How can you have a successful career in today’s job market? By managing your career rather than letting it manage you and learning the Smart Lemming approach to career development.

The 2011 job market

Employers look for proven ability by cherry picking the employed rather than take a chance on the long-term unemployed. After the Great Recession, the United States experienced a jobless recovery that lasted a past year and a half. The job market will most likely not return to its 2008 levels, creating greater challenges for workers. Hopeful candidates must be proactive in managing their careers to remain competitive in increasingly more competitive job market with “more than 10 million Americans are out of work.”

Why should you be proactive in career development?

Workers and job candidates must take a hands-on approach to ensure career success by creating a customized learning experience that adds value to their work experience, knowledge areas, and skill set.

What does it take to be successful in one’s job? As a worker or job candidate, you must:

• Have the skill set and knowledge to do your job requirements.
• Know how to get the core competencies that you lack.
• Plan for their next promotion, position, or career stage.

How can employees customize their career development based on their current career stage? By doing the following:

• Identify core competencies, e.g., career and self-development skills, productivity and organization, management, leadership, sales and marketing, leadership, strategy, work tools and templates, they possess.
• Identify gaps in their skill set and core competencies.
• Schedule a 90-day action plan for their customized career-stage curriculum.

Smart Lemming characteristics

Workers or prospective workers should also take the lead in developing and emulating characteristics in these areas:

• Career focus
• Attributes
• Career stage roles
• Goals

How can you effectively manage your career?

Over the course of my career, I have learned invaluable career lessons that helped me achieve my goals by following this approach to career development. After graduate school, I entered the job market as a product marketing manager, eventually becoming a vice president and entrepreneur. I attribute my career successes to proactively planning and managing my career in three phases:

• Phase 1: Planning my career.
• Phase 2: Applying my Smart Lemming curriculum approach to career development.
• Phase 3: Executing curriculum with a 90-day action plans.

In this on-going series, I will help you through each of these phases, so you can create a shortcut to your career success.

Recommended Reading

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