As your career unfolds and choices present themselves, remember what it’s like to wear your most comfortable pair of shoes (refer to my LinkedIn article “Job Fit And Your Career Development”), and let that experience help guide you. This applies whether you’re just getting started in your career, are navigating through mid-career decisions, or are planning for retirement. ?
Recognize that the way you approach your career decisions can be critical to their success. Slow the decision-making process down and make decisions in a deliberate manner. There can be a lot at stake financially, so you don’t want to rush things—this is not the time for spontaneity. ?
The following are a few examples of how the awareness from your self-assessment and job fit analysis can be useful to you as you approach choices that may arise. Consider the following:?
1.?????Your Career Development
2.?????Refining Or Redefining Your Current Role
Inventing You And Your Career?
Just starting out? Use the awareness of your assessment to help you invent your career, and refer to your best job fit to identify opportunities in your field that are the best match for you. Continue to be self-motivated, and think of yourself as your own “start up”—someone with a skills portfolio, not just a job title.?
Creating Your Strategic Career Plan?
Thinking about your long-term career trajectory? Use the understanding of your best job fit to guide you: identify your strengths with a thorough self-assessment. Develop a plan that includes goal posts with a strategy to adapt.?
Team Building In A Start-Up?
Part of a start-up? Draw on your career assessment to be part of a high-functioning team.?
- Suppose you’re a data scientist collaborating with several colleagues on an innovative start-up. With an angel investor in the background, this is a lean operation requiring peak performance, close collaboration, and agility. You and your colleagues have worked together successfully in the past and recognize each other’s skills and how they complement each other. You’re considering ways to further enhance your performance as a team. Each team member does an individual work style assessment that uncovers hidden strengths beyond their existing skills sets. Collectively you draw on the awareness you have gained about your best job fit(s) to engage as a team in an even more optimal way.?
Making A Decision About Graduate School?
Considering graduate school? Think through your goal before you proceed, rather than assuming graduate school will clarify your career direction.
- ?Picture this skilled administrative assistant who wanted to increase her job satisfaction and was unsure of what direction to take in her career. She proceeded methodically: Before taking on the financial commitment of graduate school, she first did a comprehensive career assessment and took inventory of her strengths. Her profile seemed to lend itself to the field of law. She tested the waters, researched law schools, and then set up information interviews with faculty and practicing lawyers before making the decision to proceed.
Do you find yourself in a field that doesn’t feel like a good fit? You may be able to carve a niche for yourself that is. This is where an internal job search may be worthwhile.?
- Let’s say you started out in the field of fund raising when you were just out of college—first taking an entry level position in a non-profit, doing well at it, and then getting promoted several times into positions of increased responsibility. You worked on special events—and did that successfully—but began thinking that the field might not be for you. A thorough self-assessment helped you realize that a role doing major gifts fund raising could be a fit in your field and that you didn’t have to make a complete change of career. A simple shift in focus can make a big difference in terms of job satisfaction.
?Planning For Retirement?
Refer to insights gained from your self-assessment to transition into retirement and remain fulfilled in your work. ?
- Consider the case of this lawyer who was preparing to retire and wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next. In discussing his assessment results, he realized that some of his most meaningful work experiences had been the pro bono activities he had taken on over the years. After performing his due diligence, he made a transitional step that gave him a less demanding schedule and also served on boards of non-profits whose missions he believed in. He continued to feel fully engaged in his work and now also had a significant degree of work-life balance that he had not previously enjoyed.
?Refining Or Redefining Your Current Role
?Considering A Career Change
?Thinking about a career change? Use your understanding of your job fit to guide you. A simple shift in your current role could provide the job satisfaction you’re looking for, and a complete change of career may not be necessary.
?Tip: When considering a career change, make sure to identify specifically why you want to make a change before you take the plunge. First ask yourself: Where is the rub?
- ?Consider the case of this recognized fashion designer who expressed dissatisfaction about her work. From the career assessment process, the designer realized that she was more oriented to working with systems and procedures than relying on a creative impulse. Rather than changing her career, she was able to transition to a production manager role, where she was responsible for getting out the product line. Establishing systems and schedules to track production came more naturally to her than relying on her creative instincts and intuition. Here, her knowledge and experience with the design process was advantageous to her because she had designers reporting to her. The role was much more compatible, drawing on her strengths with execution—and the job also paid more than what she had been earning. It was a successful transition all the way around.
?Growing A Small Business
?Are you a sole proprietor wearing too many hats? Use the awareness of your best job fit to maximize your strengths and develop a strategy for working around your weaknesses.
