CHAPTER 12—PERSONAL MANAGEMENT ACTIVITY
ORIENTATION
One of the lessons of Chapter 1 is that the new economy is changing the way people approach their careers. Your grandparents and, to a lesser degree, your parents could focus on finding a job with a good company and making a career of it. This option rarely presents itself in today’s economy. Therefore, you have to be flexible. Review the Personal Management Feature for Chapter 12. Employees today are more loyal to their professions than they are to organizations.
How do you define yourself? Complete Assessment 18 (if you have not done so already). What does your score indicate about your orientation: Most students think in terms of their career, which is probably defined by a major. If that is the case for you, it means you have more of a professional orientation. Will this change? Do you want it to change?
Putting It All Together. Chapter 12 discusses the importance of career development. One step in the planning process is identifying career goals. In previous activities, you developed a list of strengths and weaknesses. You refined your strengths to determine which ones give you a competitive advantage. Those activities helped you address the “who am I?” question. The personal SWOT analysis you performed in the Chapter 9 activity focused your thinking on matching strengths with opportunities. This activity got you started on addressing the “where do I want to go?” and “how do I get there?” questions. Let’s refine the “go” question a bit more.
Chapter 9 talked about the importance of strategy. Organizational strategies tend to be comprehensive (extensive) plans. You should have a strategy for your career, but it should be more concise. This is your career objective. Develop a career objective. Remember this should be short and generally written as a phrase. Now take a close look. Does it convey the elements of your job/career that are really important to you? Is it specific? Statements such as “a job with a growing company with opportunity to advance,” while professional sounding are not meaningful. What kind of job do you want? (Think about the research you did for the Chapter 7 activity.) What kind of organization? (Again think about the work that you completed for the Chapters 10 and 11 activities). Do phrases such as “opportunity to advance” add value to your objective? As a last check of your objective, try giving it to a couple of friends. Ask them if they understand what you want to do.