CAREER MANAGEMENT

What’s your Direction?

If you’re serious about progressing in your career you need to decide where you want to go and build a Thousand Hour Asset.

Introduction

I had an inspiring session while back in our Supervisor Circle. A Supervisor Circle is a safe environment for peers to come together and deep dive on a subject and to share experiences, discuss challenges and gain new perspectives on topics. Today it was Personal Development Plans.

For me, this was particularly relevant. Apart from coaching lots of people over the years, I also had at the time had line management accountabilities for our agile coaches, so I had accountabilities for the development of my team rather than just coaching others.

Over the years, I’ve developed a model that’s helped me and lots of my coachees define what’s next in their career and to help to set a framework for how to get there. I’m sharing it here, partly because by discussing it in my meeting, I realised it could be improved. By sharing it with you, I hope it can be improved further.

Four directions of travel

No matter where you are in your career, you have four directions of travel to choose from:

1. More seniority. If you’re moving in this direction then you need to be considering opportunities to be promoted, demonstrate leadership, manage staff, perform an interim role at a higher level or simply apply for jobs at a higher level. Voluntary work is very helpful here and a win-win. I know several colleagues who have created a win:win, gaining valuable board experience whilst giving back, all on the road to promotion.
2. New domain. You might be bored working in banking, or feel unfulfilled working with remote customers. You want to do a similar role, with the same skills just in a new setting. Here, you’ll be wanting to focus on either learning about that domain, building a network in that domain, building your CV so that you become attractive as someone with an external perspective. Again, voluntary work can help, or mentoring someone already in that domain can help to understand it. Even internally, get involved in assurance work, audits, peer reviews, internal networks or simply ask for an assignment. You’d be surprised how effective asking is.
3. New skills. You might decide that your skillset is becoming old and obsolete, or you might just be bored as a DBA. Here, your plan needs to be about a secondment, or training or even dipping your hands into your own pockets and retraining yourself. All of these are fine. When I went to an outsourcing company a couple of years ago, I met someone who had spent the last 2 years training to be a chef in his spare time, then took the opportunity of redundancy to open a street food stall.
4. Deeper expertise. The fourth direction is about becoming an expert in your area. In a world where we are becoming dumber and dumber, preferring to read just a headline instead of the story, or an story instead of a book (gulp), we still rely on expertise. In fact, we rely on it more and more as we depend on AI and machine learning more — who guards the guards? So, it’s noble and needed to be an expert too. Stay where you are and be the go-to person for … well, you choose.

Choosing a direction

If you want to be successful, it’s important that you make considered steps in the direction you want to head in, otherwise you’re destined to be a slightly bigger ‘blob’, developing for sure and getting better too — but in no particular way. You’ll become slightly better at one thing and another, but not so much better than the next person, so you will simply stagnate in your career.

So, think about your next five years and where you want to be. Same job? New job? Same employer? More responsibility? New technology?

No option is better, just better for you. Choose your direction and commit to build yourself up. That choice is critical, but scary. What if it doesn’t work out? How do I get started? You won’t be the first or last person to be stuck and not take the action to move in your direction. Here’s a simple way to start.

Start to move the dial — the Hundred Hour Challenge

The Hundred Hour Challenge is simple. If you think about the average certification, you come into a two day, three day or five day training course, study in the evening then do the exam — it’s all over in about fityty hours of effort.

It’s nice, but it doesn’t move the needle. Lots of people get certified with the same certification as you, which is one of the reasons that they aren’t really helpful. What about doing something different? If you invest two certifications worth of effort into something that your colleagues don’t have, that hundred hours would make a difference — potentially a big difference:

• It gives you enough knowledge or experience to know if it’s the right direction for you (so you can ’fail fast’)
• It gives you enough exposure to the subject that you can confidently talk about it to others
• It tests your motivation to progress to a real level of expertise in your chosen direction

Once you’ve tested out two or three different topics and approaches, then decide on your direction and prepare for your next goal.

Progress towards your next role — the Thousand Hour Asset

Your next goal is to create a Thousand Hour Asset — one thousand hours of experience in a single skill. If you’re going to invest this long, then be sure that:

1. It’s something you’re committed to doing
2. It’s something valuable — preferably unique or unusual, to give you an edge
3. It supports your next career goal

If your chosen direction is leadership, that means adopting a leadership role (even voluntarily) for ten hours a week over two years. If it’s to learn trading optimisation techniques, it might be forty hours per week for six months. Maybe, if you want a complete change, then it might mean four hours per week of volunteering over five years to build a strong foundation and credibility.

A Thousand Hour Asset is substantial and it shows you’re both serious and capable. It may take you three or four attempts at the Hundred Hour Challenge to finally decide which one is for you, but it’s worth it.

Once you have a Thousand Hour Asset under your belt, go and use it to get your next role.

Remember, the starting point is to choose your direction.

p.s. The idea of the Thousand Hour Asset came from something I saw from Seth Godin. If you haven’t read his work, it’s worth some investment.