St.Louis Business Journal
CONSTANTLY EVOLVING YOUR CAREER IS MORE EFFECTIVE THAN LONG TERM PLANNING

By Anna Navarro

April 2008  

Author's note: Client stories in this column are based on actual situations fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.



I am not a great believer in long-range career planning. In fact, I think it is almost impossible to develop the kind of long-range career plans that prior generations aimed at. The world today changes too rapidly and too unpredictably for that to make much sense.

I am, however, a firm believer in knowing what’s important to you, figuring out what your options are, and moving constantly toward fulfilling your needs as situations change. That can mean both slow evolutions and big leaps

Ned first came to see me when he was in his late 20’s. He was unhappy with what he was doing and wanted to develop a long-term career plan. His father, the Senior V.P of Human Resources for a Fortune 50 corporation, had said many times he’d developed a plan to get to that position from the moment he’d been hired. Ned liked the idea of a plan. It took some effort to persuade him that what had been possible in his father’s time probably wouldn’t work today.

At that time, Ned was working in marketing research for a bank holding company. He was bored with what he was doing and not sure where to go next. The only thing he’d really enjoyed recently was a small project profiling existing bank customers and the services they used. But his boss wasn’t a believer in that kind of analysis and instead kept him busy doing more traditional market research.

As a result of the exploration we did, he decided to seek work in data mining, a discipline that was then in its infancy. He succeeded in finding a job with a New York consulting firm that did cutting edge work. He learned from the best of the best, and enjoyed the position for many years.

Then he got married and he and his wife, an attorney, decided New York was too expensive to raise children. Also, the constant travel that consulting demanded wouldn’t work well for a dual career couple with children.

So Ned and I worked long distance to figure out what his next move should be. He decided he wanted to return to the Midwest and look for an in-house position with a major company that relied heavily on data mining.

He found that kind of a position and did well. Five years later however, he needed a new challenge. We did a self-assessment, and he decided to target strategic planning as the field he wanted to get into. He persuaded his employer to pay for an executive MBA, which allowed him to pick up the financial skills he lacked to get into the field.

Seven months before Ned would have completed his MBA, the company announced it was in merger talks. That dashed his hopes for a quick lateral move into strategic planning. But he decided to stay put and try to finish his degree.

By the time the dust settled on the merger, Ned had his degree. He’d survived the layoffs and had a good job in data mining, but his hopes for a lateral move into strategic planning seemed remote. The strategic planning group had been cut, and some parts of the function had been transferred to the corporate headquarters of the other company. He was about to start looking for a strategic planning job outside the company when the situation suddenly changed.

The number two person in the strategic planning group that remained was leaving. His boss, a man Ned knew well, wanted someone who knew the company and its products well. That narrowed the field considerably. Ned was able to make a great case for himself, and landed the position. He managed to keep his current compensation.

For now, he is learning a lot and building his track record as a strategic planner, which is exactly what he wants to do. But even if the job goes extremely well, Ned’s guess is that he probably has at least one more change in store before retiring. His boss is only a few years older than he is, so there is little room for advancement.

Despite the fact that Ned is a planner by nature, he looks back on his career and acknowledges that it would have been impossible to plan its trajectory in advance. What he has done instead is to stay abreast of what he needed, constantly assess the changing options, and make active choices to direct his career. That’s an approach that he believes in wholeheartedly.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.