How to Assess Your Career – Identifying Your Career Stages, Focus, and Attributes Part 1

What career stage are you at? Do you know what you should be focusing on besides performing your job duties? Do you know how to assess your career?

Learning Lemming

I didn’t know how to do any of these things when I first entered the workforce after receiving my MHA degree. My high school, college, and graduate school experiences didn’t teach me to how manage my career.

From 1994 to 2006, I realized that I had to develop additional skills to succeed in the workplace and to secure my next career goal.

Newbie in the Workforce

In my first job, I wasn’t prepared for my position as a product marketing manager, because I didn’t fully understand fundamental things like business etiquette, meeting management, email communications, organizational skills, or project management.

Fortunately, I quickly learned to develop my own curriculum, so I could reach my potential at this career stage.

Career Stage Focus and Attributes

Because I was so happy to land a job, I didn’t realize that I needed to manage my career. I figured out that my career would occur in several stages, with each stage having its unique focus and key attributes. I was strongly influenced by Robert Heller’s approach to achieving excellence. Heller argues that we must demonstrate key attributes as workers.

For example, as a new knowledge worker (KW), I learned that my focus was to:

Career & Self Development skills: Understand how to manage my career and develop my skill set and knowledge areas
Personal branding: Learn what personal branding is and why it’s important; figure out what my existing personal brand was and how I wanted to refine it
Next career milestone: Identify what I wanted to do next after my first job
Integrating company values: Understand my new employer’s culture and values and learn how to adapt to my new work environment by emulating their values

My attributes as a new KW were:

Self Management: Possess organizational and time management skills to be effective in my job
Work Ethics and Values: Demonstrate positive work ethics and values that were a fit for my career choice
Vision: Have a vision of my career and what my career path or paths could look like

The Seven Typical Career Stages

Over the past twelve years, I encountered seven distinct career stages, with each stage having a different a focus with varying attributes. I found each career stage was similar to my experiences in college and graduate school. Below is a summary of these parallels:

New worker = freshman year: My first job in the workforce required me to learn the fundamentals of being a worker and meeting job requirements.
Advanced KW = sophomore year: My second job built on the fundamental skills and knowledge areas I learned as a new KW.
Intermediate KW = junior year: My third year and/or job expanded my leadership and management skills as I emerged as an expert in my area of responsibility.
Senior KW = senior year: My forth year and/or job emphasized being an expert, being a team leader and having responsibility for a function in the company.
Director = first year graduate student: My first director role required new skills of me such as change management, performance management, or creating new product offerings.
Vice president = 2^nd year graduate student: Being a VP rolled up all these work experiences and customized curriculums that I had created for myself at each career stage. I applied my experience, tools, and templates creatively to each new application or business situation.
Entrepreneur = Optional: Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. I found new challenges and new skills were required for this career stage.

The tables above reflect the seven career stages and their respective focus and attributes.

What should your focus be at each career stage?

Based on my experience, I have identified fifteen things that we focus on across the seven career stages:

Career & Self Development skills
Personal branding
Next career milestone
Integrating company values
Becoming a candidate for promotion
Being an established team player
Demonstrate management skills
Demonstrate leadership skills
Being an expert in job class
Committing to company goals and objectives
Entrepreneurial, thinking beyond bureaucracy
Expert at execution, implementation
Achieves results
Living company goals
Become an entrepreneur

What attributes should you demonstrate at each career stage?

I also discovered there were thirteen attributes that are critical at different career stages.

Self Management
Work Ethics and Values
Vision
Confidence
Ability to take risks
Drive and energy
Self-awareness and criticism
Initiative
Values
Self-promotion
Visibility
Accountability
Thought leader

Assessing your career as part of your career development

How can you benefit from my lessons learned? Identify the career stage you are at, review the focus and attributes for the respective career stage, and figure out how you start managing your career with these two things in mind.

Are you new in the workforce? You should be focused on learning career and self development skills, understanding personal branding, identifying your next career milestone, integrating your company values, becoming a candidate for promotion, and being an established team player.

If you’re goal is to become a VP, then you should demonstrate entrepreneurial thinking; become expert at execution and implementation; know how to achieves results; and live the company goals.

In this The Smart Lemming Guide to Career Development series, I will help you through each of these career development phases, so you can create a shortcut to your career success. Click here for previous entries.