Why Is It Important to Have a Career Development Plan?
There are few things as important as having a career development plan when it comes to excelling in life and accelerating in your chosen field. It is vital that you have a clear sense of the direction you would like to head with your career. Career planning is a critical step and is essential to your success not something you want to skip over.
The purpose of a career development plan is to help you reach your goals. Everyone has aspirations in life and specific levels they would like to reach.
Part of the planning process actually entails you developing specific career goals and mapping out a course on how to best reach them.
To do that, you must determine what is important to you. You may or may not have an idea of what you are looking for in terms of a career – a career coach will ask powerful questions that enable you to determine exactly what you are looking for in your career. Starting out with comprehensive career assessment tools will allow you to uncover your key strengths and determine how those best relate to building a successful career. Once you have your strengths mapped out, you can determine next steps. And, next steps begin with goals.
When setting goals, it is critical that you consider all aspects. Which do you have, a job or a career? What is it about your job that you absolutely cannot stand? If you have a career, what is it that you absolutely love about it? Knowing this is just part of the puzzle – there is much more to uncover and many decisions to make to ensure you find balance, passion, and purpose as well as continued growth.
Part of identifying your career paths includes defining your purpose and passions. Why? Because everyone dreams of getting into a career field they enjoy and have fun with, but most people wander off course. They select a different career aspiration simply because they react rather than plan. They apply for an opening and take a job even though they know it is not the right fit. By having a plan and clear ideas about what it is you really want, you will avoid the pitfalls of career mismatch. You will identify find the right field to get into based on your interests, strengths, and personal passions.
So you see the importance of getting career guidance advice and creation of a career development plan. It is geared toward you and what you’re made of – you deserve to find the proper balance between your personal life and career. It can be easy to get caught up in work mode and constantly have the job on your mind. However, this can lead to a troubling lifestyle if you do not intertwine passion, purpose, and personal fulfillment into your career.
By setting goals, understanding how you will reach them, finding something you love, and finding a balance between work and play will allow you to reach a level of happiness people only dream about. Manage your career – set your course for success with a career development plan. Dreams do come true.
Twenty-First Century Workplace Trends
Joseph H. Boyett
Boyett and Associates
David Pearce Snyder
Principal
Snyder Family Enterprises
For some time now, the simple extrapolation of a number of underlying socioeconomic trends has portended an increasingly unattractive future for America. From 1973 to 1995, for example, average U.S. wages fell 15 percent and family income stagnated, even while the number of two-income households doubled. Crime and divorce rates soared, as did personal bankruptcies, and perhaps most ominously, as U.S. News & World Report (Boroughs, 1996) notes, the gap between the average incomes of the lowest-paid Americans and the best-paid widened sharply, with the ratio between the average CEO's salary and the average worker’s wages exploding in the 500 percent range!
For the years 1973 through 1975, the ration between the average income of the CEOs of ten Fortune 30 companies and the income of the average U.S. worker was 41:1. For the years 1993 through 1994, the ratio for the same ten companies' average CEO salaries to the average U.S. workder had risen to 225:1 (a 450 percent increase).
Source: The Crystal Report, published by Graef Crystal, an executive compensation expert, in Boroughs (1996).
The future implicit in these trends—one in which U.S. society is dominated by a high-paid technocratic elite while the rest of us (75 percent to 85 percent) are employed in low-value-adding service work—has become a widely held expectation in American public opinion. By comparison, declining numbers of Americans indicate that they believe in the postindustrial future long promised by academics and corporate visionaries, in which high-tech tools, products, and services engender entirely new forms of enterprise, leading to ever-higher levels of general prosperity for all. For nearly a quarter-century, successive waves of computerization, downsizing, and deregulation failed to improve either our productivity or our prosperity, while the numbers of high-value-adding jobs in the United States—including those requiring four-year baccalaureate degrees—declined as a share of all U.S. jobs. By the late 1980s, the annual output of new college graduates was clearly exceeding workplace demand, and the notion that the average person would be better off in a high-tech future simply became less and less believable in the face of most people's experience ... until now!
