By Alex Ogundadegbe
The career path is an important component of world class organizations that inculcate human resource management at the best practices level. Timely interventions by top management personnel to pinpoint
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employees with the potential to lead in different departments and sectors of organization are made early in careers so that employees can be nurtured and groomed to take up top level positions. But let’s face it we all do not work in organizations that have career paths and career guidance. So what is to be done if I find myself in an organization that believes only in the here and the now and not necessarily the future of talented employees in relation to the organization? Create your own path! Look out for yourself and whatever you do, make sure you are progressing. If you are reading this and you working at a career that you want to progress rapidly, take this advice and use it! Assess your present employability. What is your workplace status at present? Are you challenged with tasks that require creativity, initiative and expertise? Do you occasionally get to carry out tasks that are slightly above your skill and preparedness? If the answer to the above is in the affirmative, what do you have to do to maintain this activity and indeed achieve more and improve upon this? Will training in an area that you are working on help you do better? Would attaining a professional qualification take you higher or make you of greater value to your employers? What kind of experiences do you require to keep you on top of your game? How frequently do you get to attend work related conferences or tasks outside of the office that would help sharpen your skills? The basis of this discussion is to encourage you to make plans for your career development. And here are some suggestions of what you can do to be ahead of the people who you share career ideas with: Read in your field of expertise for at least 30 minutes every day. Make sure that it’s something educational that would contribute to the knowledge you already have. Also seek empowering, enlightening and inspirational stories of other people who you aspire to be like. One bad habit is watching television. We spend too much time in front of the box; this is not to say we should not watch at all. But television viewing should be minimal if we really want to grow our careers and expertise. If we spend at least an hour a day reading it would amount to a certain number of books that are bound to help us and give us better understanding of what our career requires. If we do not engage in the habit of reading, we could wake up one day and realize we have been left behind in this age of information. Work towards becoming one of the smartest, best informed and highly influential and productive people in your unique area of expertise (UAE). Also seek to listen to audio programmes. This would require some kind of device that you can download or transfer information to. To earn more you will have to learn more. Listen to audio programmes in your area of expertise every day. This will not only change your worldview but will influence your skill on the long run. To be better you need to learn how to do things faster, better and cheaper. Cutting costs and eliminating wastage where that principle is applicable is a solid advantage. One period that we need to begin to exploit for our personal development is when we drive or commute to work. We can spend the time listening to Compact Discs or MP3s about our work ethics and improving our skills. The third strategy or approach is to schedule periods for training, seminars and workshops. I advise that we attend at least four seminars or workshops in a year where we can listen to experts talk about our areas of interest and proffer solutions to some of the sundry problems we face at work. Frequent sampling among executives in all the professions shows that most of them hardly schedule a training programme for attendance. They rely on residual knowledge, sometimes to solve new problems and developments and it does not always work out the way they expect. There are a variety of questions that should come to mind for people who seek to up the ante in their careers: Who could help or hinder you in this development? What opportunities and threats do you face? What exactly would you have to do or forgo to bring about the changes you desire? The bottom line is to draw up an action plan which would involve some of the activity we have highlighted here and some others that you feel would be useful to you. If you work in an environment that does not have a career path, don’t expect much help from your superiors. You might have to work it out yourself
