Understanding the changing face of your career
Your career is a journey. There are different stages as you progress and develop. Here we explore the changing face of your career and how learning and development can be adapted to work alongside career stages.
Looking in more detail at the career profiles of leaders in organisations they all broadly follow a similar route, although very rarely in this linear fashion:
The Early career stage sees you as a functional contributor to the organisations’ purpose and goals. At this stage, you are learning the ‘tools of the trade’ and mastering technical skills, be them in IT, finance or other organisational disciplines. At this stage, the focus of your learning and development is around the depth skills you need to carry out your functional tasks.
As your career starts to progress into its Mid stage, you tend to move into the managerial layers of the organisation and this requires new understanding of managing both people and tasks. During this stage, the organisations’ expectations of you shift from ‘doing’ to ‘managing’ and this requires a similar shift in your own mind-set, as you face the challenge of letting go of tasks while still being accountable for them. This also sees a shift in your learning and development needs, away from technical mastery to the broader emotional intelligent skills associated with effectively managing people.
As your career moves into its later stage, you embark on the transition from a people and task manager to an organisational leader. This sees you taking on a more strategic role, where your ‘line of sight’ shifts from the internal challenges of people and tasks, to the external dilemmas of dealing with the uncertainties of the world external to your own. This in turn requires you to hone your emotional intelligence skills still further as the need to show resilience, optimism and empathy in difficult situations is what the people in your organisations look to you for. So once again your learning and development needs shift to account for your greater levels of responsibility and exposure to organisational risks.
The above illustrates the career envelope and how your learning and development needs shift overtime from a depth focus to a breadth focus. This changing face of your career can often be overlooked when understanding the learning and development needs in an organisation. Our Consultants in Nicholas Associates Consulting, have expertise in gaining a true understanding of your L&D needs mapped against your organisational and talent strategy, and proposing effective and highly creative learning solutions that maximise career progression and retention. Speak to us about your L&D needs.
