Take Responsibility For Your Career

I’m getting caught back up on my reading of The Daily Drucker. The reading for September 9 is just so true and so powerful and so relevant that I have to reprint it here:

The stepladder is gone, and there’s not even the implied structure on an industry’s rope ladder. It’s more like vines, and you bring your own machete.

If a young man in a gray flannel suit represented the lifelong corporate type, what’s today’s image? Taking individual responsibility and not depending on any particular company. Equally important is managing your own career. You don’t know what you’ll be doing next, or whether you’ll work in a private office or one big amphitheater or even out of your home. You have to take responsibility for knowing yourself, so you can find the right jobs as you develop and as your family becomes a factor in your values and choices.

Remarkably few Americans are prepared to select jobs for themselves. When you ask, “Do you know what you are good at? Do you know your limitations?” they look you in the eye with a blank stare. Or they often respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer. When they prepare their résumés, they try to list positions like steps up a ladder. It is time to give up thinking of jobs as career paths as we once did and think in terms of taking on one assignment after another. We have to leap right over the search for objective criteria and get into the subjective – what I call competencies.