Career Management

What Is Career Management?

It’s shocking how many people fall into their careers by accident, not by design. Ask people how they came to be doing what they do for a living. And, more often than not, they will tell you a story of how one thing led to another. Or, perhaps, how some person in their life influenced them to follow a certain career path. Few end up in their field as a result of a thoughtful, predetermined plan. Once established in their careers, even fewer people think about where their career paths take them. They just follow wherever it leads…until the path ends.

Your career is too important to be determined by the winds of fate. It is an asset — the most important one you have next to your health and your family. And it is intrinsically connected to the well-being of both of those assets, not to mention your finances. That’s where career management comes in.

Career management means being thoughtful about identifying your values and your ambitions, setting goals that align with them, then methodically charting a course to achieve them. It means putting yourself in optimal positions throughout your career to capitalize on new opportunities as they arise so that you can find success and fulfillment in your career and, by extension, in your life.

Career Changes Are Opportunities

Career management also means being prepared to make career pivots. Long gone are the days when a person might retire with a gold watch from a lifelong career at one company. Nowadays, American workers stay with an employer four to five years on average and sometimes job transitions involve a shift between industries, not just between companies. Chances are good that whatever you set out to do at the beginning of your career is far from what you now do for a living. And whatever you do today may not be what you will be doing tomorrow.

As commonplace as it has become, changing jobs ranks as one of the most stressful experiences in a person’s life, but it doesn’t have to be. People often view career change through the lens of a layoff or some other degenerating professional situation, like a boss from hell. Employee burnout is also a rising problem. Although these are always very real threats, savvy workers view job transitions as opportunities to shape their careers and seek more desirable jobs.

With good career management, career change is an excellent way to advance your career and pursue your dreams. So, how do you do that?

Create a Plan

Most people focus on their career in a reactionary instead of a strategic way. They put their head down and work hard. That’s a laudable ethic, but it means that if things go south, it is hard to understand what went wrong and how to make things better.

The most important element of good career management is good perspective. That is, knowing where you are, where you want to go, and what obstacles might stand in your way. Only then can you figure out the steps you need to take to get to where you want to go. There is no more effective way to get to a destination than to create a plan.

A good plan also helps you prepare for upcoming course changes because switching gears can be tricky. If you anticipate any kind of career change – whether it’s an internal promotion or changing companies – you should begin laying the groundwork months in advance. How? By building your social network, recording your achievements and putting metrics to them, developing your skills, and many other tasks that could be instrumental in opening doors for you. Good career management begins way before you are thinking about a job transition and it extends well past it, too.

Sometimes you change your mind about where you want to go. That doesn’t mean that you’ve been on the wrong career path all along. It just means that your needs have evolved and so should your plan. At the start of your career, for example, you might value title, compensation, and growth. Later, you might value more highly work-life balance, stability, and meaningful work. So, it’s important to periodically reassess things to ensure that your career choices are in line with your values and priorities.

When to Hire a Professional

Even though career changes have become a part of life, people can be forgiven for needing help with job transitions and career management. Recruiting tactics and tools change over time, and the pandemic spurred historic shifts in employment trends. The average worker can’t possibly stay up to speed on best practices. Sometimes it makes sense to bring in a pro.

Career management professionals offer their clients many benefits:

The Barrett Group Dividend

Our industry is comprised of executive coaches, recruiters, resume writers, and so on but, when it comes to career change, no company offers service as comprehensive as The Barrett Group. Our specialty and greatest source of pride is our success in coaching our clients to see a broader picture of their lives, helping them to identify their ideal careers, and teaching them how to seek and find their dream job. In short, we teach them how to expertly manage their careers. With 30 years of experience under our belt, we know that successful careers hinge on good long-term career management.

We liken our service to the lesson of the old proverb, “Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime.” It’s more than a program — it’s a career change system that combines software, consulting, coaching, and more. We teach clients how to launch a professional search that will serve them now as well as in every future job search they undertake.

Even more important, we coach clients to find the right job for them.

Some people call what we do “reverse recruiting” because, unlike employee recruiters, whose focus is on helping companies fill job openings, our focus is you, the candidate. We are in your corner, supporting you – exclusively. It’s a service that is woefully underrepresented in the employment industry. An oversight that we aim to rectify.

We know we are doing something right because our clients often come back to work with us as their careers mature and their needs change. They value the professional sounding-board we offer and the dedication to their needs that we provide. They know that with the experience our team offers, they are more likely to find job satisfaction and compensation that is commensurate with the value they bring to a company.

Great careers don’t happen by accident – they are journeys that require work and smart, consistent management. When you hire The Barrett Group, you are making an investment in you and in your career that comes with recurring dividends.

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