- ?Consider the case of this successful photographer who wanted to build her practice. From her comprehensive self-assessment she was able to pinpoint her natural strengths—doing shoots and relating to clients—from the activities required to run and develop her practice. The administrative and strategic aspects were not natural for her and were highly time consuming besides. Hiring a part time assistant to help with the administrative details and a consultant to advise her about a marketing plan freed her to focus on the activities where she thrived.
?Making Constructive Use Of Differences
?Don’t let differences with others get in your way—come up with a strategy for using them constructively.
- ?Let’s say you are the Director of Client Services for a large non-profit organization who finds yourself butting heads with your Assistant Director. You want things to run more smoothly and recognize that your differences are interfering with the delivery of services to clients. After doing a thorough career assessment, you can both understand why, at times, you seem to speak different languages. Now that the two of you understand that you have style differences that aren’t personal, you can focus on your strengths and come up with a strategy for working around your differences—all to the benefit of the clients.
?Adapting To Rapid Change In Your Profession
?A field or role that may have been a good fit when you started out in it could have changed significantly because of accelerating technological changes. Draw on the insight that you have gained about your best job fit to separate the issues and help you adapt so that you can experience the job satisfaction you once had.
- ?Consider the case of this established physician who had been very well matched in her work in internal medicine. Because of technological developments and other changes in the healthcare industry, she had become so dissatisfied with her daily routine that she was even considering a career change! In the course of discussion about her assessment and her best job fit, she realized that the “rub” was not the field of medicine but the way it was practiced. Spending extended periods of time in front of the computer was not a good fit—she gravitated naturally to the interaction with patients. Another source of mismatch was with her colleagues and her working environment, which was not a collegial situation. Moving her practice to a new location with colleagues who were willing to cover for her, and getting assistance with electronic workflows were among the changes she made that gave her the breathing room she needed to again find the satisfaction in her work that she once had.
?Preventing Burnout By Expanding Your Skills In Your Area Of Expertise
?Use the awareness of your best job fit to develop skills in your area of expertise and remain engaged in your field.
- ?Let’s say that you’re an experienced dentist who has kept his career alive by taking on additional responsibilities in his area of expertise. With an awareness of his best fit, he expanded his scope and assumed even more responsibilities that were in his field. In addition to seeing patients on a part-time schedule, over time he set up a dental clinic and researched and published a technical paper in his area of expertise. He served on the board of a dental school and learned to do fund raising. Keeping his best fit in mind, he created new opportunities for himself that continued to challenge him, that used his expertise, and that enabled him to develop new skills in his field of interest.
?Partnering To Bring In New Business
?Increase your effectiveness by using the insight from your assessment process to identify strengths in others that complement yours on a sales call.
- ?One client, an investment banker, was looking for ways to increase her effectiveness. In looking closely at her job fit, she realized that she gravitated to a role where she was executing the deal. Brainstorming for new business opportunities on client calls did not come naturally to her. She realized that her effectiveness would be improved if she included a colleague in some of her client meetings whose strengths complemented hers—someone who could help brainstorm for possibilities. It was an easy fix that helped bring in the business. The investment banker was then able to focus her efforts on what she did best—closing the deal.
?Understanding And Reducing Sources Of Job Stress
?To alleviate job stress and increase your job satisfaction, make a distinction between your acquired skills—even though they may be very well-developed—and your natural bent. You may then be able to adjust your role so you have more time for the activities that come most naturally to you.
- ?Consider the case of this consultant who had well-developed interpersonal and client management skills. She was relieved nevertheless to identify through our testing and discussions that too much interaction was a source of stress and potential burnout for her—her interpersonal strengths were an acquired skill, not something natural for her to use. With this understanding, she found ways to structure her schedule a little differently: by giving herself some “alone time” each day to recharge, she was able to increase her job satisfaction significantly.
- ?Use your awareness of your best job fit as a reference point in your planning
- Think through career decisions carefully before proceeding with them
- Look for opportunities to leverage the strengths you have identified in your self-assessment and work around your weaknesses
- Be aware of opportunities to collaborate with others whose strengths complement yours
- ?Approach your career decisions in a reactive or impulsive manner
- Make a complete career change without first considering ways to shift in your existing area
- Go to graduate school to “figure out what you want to do”
?To Sum Up: Be deliberate in your decision making. With an understanding of your best job fit, you will have a solid foundation for your career choices. Approach the decision making process systematically, and you will position yourself for success!
Published on LinkedIn May 25, 2022
