How do you manage, grow and think about your career in a fragile economy? Recent research by McKinsey and Company focuses on business management in a fragile economy. The research, however, lends itself to a smart strategic application to career management and surfaces three fundamental keys that every professional can and should access for their big-picture career thinking.
It's a serious mistake to draw career conclusions in a human resource void. Careers have to be considered within the basic realm of global business. If you lost your job, it wasn't just a matter of your firm downsizing, but of a large number of converging issues. There are three big issues that will drive your career decisioning for years to come.
As McKinsey writes, the pundits and policy makers think the economy is out of the woods. Not business execs. Based on their daily experience, execs believe that full recovery is a lot further off.
Executives "simply don't know what will happen."
There are a number of reasons for that thinking, all of which should impact your career thinking. We've averted the immediate crisis, but what happens when the patient is taken off the medicine? It's hoped that there'll be less risk taking, but what else is liable to happen? We don't know the answer to that question and it's liable to be a long and frustrating time before there are complete answers. One thing is clear, there are going to be a number of permanent shifts liable to impact your career.
Furthermore, says McKinsey, the info available is massive--108 indicators. It'll take more than statistics to draw intelligent conclusions from that much data, even for smart McKinseyites. Data mining is not the simple task many seem to think, and as my friendly statistician regularly emphasizes to me, "Drawing conclusions from data is fraught with difficulty."
For my money, the third issue is the most problematic for career thinking: The crisis isn't merely a simple breakdown. It was/is made up of many small crises, each with its "own pace and impact." The credit crisis precipitated this mess, but it impacted consumer buying, consumer saving, corporate restructuring and development, and governmental policy.
What happens to business is what happens to careers.
An overstatement, but close enough to reality to be really, really bothersome. What follows is my own translation of McKinsey business recommendations into the career setting for my readers.
First, you can capture the economic complexity by rethinking your career model, and then through several career scenarios. Never done that before? I deal with the basic career models in a blog. And for the first time, a career scenario-planning model has made it into print, available on the web through Wired. The model will make it possible for you to future-proof you career and limit your potential for personal disaster. The link is here: Wired.
What else do you need to do for career success? Drop the pretense that you can predict your own career future. Careers come and go. Data inputting used to provide a middle class income, but that's all handled by means of software and $12 and hour, unskilled help today. Keep up with the learning curve and get ahead of it if you want to have any kind of livable future. That requires an intimate knowledge of your chosen expertise, industry need and global shifts. The skills of the future in all careers include sophisticated thinking and problem solving, creativity and language technology (people skills).
Finally, learn how to learn and how to access the expertise to make learning possible. Continue adapting your career competencies and capabilities with an eye to better decision making and problem solving "under uncertainty." Although there's nothing like this for careers, everyone interested in managing their own careers ought to have Karl Weick's, Managing the Unexpected on their shelves. What Weick says about business practices can be adapted for career success.
One of my colleagues, Brian Baumley of OneWire.com, sent me a survey summary of university and college career centers just released. It noted that two-thirds of college and university career counselors expect the job market to turn around by sometime next year while one-third think a rebound is further off. Those are traditional responses to traditional recessions. The major economic shifts not only of the past two years, but of the last ten years suggest that the entire model for thinking about and doing careers is in a permanent shift. I seriously doubt that there's much validity to the thinking of most career counselors regarding career futures. The mental models of the career centers and career coaching need to be significantly revamped.
A new career model is needed.
Instead, we need to be thinking about a model that will fit the McKinsey research. McKinsey's conclusion for business leaders is just as memorable for career success: All this portends a shift to more dynamic management in a more complex and unpredictable environment. The industry leaders of the future--stalwarts and upstarts alike--will be able to adopt, adapt, and build these capabilities for navigating uncertainty.