How to drive your career with agility?

Do you know Melly Shum? She hates her job but she doesn’t resign. Fear of losing her job, afraid to ask for a raise, internal competition… Melly has the feeling of being exploited and under-appreciated. She’s not motivated and her performance level degrades.
Why does she prefer to be sad rather than to find a job where she would be happy?

With the economic situation, I was like Melly and I know lot of people who are still.

So much energy spent to not be disengaged! Can we use this energy to find a great job?

Manage yourself as a business

Your skills and your behaviors add values for organizations. That’s why you can manage your career like a business whose products are your skills and customer is the target enterprise.

It should be noted that mismanagement of your career can lead to a bad professional reputation, erasing any chance of reaching the goal.

To manage yourself, you can use a great visual management tool: the Career Management Canvas.

What is the Career Management Canvas and how do you build it?

As the Business Model Canvas (A.OSterwalder), the Career Management Canvas is a visual tool for strategyzing a career or a job search. It is composed by the twelve following blocks.

Kathleen Bartels, 40 years old, is account manager for a B to B desktop company for fifteen years. Working in Paris for more than twenty years, she bought a house in Nice for her retirement. Today, she doesn’t support Parisian life and her work is not motivating. She wants to leave everything to go in the South of France.

Lucky woman! Kathleen note an interesting job announcement. Help Kathleen to get the job she wants by using the Career Management Canvas:

– 1: Target Companies: What is the kind of target company (legal status, size, sector of activities, location)? It comes to gather a maximum of information when the company is known or to detail the most precisely possible in what structures you want to evolve.

– 2: Value proposition: What do you bring to the company? It is not to list all of the standard skills for your job (already included in your CV) but to set the added value from your own profile (specific technical knowledge, years of experience, languages, attention English is almost obligatory nowadays so noteworthy on your resume but it is not added value for the company as opposed to speak Chinese for example...).

–3: Experience Key Results: What are your key results? (Don’t forget the intervention in professional seminars, obtaining a patent…)

– 4: Communication: What are the tools you dispose to enter in contact with the company? What are the tools making it you visible for the company? (Don’t forget to clean your personal public profiles on social networks pages where incriminating pictures may be broadcast).

– 5: Job status: What job status do you want? What could be the added value for the company? (Manager, long or short term contract, freelance, interim…).

– 6: Key Skills: What are your key skills adding value for company?

– 7: Key Behaviors: What values can you bring to the company by your behaviors and your personal values?

– 8: Key Influencers: What are your professional network who can (through their comments and their functions) enhance your profile? The percentage to obtain a job via its professional network is high.

– 9: Revenus streams: How do you raise money? How many? What are the advantages?

– 10: Target State: What is your long term target state? This issue is important because according to the response, block 11 will also change as your career strategy.

– 11: Actions: What actions should you put in place to achieve your Target state? (Training, write a blog…)

– 12: Risks: How your profile should scare the target company? By identifying the risks, you can prepare yourself to answer questions on these topics.

Here is the Kathleen’s Career Management Canvas:

Results

Kathleen was able to highlight her strengths and weaknesses. She was able to communicate on the positive points and prepare for issues relating to weak ones.

Today, Kathleen loves her job!