Career Management. It’s Not About Your Job. It’s About Your Life.

Career management boils down to how much control or influence you believe you have on your career trajectory. People misunderstand this in lots of ways. It’s not about your job title or specific skills.  Career Management is about how you make a livelihood over a period of time.

Work is attached to a lot of aspects of our lives and with it comes a lot of feelings. It affects how we understand our place in the world. It dictates a lot. It represents how we serve the needs of our family and it creates our lifestyle.

If you think about it, the decisions you make in your career dictate what school your kids go to. You career dictates how much you’re going to be willing to pay for college for your kids. It dictates how old you’re going to be when you retire or how healthy you might be when you retire. It dictates what kind of house you’re going to live in, what kind of neighborhood you’re going to live in, what kind of car you’re going to drive. It creates your daily life.

Most people “manage” their career as if the current circumstance will be true forever.  Change is inevitable. You cannot count on everything being the same. The time to start managing your career isn’t when you need a new job. The time to start networking isn’t when you need a referral to a job opening. The time to start managing your career isn’t when you get a new boss and all of a sudden there’s a new expectation. It should start long before that. Your employer can’t care more about the trajectory of your career than you do.

Think about how resilient or vulnerable your career is. How easy would it be to replace your income, your title and your status? Your career is something you want to steer.

Career management is about intention and mindfulness. Caffeinate Your Career, is a collection of micro actions that support career management. It’s about ritualizing these actions. Making a habit out of these actions. We aren’t talking about adding more work. Every action in Caffeinate Your Career takes less than 15 minutes to complete. It’s about the one thing you can do today to fuel your career.

Jennifer Way is available for personalized career management coaching. You can reach out to her at Way Solutions.