Career Development Advice - My Experience

The advice I discuss in this post pertains to career development considerations, whether you are employed or looking for your next position. I’m not a career development specialist but, I will share my insights and experience regarding personal career development that I have gained over my career.

I have been in the oil industry for over 35 years, and plan to remain in the business for another 12 – 15 years. My focus area for the past 16 years has been in oil sands geoscience for the evaluation, development and production of assets. I have worked at three different exploration & production companies. The current global downturn in oil and gas has left Calgary with the highest unemployment rate in Canada, and I am included in these statistics.

In the last 13 months I have been given advice from hundreds of professionals. Some people I know and have worked with and others I have met for the first time. The advice often comes from their own experience and learnings from when they were laid off. Their advice is always appreciated and welcomed but everyone has a different approach and ideas on how to navigate through today’s ever changing business environment. As with any advice, it should be tailored to what works best for your particular circumstance.

How many of you are happy and passionate about your career and want to continue to grow and develop your knowledge and experience? Like myself, I am sure there are hundreds if not thousands of you that have a career in your chosen field, see my post What I enjoy about My Career. If you are not happy in your career now may be an opportune time to adjust your career path.

During your career there are key moments and choices that ultimately affect your future career opportunities and your potential to grow. If you take ownership of the decisions you will achieve your long term career goals. Just remember, a career path is not always a straight path of continuous vertical progression. Sometimes, you may need to take a step back or sideways to develop other valuable skills before another vertical growth opportunity presents itself.

Don’t leave your career to chance; actively engage your direct supervisor in career conversations, on a regular basis, at least annually. I am a strong proponent that the development of your career is your responsibility and therefore it is only you that can manage it. Your supervisor is there to aid, support and/or guide you, but you have to put in the time and effort to develop and actualize the plan. If you haven't done so already, this will require some self reflection regarding your strengths and areas for development.

Ask your supervisor or the HR team about a corporate mentor program. If your company doesn’t have one, ask someone you respect if they would consider being your mentor. I was lucky to be both a mentor and a mentee; it helped me address several career development considerations. Being a mentor provides you with opportunities to learn from the mentee, and grow and develop other skill sets. You can also identify senior staff members that you respect and actively observe how they conduct themselves in the workplace. I don’t mean you should mimic them, but select one or two traits that you want to develop and then customize these traits to fit your personality and business style.

In my career I try to be open and receptive to new challenges and assignments. It was through these particular opportunities that my skill sets grew the most. Yes, it was initially a stressful experience, but in time the stress became more manageable. Once I successfully completed the deliverable, I was afforded another opportunity to demonstrate my abilities. From my experience, it is not until you consistently demonstrate a capability that your career can benefit from this new skill. A one-time performance doesn’t make you accomplished or an expert; expertise comes from multiple executions and demonstrating learnings from failures.

I am sure this next topic will garner some discussion and difference of opinions, which is a good thing because everyone has different wants or needs regarding career development. From my experience I have found that technical courses are not the only or necessarily the best method for knowledge growth in your career. In my opinion, nothing beats hands-on direct experience, working on a project deliverable allows you to grow and develop your technical and soft skill sets. Yes, training has its place, when a specific skill set is required for a project’s deliverable or when you need to develop a particular soft skill but timing is everything. Make sure that the new course based skill can be used immediately after the training on a specific deliverable. Otherwise, the value of that training diminishes rapidly with time.

The last piece of career advice relates to what I have learned and experienced since I was laid off. As stated above, I have been laid off for 13 months, but by no means are my learnings and experience applicable to everyone. I want to continue working for the next 12 – 15 years, and I want to find an oil industry opportunity that fits my skill sets and is a good corporate cultural fit. The key for me is a career opportunity that provides an open and sharing environment that encourages continually learning, growth and development coupled with a team that shares in my goal to successfully achieve the project deliverables.

Understanding what you want from your next career position is vital along with, self-awareness and reflection. Until you know what you are looking for in your next career opportunity it is difficult for your network to help you accomplish it. There are many schools of thought regarding how you achieve this goal but for myself I have found three development areas that have personally challenged and pushed me:

• Networking
• Social Media
• Consulting

I will not individually expand on each of these but, I would suggest that you put some thought into what development areas should be on your list that would assist in achieving your specific career goals. I do have a networking post you can read, and it touches on my social media perspective. The key piece of advice I can provide regarding networking and social media is that you need to be active in both, no matter your age, experience or career ambition.

The consulting component was born from my perceived notion that a number of companies have cut their staff level well beyond what was originally intended or is needed to address key deliverables but, these staff reductions were required to survive this dramatic downturn. Companies may turn to the consulting market to fill short term gaps in knowledge and experience in order to ensure they successfully meet their deliverables. I do know several people that have successfully found some limited consulting work in their specific discipline.

You might be thinking, what is the career development opportunity associated with the three areas. For me, it is about learning how to market myself, and show potential employers how my value added brand of strong technical and leadership skills can be beneficial to their company and projects. I can and have successfully marketed several business opportunities within each of my former employers. In hindsight, if I had the opportunity to do things differently I would have made networking and marketing myself a higher priority throughout my career.

I hope this post provides you with some food for thought regarding your own career development considerations.

All the best to you in 2017!