This post is a follow-up to the Career Planning Lifecycle article that outlined the five high-level steps of managing a successful career plan. Over the next five posts I will take you through best practices and content that is included in my career plan. The final deliverable is a Word document that summarizes your entire plan and includes references to other artifacts that support your plan (e.g. resume). Once you have a complete plan you are then ready to execute a targeted direction for your career.
The first step in the career planning process is to know yourself. While this is common sense, I find the many people have a hard time describing many key characteristics that should ultimately shape the career planning process such their interests and motivators. The first section of the career plan is a personal brand profile that describes who you are and what makes you tick. Imagine giving your profile to someone who does not know you and within ten minutes they have a fairly good idea of who you are. How powerful would that be?
- Life Mission - Defining what your high-level mission is in life is the first place to start. Many people forget to take a holistic approach to career planning and think about their career as something separate and distinct from other aspects of their daily life. What do you want to accomplish in life? What is important to you? A successful career plan is one that supports your life goals and critical success factors for personal happiness.
- Personal Motto - What is the one-liner that embodies your view on life? My motto is "anything is possible if you put your mind to it".
- Values - Your personal values define who you are and what you believe in. The roles you pursue throughout your career must not conflict with your core values. Leaders have clear values and they use these to inspire others to follow.
- Passions - What energizes you? Successful careers include roles that leverage your passions. What combination of passions would make up your dream job?
- Strengths - You will be most successful throughout your career when the roles leverage your unique combination of skills and capabilities. The book StrengthsFinder 2.0
provides a great framework and assessment for identifying your strengths.
- Brand Attributes - How do you want to be known and described by others? Is it believable or do you have development that is required to deliver on your brand promise?
- Personal Brand Statement - What one line sentence would describe your value? Similar to a product you must position your offering at a target market with a defined value proposition. The book Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand
provides a great overview on what elements should be included in the personal brand statement.
- Interests -Selecting a role that aligns with your core interests is critical to job happiness and success. While this is obvious many people cannot describe their high-level interests. My company uses the CareerLeader assessment to support career planning processes. The final deliverable is a report that summarizes key information such as interests, motivators, and culture fit.
- Motivators - You won't be happy for long in a position where you can't earn specific rewards. What motivates you? Is it money, title, or recognition?
- Organization Culture - What type of organization culture will you most succeed in?
- Physiological Type Preference - It's a well known fact that you will get the most career satisfaction with opportunities to express and use your physiological type preferences. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is an instrument to identify where you focus attention, the way you take in information, the way you make decisions, and how you deal with the outer world. I am an "ENTJ", what are you?
- Professional Profile - It's important that your network understand your education, career accomplishments and the recommendations that validate your value. I use Linkedin as my online professional profile. In the past I have used the export to PDF feature to summarize my profile and share it with prospective hiring managers or new members of my professional network.
A clear and concise personal brand profile will help you target roles throughout your career that maximize your success and personal happiness. A personal profile can be used in many ways throughout your career. I have shared my personal profile with prospective hiring managers to quickly enable them to understand who I am and if my profile is a good fit with the job. A match is one that is a win-win - great for you and the company. Knowing who you are and what you want will enable you to confidently sell your value and take the next step to target the right market.
I know sometimes it's easier to create your own personal brand profile when you have an example. Best of luck creating your profile and feel free to share any of your best practices.
This is absolutely fascinating -- to find career planning AND Business Intelligence in the same blog! I haven't read Goldsmith's Mojo book yet, but am a big fan of both of Keith Ferrazzi's books, especially "Who's Got Your Back?"
Posted by: Cathmary | 05/25/2010 at 05:14 PM