All Posts in Career Management

|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Someday I’m going to have to plan my career. I figure I’ll have time to plan it a few months after I retire. In the meantime, I’m having so much fun at whatever I have instead that if I have any more I’m not going to get any sleep at all.

Oh, I know we’re all supposed to have a five-year career plan with timetables, self-improvement programs, personal re-invention programs, education programs … jazz like that.

Take my advice: Don’t bother. You’ll make yourself miserable executing your plan, you’ll make everyone around you miserable as well, and you’ll be just as miserable when you succeed as you are now.

What should you do instead? Here’s a realistic alternative. Even if your own career is in good shape it may provide a useful framework for helping the people who work for you plan their careers (you do help them plan their careers, don’t you?).

Begin with a self-assessment: Do you really want a career, or do you just want a job? People who just want a job do it to make money so they can do what they enjoy in their time off. People with careers wrap a lot of their identity into their professional lives.

There’s nothing wrong with just wanting a job. You won’t experience the same kind of advancement, personal satisfaction, and monetary reward as the career-minded, but it’s a perfectly valid option.

If you (or your employees) are career-minded, here’s the program:

  • Decide what you enjoy doing. This should be a list, not a single item, it should be short, and each item should be very general. “Solving puzzles,” is a good one. So are “Helping other people succeed,” “Building useful things,” and “Performing in front of an audience.”
  • Figure out which of the above you’re good at. You can build a career out of these. The rest you should enjoy as hobbies.
  • Establish a long-range goal – one that is at least three career steps away. If you’re a regular reader of this column and you aren’t CIO already, that may be where you’re headed. If you are CIO you may want to become CEO someday, run your own company, become a consultant – or become a professional waterskier for that matter.
  • Make a list of desirable next jobs. You don’t have to decide on just one, of course – there are no career police to force the issue. Just don’t be honest about it in a job interview – there, the job for which you’re applying is exactly what you want to do next. You want jobs you can attain, of course – your resume must qualify you for them. They also must fit the profile you established in steps one and two; you must have the aptitude and enjoy the work. Finally, they have to move you in the right direction for achieving your long-range goal.
  • Prepare yourself for the jobs you want next. Attend training sessions or night school, but most important, get on project teams that will give you the right experiences.
  • After a year or two in your new job, repeat the process. You’ll have learned more about your long-range goal, you’ll have learned more about yourself, and you’ll be a different person than when you last went through this exercise.

People with careers sometimes retire. You find these folks volunteering a lot. Others don’t bother to retire – they may slow down, but basically they get paid for their hobby. Supposedly, when asked about his retirement the golfing great Ben Hogan answered, “People retire to fish and play golf. I fish and play golf.”

Why would he retire when his career was in full swing?

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

When it comes to government intervention in the antitrust action against Microsoft, lots of people say the marketplace should decide, even when there’s no longer a competitive marketplace and the whole point of the antitrust laws is to either preserve competition or compensate for its absence.

In the labor market, though, there’s widespread desire for government intervention to keep out “cheap foreign labor” – protectionism, in a word, to prevent competition.

Technical professionals are in short supply. Still, some Americans can’t find work, or at least can’t find it at their desired salary in their city of residence. Then they read about an influx of inexpensive foreign technical talent, especially from Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Adding two and three to get 23, they conclude that greedy American employers are hiring cheap foreign labor at their expense.

Like it or not, American technical talent, like all American labor, competes in a global labor market. When the government takes protectionist action we compete through our employers. When it doesn’t, we compete as individuals.

Take your pick, but when, for example, SAP wins a contract over Oracle in the ERP market, foreign jobs increase and American jobs decrease just as surely as when an American company hires a Pakistani programmer. One way or another, we all compete globally for our jobs.

Many American technical professionals have contributed to the developing mess through complacency, assuming job security from, for example, designing and programming batch Cobol systems. American employers certainly aren’t blameless in this fiasco either. You probably have employees like this batch Cobol programmer. When was the last time you provided career counseling or growth opportunities? Do your codger-programmers even know their jobs are at ever-increasing risk?

If you’re recruiting you probably have the right headcount (or close to it) but are undergoing some change that has led to a skills mismatch. That means employees who used to be competent aren’t anymore, and people get cranky under those circumstances. Since shooting your current employees is inhumane, frowned upon, and illegal in most states, here’s a more productive alternative:

1. Communicate the change you’re undertaking and why you’re undertaking it every chance you get. Your whole IT leadership team must preach the change, what it means, its implications and consequences, including the likelihood that not everyone will succeed in the new environment.

2. Hire a few key positions from the outside to lead by example. Hire the best people you can find. You want your employees to think, “None of my co-workers could do that.” As an alternative, bring in a consulting firm to work on projects in “blended teams” with your employees to help them learn the new skills. (Disclaimer – my company is in that business so I’m unavoidably biased in its favor.)

3. Retrain your retrainable employees. It’s cheaper than replacing them. Identify those least likely to succeed, tell them in no uncertain terms your concerns about them, give them every chance you can, and say good-bye to those who fail. You’re responsible for providing opportunity. They’re responsible for taking advantage of it.

4. Recruit replacements from wherever they live. Hire the best people you can find – the best, not the cheapest – and make no apology for doing so.

Great companies need great people. Hiring foreign labor because it’s cheap doesn’t get you great people.

But there are plenty of talented foreign technical professionals who are willing to work harder, and for less money, than their American counterparts. The resentment some American programmers express toward Indian, Pakistani, and Asian programmers is nothing more than simple bigotry.

It’s easy to preach competition when it’s Microsoft against Sun. When it comes to jobs, theory gets real personal, and that just doesn’t bring out the best in people.

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