Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Happy 100th Blog Post and Book Review: Advancing Your Career

It’s hard to believe that I’ve already written 100 posts to this here little blog.  My first goal for this writing experiment was to reach 100, and I’m proud to say that I have not missed a date with varying degrees of writing quality.  So here’s to another 100!  It’s always important to set goals, and even more important to set goals you can actually achieve.
In honor of advancing this blog, I’ve recently read a book about advancing your career which I’d like to share with you all.  The Harvard Business Review’s: Advancing Your Career is a collage of assorted articles and writings from Harvard MBA professors and other intelligent experts.  Just to give you an idea about the types of material in this book, here is a list of the article titles:
1.)    How Will You Measure Your Life?
2.)    Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want
3.)    How to Stay Stuck in the Wrong Career
4.)    Job-Hopping to the Top and Other Career Fallacies
5.)    Are You a High Potential?
6.)    Why You Didn’t Get That Promotion
7.)    Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women
8.)    Five Ways to Bungle a Job Change
9.)    The Right Way to Be Fired
10.) How to Protect Your Job in a Recession
11.) How Leaders Create and Use Networks

Right off the bat, you can see some pretty interesting and useful topics.  I’ll focus on two in particular and my own opinions.

How Will You Measure Your Life – It’s interesting that this book about advancing your career and improving your pay and job position starts out with a sobering look and reminder as to what should actually be important to you.  Author and Harvard Professor Clayton M. Christensen discuss his own personal experiences in this field and remind us that family is the most important part of life.  Secondary, it’s also important for a manager to understand that their job can be the “most noble of occupations” as only a manager can truly help someone achieve more with their career and life. 

This article was a nice sobering reminder of what management could be.  Despite the workforce confrontations, the stress of managing a team, and the overall problems a manager could face, it’s important to realize that you as a manager could have more of an impact to a subordinate then that person’s own family.  In my own experience, it’s a shame that more managers don’t know this.

Job-Hopping to the Top and Other Career Fallacies – Author Monika Hamori discusses four main fallacies in the workforce and how career-focused individuals routinely make the same errors.  Fallacy 1: Job Hoppers prosper.  Fallacy 2: A move should be a move up.  Fallacy 3: Big fish swim in big ponds.  Fallacy 4: Career and industry switchers are penalized. 

What I found most interesting in this article was Fallacy 1 and 2.  I’ve seen countless times the career-minded person switch to another job at a competitor only to sour their former relationship with their employer and hurt themselves in the long run.  This type of thinking is often hard to grasp, but keeping a long term perspective will help you in the future.  Secondly, a move doesn’t have to always be up.  If you’re thinking about making a career change, you may need to demote yourself in another industry in order to garner the experience necessary to pursue that enterprise.  While this is a humbling concept, it could be just what you need to pursue a life of fulfillment and happiness.

At 192 pages, this book was a pretty quick read, and offers some whole-hearted career advice that is pretty simple to understand.  My only caveat with reading this book is that it is more focused on the “already executive” type person.  Whereas this information is helpful wherever you are in your career, it is far more focused on those who are already in an executive type position.

Overall, this was a great read and a nice way to focus on your own career.

Wonderful Moment of the Day:  Training on my TSlim today.

2 comments:

  1. Hey!! Well done! 100 posts is a fantastic milestone.

    Here's to a hundred more!!

    Dom :D

    ReplyDelete