Toward a Self-Managed Career

The developments noted above all point in the direction of greater career self-management and apply to everyone: executives, managers, technical professionals, and rank-and-file employees. Companies are forcing people to take charge of their economic futures and shoulder greater responsibility for the risks and financial returns associated with them. Fortunately, greater geographic mobility, opportunities for training, and labor market information give people the means to do that. Goal definition and goal matching are the two building blocks of career self-management.

Goal Definition

What are your primary occupational goals right now: money, progressive promotions, a growing level of responsibility, intrinsic growth, personal gratification? You may want to broaden your range of experience and competencies or, conversely, become more and more skilled in your current specialty. Work-life choices often dictate goals, such as staying in the same community. Whatever goals you’ve chosen, make sure they are crystal clear.

Determining one’s workplace goals is the first step toward the kind of thinking people should adopt with respect to the human capital they invest. An astute financial investor, for example, does not make a move until he or she has established an investment goal, and that goal should have a time component: short-term, intermediate, or long-term.

Although money is often not the prime motivator, the goals of human capital investment closely parallel those of financial investors. For example, financial investors cite goals that fall into any of the following four categories: safety of principal, current income, capital appreciation, and tax advantages. The first three apply directly to those who invest their human capital:

• Safety of principal. You don’t want the value of your human capital to be diminished by obsolescence. This is a big concern for engineers and other technical professionals. You also may be concerned with the safety of social capital: protecting the relationships you have built up over time. This may incline you to remain within your current industry, geography, occupation, or employer.

• Current income. A high current return from your investment may override other considerations, particularly if you need a high income to put children through college, build a retirement nest egg, or meet other financial obligations. In this case you may be willing to forgo future opportunities for work that will maximize your net pay today.

• Capital appreciation. If you’re in the early stages of your career, developing new skills and gaining experience may be a primary goal. These achievements may not pay off today, but they will build capital value and provide for higher earnings in the future. This is the basis of apprenticeships and internships that pay less than what an individual might earn in another position. Indeed, the path to capital appreciation is often one of delayed gratification. The higher lifetime incomes of college graduates are a good example of delayed gratification.

Goal Matching

Once you have defined your goals, identify a company or companies with which you can pursue them effectively. Start with the company for which you are working currently. Is there a match between your goals and the way that company deals with employees’ careers? For example, if one of your goals is to become more expert at your craft, does your company encourage and reward specialization? Many do not.

Chapter 1 profiled a manufacturing company, ProductCo, whose pay and promotions agenda rewarded managers for doing the opposite of what the company needed to be successful; it put greater stock in generalists than in specialists. At TechCo we observed conflicting behaviors on the part of the company. While encouraging entrepreneurship and risk taking through its rewards, that company also enforced a regime of following rules and procedures and doing things by the book. At TechCo employees were bound to be whipsawed no matter what their goals were. No wonder the company was losing its best talent at ever-increasing rates.

The bottom line is that you always will be paddling against the current if your employer does not support or reward your goals. Thus, if you are comfortable doing things “by the numbers,” find a company that rewards and encourages that type of work. If your goal is to advance progressively through the ranks, look for a company that has explicit career ladders that reward capable and ambitious individuals. Career ladders are formal programs for moving promising employees step by step up through the ranks, using training and various assignments to prepare them for each succeeding rung on the ladder. Those programs help employees build their personal human capital.