To grow your knowledge and skills requires a plan, one designed to make you increasingly more valuable in the marketplace. You have to find ways to (continue to) develop the knowledge and skills that your clients and contacts value.
In essence, we all need a personal strategic plan for our careers;
Lesson One: What you know now and are able to do now, what your current success is built on, will unavoidably depreciate in value unless you actively work on learning new things and building new skills. Continual professional development is a lifelong requirement, not an option. There may have been a time when once you got good at something, you could live off that for the rest of your career. If so, those times are now over. The minute you start thinking you know how things work, you’re dead.
Lesson Two: The health of your career is not dependent so much on the volume of business you do, but the type of work you do (whether or not it helps you learn, grow, and develop), and who you do it for (whether or not you are increasingly earning the trust of some key clients). In any profession, the pattern of assignments you work on is the professional development process – you just have to learn how to manage it.
Lesson Three: No matter how busy you are, you still owe it to yourself and to your career to get involved with, and take charge of, your own practice development activities (marketing and selling). If you let others in your firm generate the business you work on, you are putting your career development in other people’s hands – a risky move at best. If you rely on business flowing to you unsolicited, then, with high probability, it is going to be “asset milking” rather than “asset building.” What marketing and selling are about is truly practice development; influencing the qualitative nature of what you work on, so that you use your work experiences to continue to build your career.
Lesson Four: Since asset building is about managing your affairs for the long term health of your career, you’d better take charge of it yourself. Don’t wait for your firm to establish formal policies to reflect concern about the balance sheet as well as the income statement. It probably should, but whether it does or not, it is your own interest to get started yourself.
Lesson Five: You cannot automatically assume that what you are “asked to do” will always be the right thing to build your asset. For example, if you are already experienced in a certain area, chances are that others in the firm will turn to you every time an issue comes up in that area. If you don’t take charge, others will exploit your asset. You’ve got to be a good corporate citizen, but you’ve also got to learn to balance that with what makes sense or you.
Lesson Six: Among the worst mistakes a professional can make is under investing in marketing to your internal or external clients. Existing clients are not only more likely to give you new business, but the business they’ll give you (if you work to earn it) is likely to promote the value both of your skill asset and your client relationship asset.
Conclusion Whether you are 25 or 55, you will always need to worry about where your career is going from today. As you think about your career, here are some key questions to ponder:
• In what way are you personally more valuable in the marketplace than last year?
• What are your plans to make yourself more valuable in the marketplace than you have in the past
• What specific new skills do you plan to acquire or enhance in the next year?
• What’s your personal strategic plan for your career over, say, the next three years?
• What can you do to make yourself (even more) special in the market in the near future?
• What, precisely, is it that you want to be known for?
Pessimist: Oh, this can’t get any worse! Optimist: Yes, it can!