be completely blindsided by an employer who let's him go without any notice because of reasons outside the worker's control.  Here are words I've heard a lot:

"I worked 18 years with excellent reviews. I don't understand why they let me go. I am devastated."

"I've given my employer everything. I worked late nights without pay, given extra time in the office on weekends. I was employee of the month last year.  I can't believe when my team was reduced they included me in the layoff.  Now what do I do?"

In the next post, we'll look at ways to career so you won't be susceptible to the careen.

Careening occurs when you are forced to lie over on the side of the road of employment because you had no idea the gust of change would blow so hard your job buckled under the weight and you didn't even know what was happening.

The solution to this problem is straightening the path of your expectations of what a career is.

If only we could empower our students to understand what career readiness truly means today.