建立职业生涯的5个部分

英文原文

5 Parts of Building a Career

Every time I speak with our international students about their professional goals after graduation, the answer is typical: making money or advancing in their career. However, today, that is not the case. Career success in 2021 is more about making alignment between goals, intentions, activities, and the environment.  

How can this be done? We have all learned from COVID-19 that many things in our lives are genuinely uncontrollable, and the only constant is change itself. 

I always tell our students while their career aspirations and goals may be constant, their happiness and prosperity shouldn’t depend on one job, one role, or even one company. Things are changing at a moment’s notice all the time. To find our way in the new world of work as recent college graduates, we have to be fluid in the way we think and act. We must adjust both personally and professionally to grow with the flow and our persona and professional goals.  

Here is a list of five things that can help all of us navigate a more flexible and fluid way to work, even understand our future of work and learn to build powerful momentum in a fluid world. To do that, we must take control of our career path early on by making it one step at a time. 

#1 Constantly Looking for Trends (Internally and Externally):  Developing our flow starts with understanding the lay of the land ahead of time. What trends do we need to be aware of, let’s say, if we major in marketing as an example? It is important to research not just what these trends could be but also how they can impact what we do now and in the future. It’s vital from early on to gather information about the industry of your interests, significant players, job junctions, and even potential disruption in that industry. It is essential to know how to collect the right data and know what to do with it.  

#2 Making Your COMPASS:  It is merely about where is everything going? What does the picture of success look like for you? To answer these questions, we need a COMPASS. This is essentially our strategic plan that we create to guide us from ideas, dreams, and thoughts to ACTION. Now we must figure out where we want to be based on what we learned in the first part and decide how to fill the gap. I believe the compass is the best metaphor because our journey will be directionally kind of linear. Even with switching, shifting, or pivoting, we should be heading in the general direction of our North Star.  

#3 Getting Ready for Change:  I always tell my students to accept that change is coming. Fear of the unknown and fear of failure are what keep students from actually chasing their dreams. Preparing for change is emotional and mental, not just functional. This is about managing our fear, converting the energy into real excitement, and developing our self-confidence, so we know with little or no doubt that we know what we are doing. We must let go of external pressure and overcome internal challenges like self-doubt. 

#4 Build a REAL NETWORK:  Yes, this is very, very, very important. Building our network is critical to getting where we want to go. It’s like a village. Not only will our new town make the introductions we need, but they can also point us to skills and knowledge gaps we need to fill to stay flexible and open up even more career opportunities in the future. Don’t forget that Networking can help us create ends into areas that we want to pursue, which might not be even the field we are in now, but we want to pivot into that. This is about aligning what we identified as our goals and objectives in the COMPASS section and then finding those who can help us get there.  

#5 Focusing on HARD + SOFT Skills:  I also tell my students to focus on earning long-term skills. This involves looking for where to pick up the necessary skills and creating environments to practice and measure our progress continuously. It is essential to establish and add a portfolio of skills to our resume. As we build our skills, we will grow more comfortable with our new role or job and ultimately advance our career in the way we want it.  

Remember those old ways of career path where we just added up our job title and salary are long gone. Now with so many different roles to track, we may find several other lines. One job might not work out, while another offers fantastic success.  

Success is about having a process and continuing making progress in how we build the process and how we get from having a plan to execution matters most.