David G. Jensen, Contributing Editor04.03.17
It’s always surprising to find out how much control some people will give up over their career. A graduate student allows an adviser to choose the research topic and direction, or a postdoc falls under the spell of a terrible PI and allows him or her to run rampant over them. Upon landing their job in a company, other people take the Human Resources department literally when they are told that there’s a career development plan in store for them. No, the company doesn’t take care of your career development for you—you need to actively pursue professional growth. And, some will trust a headhunter who says, “Hey, just leave your job search to me.”
It’s far easier to leave your career in the hands of others than it is to sit down and logically determine your next steps. But that approach is also likely to lead to disappointment and frustration down the line. A lesson that everyone learns at some point is that you are the only one who cares enough about your career to make the right choices. And in order to make the right choices, you need to take control.
In this month’s column, I’ll describe three major elements that control your career and the overarching mechanism at work behind driving you forward to success. Like a governor on an engine, there’s a system at work in your thinking that maintains, or derails, your constant, steady momentum towards success, and it’s called the locus of control.
The locus
It’s easy to expect good stuff to fall into your lap. You’re smart, you worked hard to get into your job choice, and you deserve a career that pays well and offers intellectual satisfaction. But careers don’t blossom because of things that happen to you. They blossom when you exert control over your actions, guided by a set of career goals. Think about your job as a license to hunt big game; you’ve still got to head into the bush and land that moose.
If you want as much control as possible as you head out to “bag” a senior leadership role in your company, you’re going to need what is called an internal locus of control. In psychology, locus of control refers to what factors people believe control their lives. At one end of the spectrum are people with an external locus of control, who believe their lives are driven by outside forces. That’s generally an unhealthy view of things. Far better is an internal locus, where one believes that what they get out of life is due to forces within them, and that they can influence events and outcomes. Cultivating an internal locus will help you in the job search or in moving up the ladder, and will generally put you in a good position to succeed throughout your career.
My advice is to look within yourself at every stage of your career, and at every important career decision. Are you making the decisions based on something inside you that tells you it is the right move? Or are you being driven by the winds of fate (or an overly aggressive boss)? If you realize you’re not the one in control, maybe you should reconsider.
Three keys to career control
I can’t give you an entire list of the ways that you can control your career in one column, but I can point you to three of the main areas where exerting control on a daily basis is bound to put you on the right road. The first one is time. No one who learns to manage the clock will ever come out short on career opportunities. It is a vital aspect of success. And you are ultimately the only one who will decide how much time you are going to commit to each of your activities. The clock is completely yours.
The best way to make the clock work for your career is to learn to focus your efforts on what is truly important, not just on those urgent tasks in front of you. As President Dwight Eisenhower said, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” Learning to discriminate between these two is a great skill that you should make a point to develop.
Secondly, we control our communications, and the effect of the way we communicate on others. The words that come out of your mouth, the way you look, and the clues you give off as you communicate—it’s all a package deal to the person receiving your communication. It’s such a vital aspect of career success that it has become the number one thing you’ll find that job ads have in common. We’ve all seen those lines about “must have good communication skills, both written and oral.” That’s for real. I turned my early career around by being involved in Toastmasters International, an organization that helps members develop their public speaking skills. You can work on your communication to take charge of your career too.
Finally, we control our commitments. When you start a new job, you may be floundering a bit, and that’s OK. But there is no floundering after you’ve been there more than two or three months. And when you make a commitment, to your boss or to a co-worker, live to fulfill that commitment. Exert the control necessary to make commitments carefully, and once made, to strive with all the passion and effort you can muster to get it done. There’s nothing more important to a hiring manager than hearing a reference tell her, “John was the kind of person I could count on. Not every one of my people had that distinction, but I could always count on John.”
Never leave your job search to someone else
Controlling your time, communication, and commitments are good general principles. But, after a few years of marketable experience, some people would like nothing more than to outsource their career choices to someone else. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have an agent to represent you, just like movie stars in Hollywood? All they need to do is concentrate on the job in front of them, and someone else goes out and lines up their next project.
Some contingency recruiting firms will make you believe that they are “agents” and that they’ll represent you in the job search process. That’s not true. Recruiters are paid by the hiring company. Therefore, they officially represent the employer. But relying on someone else like this—someone who plays a “mix and match” business with a drawer full of employer ads and a drawer full of candidates—isn’t going to represent your career the way you would, that’s for sure.
During my first big job search, a couple of headhunters told me, “Hey, don’t worry. We’ve got a great network in your area of interest, and you can leave that resumé with us and we’ll get you lined up for interviews.” As a result of those conversations, I sat on my hands waiting for the phone to ring. It never did. Lesson learned: No one will ever care as much about your situation as you will.