The Light at the End of the Twentieth Century
One by one, over the past three years, essentially all the statistical indicators of our twenty-year socioeconomic degradation have begun to reverse themselves. Average wages and benefits—as well as average household income—are now rising for all income groups and ethnicities. What's more, rising productivity improvement rates mean that—so far—the increased labor costs have not proven inflationary. Simultaneously, welfare rolls have shrunk by about one-third, crime rates have dropped by one-fourth, and divorce rates, teen pregnancy, and most recently, juvenile drug use are all declining! For the nation's colleges and universities, the bounty of the new prosperity is reflected by the fact that recruiters are back on campus.
All this good news has not been lost on public opinion, which began to reflect a rising optimism in 1996. Indeed, at this moment, it would be comfortable and convenient to assume that,
after a decade or two of getting "lean and mean," American enterprise is finally back on track to a high-tech future in which essentially all high-value jobs will require some form of postsecondary education.
But U.S. enterprise has not merely been getting leaner and meaner during the past twenty years, it's also been getting keener. Specifically, it's been adopting new structures and practices to take advantage of the unique value-adding capabilities of our rapidly maturing info-com technologies. And as our private and public sector employers have increasingly undertaken productive new organizational arrangements, several workplace trends have emerged in the United States that are already having a profound impact on American workers and on educational institutions seeking to prepare workers for the new workplace. These trends have, in fact, long been forecast by the major futurists, notably Daniel Bell in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave (1980), and John Naisbitt in MegaTrends (1982). The fact that these long-range forecasts are rapidly becoming universal realities is a measure of how far into the future we have come in the past twenty-five years.
Info-com is derived from a simple contraction of the words INFOrmation and COMmunication, and is used here as many people use "information," as in information revolution or information technology. The productive power of electronic information systems does not rest solely on the computer's capacity to assimilate large amounts of data in a moment; it also rests on our newly gained ability to gather data and information from anywhere and distribute it to anywhere instantaneously.
Trend #1: The Growing Contingent Workforce
The social contract that promised job security in exchange for employee loyalty has been broken. American companies continue to downsize, restructure, and lay off thousands of workers. Work that is not considered to be part of the "core competency" of the corporation is being outsourced or performed by temporary, part-time, or contract workers. Today, there are twenty-eight million temporary workers in the United States, representing over 20 percent of the workforce—up more than 400 percent since 1980, when temps represented only 4.5 percent of all workers (five million people). The upside to this initially dismal trend is that, as the marketplace regularizes the use of contingent workers throughout all levels of employment from the rank and file through professional and managerial jobs to the executive suite, the pay and benefits of temporary workers have rapidly begun to catch up to those of full-time wage earners over the past thirty-six months.
If this trend continues, many Americans—by some estimates as much as half of the workforce—will be contingent workers who will be employed in part-time, temporary, contract, or other nontraditional employment within ten years. Many of these highly skilled workers will be self-employed solo professionals. Meanwhile, the other half of the workforce will be employed in full-time permanent jobs where they will be expected to behave as continuously adaptive, self-developing team players in exchange for the benefits of career employment.
Trend #2: Flexplace Work
The number of employees who are telecommuting or working at nontraditional work sites such as satellite offices has been growing at the rate of 20 percent or more per year throughout most of this decade. Thanks to new technology and the changing nature of work itself, fully 60 percent of the workforce today perform jobs for which physical location is no longer critical. Already, one-third of American households have at least one person performing compensated work at home for at least one day per week. The geographic same-time-same-place workplace is being replaced by dispersed, anytime-anywhere workspace networks. Within a few years, the phrase "going to work" will become meaningless for most Americans. Work, for them, will be what they do, not the place they go to.
Trend #3: Upskilling of Jobs and Workers
Practically all jobs are being "upskilled." The technical workforce is growing in size and importance. Today, there are some 20 million technical workers in the United States and one in four newly created jobs is technical. Workers with strong technical skills—lab technicians, computer professionals, drafters, paralegals, medical technicians, designers, engineers, and so on—are becoming the front-line workers of most organizations. Even jobs that have not traditionally been considered technical positions, such as the job of a courier, now have a strong technical component and require the use of computers and other sophisticated electronic devices. At the same time, the semiskilled and unskilled jobs that employed masses of illiterate or semiliterate workers in the past are disappearing at a rapid pace.
Trend #4: Self-Managed Teams
Finally, we are seeing rapid growth in the use of cross-functional, multidisciplinary teams with globally and ethnically diverse memberships. Already, one-third of American companies with fifty or more employees have half or more of their employees working in self-managed or problem-solving teams. Many of these teams have no traditional boss or supervisor. Instead, team members take on responsibility for planning, organizing, staffing, scheduling, directing, monitoring, and controlling their own work.
