In a less secure professional world than anyone has ever known, you need a tougher, more pragmatic approach to managing your professional life. It’s time to stop thinking of yourself simply as a job title and an employee, because this point-of-view has you psychologically shackled to entities that can, and will, dispose of your services at short notice.
Me, Inc.
Instead, start to think of yourself as MeInc, a corporation that operates in the best interests of its shareholders for their (i.e. your) long-term economic success. When you use a more corporate mindset and replicate the operational behavior of a corporation; you will dramatically improve your odds of reaching life goals.
MeInc, like any other company, needs products and services that evolve to meet the changing needs of its customers (employers). These products and services are the bundle of skills, behaviors and values that define the professional you. To succeed over the average career span (some 50 years), MeInc must develop, differentiate and sell these skills to a targeted customer base: employers who hire people like you. Your success depends on how well you coordinate the activities of the different departments that allow you to operate profitably. A successful MeInc needs these departments:
Product Research & Development
To keep your skills in sync with market demands. Keeping tabs on what employers are looking for when they hire people like you, allows you to build the skills that keep you a marketable commodity; and in the process maintain a viable brand.
Strategic Planning
To develop strategies and tactics for professional growth. Strategic planning looks at the horizon and at the tactics you use today to get where you want to be tomorrow. You need offensive and defensive career management strategies, planning for consistent professional growth yet being prepared for recessions, layoffs, age discrimination and the like.
Accounting & Finance
For fiscal prudence. Most professionals are good consumers, whose media induced craving for instant gratification leads them to live beyond their income and borrow against their dreams. People like you, on the other hand are going to focus on building the company, in other words your brand, living within your means now, so that you really get to live those dreams for all your tomorrows.
Marketing Communications
For positioning, branding, and sales. Marketing communications (Marcomm) initiatives establish visibility and credibility in your marketplace. This includes your active involvement in professional networks, like linkedin.com, to create an ever-widening web of professionally useful contacts. Your involvement helps build skills and relationships, and you become increasingly visible to headhunters.
Sales
MeInc is only as stable as its sales strategies are reliable. This means getting your résumé, job search, interview, and career management skills ramped up to a higher level, so that job changes happen on your timetable. Once in a new position, your Strategic Planning and Marcomm activities will mean you have tactics in place to land plum assignments, raises, and promotions.
Re-think your place as a pawn in someone else’s game, and you can gain control over your destiny. In this less secure world, commitment to a MeInc mindset gives you permission to reinvent and brand a newly empowered you.
Author:
Martin Yate (CPC) is the author of Knock em Dead The Ultimate Job Search Guide, a NY Times bestseller updated annually for 24 years. He’s been in career management for 34 years: Silicon Valley Headhunter and VP with the seminal and feared Executek, Director of HR for Bell Industries Computer Memory Division, Director of Training and Development for Dunhill . Martin believes that change is your future, branding is critical, but no one has ever taught you how to navigate this stuff.
