Fifty years ago if you had career street smarts, you paid attention to your boss, followed through on his expectations and figured out how to stay out of trouble. That would put you on the career ladder. By the mid 1980s, with the coming of technology and the information age, you learned to “manage your boss,” use technology to achieve some of your boss’s goals, and how to work cross-functionally. The career ladder was dissolving. By the 1990s, street smart workers knew to manage their boss, work cross-functionally and apply technology to their job. But they also knew, much to their dismay, that neither their boss nor the company was going to take care of them. The career ladder had been "disappeared."
In the 21st century, work life and career for many has gone to hell in a hand basket. Today, the street smart professional takes it for granted that that he or she will have to manage their boss(s), their work, and their entire career. But how, many ask, do I turn myself into the unique, desirable professional that will be able to open career doors for now and in the future
FYI: street smart—alert, calculating, shrewd and with the resourcefulness to survive in a business environment.
A career platform
In his new book, Promote Yourself: The New Rules for Career
Success, Dan Schawbel’s goal is to show you how to take your strengths
and uniqueness and turn them into a successful career and your own “personal
brand.”
If you’re a Millennial (and older, too), you’ll want Schawbel’s book on your shelves. Promote Yourself identifies the key issues of the platform for furthering your strategic understanding of optimal growth in your career—under the rubric of personal branding.
Promote Yourself emphasizes issues including the key work skills, gaining visibility, organizational promotion, cross-generational relationships, network building, creating new positions for yourself, and even starting your own business.
Indeed, as business vocabulary is getting reframed for this new work world, Schawbel makes one very simple key move that is only obvious in retrospect. Uniquely, he refers to key work skills as hard skills, soft skills, and online skills, devoting a chapter to each in the first section of his book. The term “hard skills,” those practical, technical skills to fulfill a job description, is obvious. Although “soft skills,” the interpersonal competencies, has developed significant cachet among business leaders, it’s little more than 10 years old among coaches and mentors. I’d guess that three-fourths of business people couldn’t name more than a couple soft skills, although they have the impression that the skills are necessary for successful careers.
Once you get beyond the IT Millennials, most business people will affirm their lack of experience in the use of online skills. What’s especially significant about Schawbel’s triad of career skills is that he makes all three necessary for the successful career. That simple triad—those skill metaphors--say it all: the successful 21st century career demands hard and soft skills, but also online skills.
Vocabulary power
Although there is little popular knowledge of this
profound rhetorical insight, the vocabulary we know and use
profoundly affects our perceptions of the world. In short, our vocabularies limit—and
expand—the controls over how and what we think and do. So our vocabulary literally
chooses what we pay attention to and how we construct meaning from experience,
as well as the behaviors in which we engage. And if we’re not on top of rich
vocabularies, vocabularies that provide us with superb choices, we’re going to
be totally hosed in our career.
Karl Weick, Michigan’s brilliant organizational behaviorist reinforces my argument with his book on Sensemaking. He argues that people with growing vocabularies have far more potential for personal success. He explains that “when people put stimuli (in this instance, "online skills") into (rhetorical) frameworks, this enables them to comprehend, understand, explain, attribute, extrapolate and predict.” Using a familiar example, he reminds us that the term “strategy,” has become a framework (metaphor) that “involves procurement, production, synthesis, manipulation, and diffusion of information in such a way as to give meaning, purpose and direction to the organization.”
So Schawbell has rather innocently messed around with our brains, placing “online skills” front and center in every professional’s career expectations. Over time, terms develop a richer and more specific definition and become accepted. So I suspect “online skills” will work just like “strategy” has worked since Peter Drucker put it front and center. And just like Gabarro and Kotter put “managing your boss” front and center. Inevitably, “online skills” will provide far more developmental clarity and raise the bar for everyone for whom their personal career—their personal brand—has the slightest bit of importance.
It’s cool how an innocent statement can take flight and impact all of us. There just may be more street smarts in Schawbel’s book than even he anticipated.