Perhaps more important, these teams are increasingly linked via the Internet or other global networks, with instantaneous and unrestricted flows of information within and between teams and team members and among outside suppliers and customers. Charles Manz and Henry Sims (1993), authors of Business Without Bosses, have estimated that 40 percent to 50 percent of the entire U.S. workforce will work in some type of empowered, self-managed team by the year 2000 (p. 12).
Implications
Taken together, these four trends represent forces of truly transformational change in the workplace, destined to dramatically alter the day-to-day content of most jobs, as well as the traditional patterns of lifetime employment. These imminent changes, in turn, pose powerful implications for every individual who enters the workplace, and for the institutional processes—from kindergarten to the college campus—by which our society prepares people for that workplace.
Implications for Individuals.To succeed in the new workplace, workers will have to have the skills and abilities to add value quickly. The new workplace will reward those "specialized generalists" who have a solid basic education plus deep professional or technical skills in demand across a range of companies and even industries. A solid basic education, as in the SCANS competencies (The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1993), will no longer be enough. Everyone will have to be able to do something that adds value now—or be able to learn such value-adding skills quickly—to be considered for employment in all but the most marginal twenty-first-century jobs. (An HR executive with a Fortune 30 firm recently described liberal arts graduates as "literate, unskilled recruits.")
While large employers (such as GM, Lockheed Martin, or the armed services) will continue to provide their employees with career counseling and retirement planning, most Americans will be responsible for managing their own careers from now on. As Charles Handy has written, we will all need an agent—much as writers, actors, and sports figures have agents today. Temporary staffing services, career counselors, and employment agencies in particular will rapidly redefine their missions and marketing strategies to stress their role as agents in an emerging human resources industry.
Since most Americans will not have full-time permanent jobs—and even those who do will have no real job security—most workers will be financially insecure. Americans will be forced to build and maintain liquid savings equivalent to a year or more of income as a shield against periods of unemployment or underemployment. Today's concept of retirement will all but disappear, since most Americans will have to work through their sixties, just as we did fifty years ago.
Meanwhile, the barrier that since the rise of industrialization has separated work and the rest of life will be shattered. Work will intrude into every aspect of life, and life will intrude on work. As a result, housing will change dramatically. Homes will be wired for commerce as well as for recreation. Houses and apartments will become both homes and work sites.
Essentially all employees will be expected to demonstrate strong team skills and to have the ability to function effectively in a new team from the start. Employers will no longer accept or tolerate six to twelve months of "team building." Like a second- or third-string tail back, everyone from the rank and file to the senior staff will be expected to come off the bench on short notice and help the team gain yardage right away.
As we move increasingly to self-managed teams, everyone will be expected to contribute to the team by performing one or more of the following leadership roles:
While facilitating conveys much of what is intended here, the word suffers from the same shortcoming that socializing does; the colloquial understanding of both terms crucially misapprehends what is involved--that is, purposeful but transparent intervention in a small group's dynamics by one or more members of that group in such a way as to both facilitate and shape consensus.
The retention of the "y" to indicate a conjunction between social and analyze describes a process developed over years of practice and field application and reported in the literature on "competent organizations." Elements of sociolyzing are crucial to the success of all types of un-led small groups, including teams, civic and community organizations, and neighborhood projects, that must function in an open, unstructured, egalitarian setting. The practice is also reflected in successful online forums and symposia that involve subtly interventionist "moderators," editors," or "fair witnesses" who help naturally diverse participants discover consensus.
In the delayered, authoritative, collegial, and collaborative social technologies that are now supplanting our old hierarchical, compartmentalized, authoritarian, industrial bureaucracies, the principles and practices of sociolyzation will replace the coerced social engineering of Taylorism.
Envisioning: facilitating idea generation and innovation in the team and helping the team members think conceptually and creatively
Organizing: helping the team focus on details, deadlines, efficiency, and structure so the team gets its work done
Spanning: maintaining relationships with outside groups and people, networking, presentation management, intelligence gathering, developing and maintaining a strong team image, and locating and securing critical team resources
"Sociolyzing": uncovering the needs and concerns of individuals in the group, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to present his or her views, injecting humor when it is needed to relieve tensions, taking care of the social and psychological needs of group members