David G. Jensen
Contributing Editor
Dave Jensen, President of CTI
Executive search, is an executive recruiter with 30 years of experience in
biopharma recruitment, and he can be reached at davejensen@careertrax.com. See his website at www.careertrax.com for hundreds of open positions across the industry.
It’s far easier to leave your career in the hands of others than it is to sit down and logically determine your next steps. But that approach is also likely to lead to disappointment and frustration down the line. A lesson that everyone learns at some point is that you are the only one who cares enough about your career to make the right choices. And in order to make the right choices, you need to take control.
In this month’s column, I’ll describe three major elements that control your career and the overarching mechanism at work behind driving you forward to success. Like a governor on an engine, there’s a system at work in your thinking that maintains, or derails, your constant, steady momentum towards success, and it’s called the locus of control.
The locus
It’s easy to expect good stuff to fall into your lap. You’re smart, you worked hard to get into your job choice, and you deserve a career that pays well and offers intellectual satisfaction. But careers don’t blossom because of things that happen to you. They blossom when you exert control over your actions, guided by a set of career goals. Think about your job as a license to hunt big game; you’ve still got to head into the bush and land that moose.
If you want as much control as possible as you head out to “bag” a senior leadership role in your company, you’re going to need what is called an internal locus of control. In psychology, locus of control refers to what factors people believe control their lives. At one end of the spectrum are people with an external locus of control, who believe their lives are driven by outside forces. That’s generally an unhealthy view of things. Far better is an internal locus, where one believes that what they get out of life is due to forces within them, and that they can influence events and outcomes. Cultivating an internal locus will help you in the job search or in moving up the ladder, and will generally put you in a good position to succeed throughout your career.
My advice is to look within yourself at every stage of your career, and at every important career decision. Are you making the decisions based on something inside you that tells you it is the right move? Or are you being driven by the winds of fate (or an overly aggressive boss)? If you realize you’re not the one in control, maybe you should reconsider.
Three keys to career control
I can’t give you an entire list of the ways that you can control your career in one column, but I can point you to three of the main areas where exerting control on a daily basis is bound to put you on the right road. The first one is time. No one who learns to manage the clock will ever come out short on career opportunities. It is a vital aspect of success. And you are ultimately the only one who will decide how much time you are going to commit to each of your activities. The clock is completely yours.
The best way to make the clock work for your career is to learn to focus your efforts on what is truly important, not just on those urgent tasks in front of you. As President Dwight Eisenhower said, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” Learning to discriminate between these two is a great skill that you should make a point to develop.
Secondly, we control our communications, and the effect of the way we communicate on others. The words that come out of your mouth, the way you look, and the clues you give off as you communicate—it’s all a package deal to the person receiving your communication. It’s such a vital aspect of career success that it has become the number one thing you’ll find that job ads have in common. We’ve all seen those lines about “must have good communication skills, both written and oral.” That’s for real. I turned my early career around by being involved in Toastmasters International, an organization that helps members develop their public speaking skills. You can work on your communication to take charge of your career too.
Finally, we control our commitments. When you start a new job, you may be floundering a bit, and that’s OK. But there is no floundering after you’ve been there more than two or three months. And when you make a commitment, to your boss or to a co-worker, live to fulfill that commitment. Exert the control necessary to make commitments carefully, and once made, to strive with all the passion and effort you can muster to get it done. There’s nothing more important to a hiring manager than hearing a reference tell her, “John was the kind of person I could count on. Not every one of my people had that distinction, but I could always count on John.”
Never leave your job search to someone else
Controlling your time, communication, and commitments are good general principles. But, after a few years of marketable experience, some people would like nothing more than to outsource their career choices to someone else. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have an agent to represent you, just like movie stars in Hollywood? All they need to do is concentrate on the job in front of them, and someone else goes out and lines up their next project.
Some contingency recruiting firms will make you believe that they are “agents” and that they’ll represent you in the job search process. That’s not true. Recruiters are paid by the hiring company. Therefore, they officially represent the employer. But relying on someone else like this—someone who plays a “mix and match” business with a drawer full of employer ads and a drawer full of candidates—isn’t going to represent your career the way you would, that’s for sure.
During my first big job search, a couple of headhunters told me, “Hey, don’t worry. We’ve got a great network in your area of interest, and you can leave that resumé with us and we’ll get you lined up for interviews.” As a result of those conversations, I sat on my hands waiting for the phone to ring. It never did. Lesson learned: No one will ever care as much about your situation as you will.
David G. Jensen
Contributing Editor
Dave Jensen, President of CTI
Executive search, is an executive recruiter with 30 years of experience in
biopharma recruitment, and he can be reached at davejensen@careertrax.com. See his website at www.careertrax.com for hundreds of open positions across the industry.