First 100 days

(or to be more positive, a proper career plan can help you to work out what new roles are most likely to be right for you.)

I have spent much of the last 6 years or so advising and helping marketers with their career and personal development. There have been two major features that I have found running through this work. The first is that marketers are very ambitious – no surprise there, and no different to people that I have worked with from other functions. The second has been that most have had little clarity over their longer term career objectives, therefore even less clarity over how the various roles they take fit together into a coherent career plan; and this has been different from many people I have worked with in Finance and Supply Chain.

SO the first piece of work I always try and do is to identify a career objective – this does not have to be a lifetime objective but it should be sufficient to give you a perspective over 7-10 years, or 2-3 jobs. The second step I take is to work out a detailed framework of conditions around that objective – the experiences and skills it is likely to require, the commitments that must be made, the relationship between professional and personal development, compromises that must be considered, opportunities that can be created.

These two steps are important when taken together because while the objective expresses a longer term ambition and is a source of motivation, the framework gives a set of measures against which any new role can be assessed. Furthermore the framework informs on what roles should be sought out for the next or second-next step. For instance, I have worked with several aspiring and ambitious young marketers with lots of home country experience who have wanted to take on regional or even global roles at a future point. An obvious element in their framework should be to get some international experience outside of their home country – obvious, but often overlooked I have found. Furthermore, the implication of getting international experience is most probably a commitment to moving self and any partner or family away from the home country along with any compromises that this might engender. None of this is rocket science, of course, and whenever I start to do the work with individuals I tend to get the sort of “why did I not think of this before� response; but the point is all to often, that it has NOT been thought about before. In that situation, and in the absence of proper career planning, the siren call of the exciting new job tends to overwhelm sober reflection on whether any new job is in fact a step in the right career direction. On the other hand, if you are clear about the career objective and plan the framework that is going to help you achieve this objective then you are more likely than not to make the right steps for your future.