The Career Change Process: Five Steps to Better Professional Stature

by Vern Johnson

You say you want to improve your personal or professional stature within your organization. But, how do you do that? Consider following a clear, but flexible career improvement process. This simple five-step process incorporates a set of values; a well-articulated purpose or mission; an understanding of competencies, gaps and resource limitations; your ability to develop a tactical plan; and your willingness to implement that plan.

Step 1 – List your dissatisfactions with your current situation.

Dissatisfaction indicates that a gap exists between your reality and what you want your reality to be. It serves as a measure of what has not gone well in the recent past. Your values will define how you measure things; they serve as the basis for your everyday behaviors, and therefore help determine your dissatisfactions. You need to ask, "What about my career is not optimum?"

Responses that indicate dissatisfaction might include:

• Global competitiveness, economic conditions, and corporate buyouts make my job unstable.

• My peers get all of the good assignments and some of them are passing me by.

• Technology changes so rapidly that I can't keep up with it.

Motivate yourself to accept responsibility for finding a way to remove dissatisfactions from your career. Recognize your career needs and goals, diagnose them, and then define a set of problems that once solved will remove the dissatisfactions you've identified.

Step 2 – Identify a vision of excellence.

Your mission or purpose is the basis of your vision of excellence. Developing a statement that describes your personal mission is merely a matter of declaring what you do or want to do, and why — your purpose. Then, based on your declared purpose, you can develop a vision that describes where you want the future to take you. Your vision will outline what you believe, as well as what energizes and motivates you. People who have a clear-cut vision of their future will learn about their strengths and weaknesses. They will then be able to see what they need to gain in order to succeed.

Your vision statement might include:

• My personal, family and work goals are focused and support each other.

• I am growing professionally and can do a great job for my employer.

• I am the engineer (employee) of choice in my unit.

• My professional colleagues look to me for my opinion.

• I perform at a high level, and my professional behavior and career-related technical and non-technical skills, knowledge and attitudes contribute to my performance.

Step 3 – List the barriers that will keep you from achieving your vision.

Competencies, gaps and resource limitations may constrain your career growth. Some of these issues may be beyond your scope of authority, but others are simply barriers that you can remove.

You might face these barriers, among others:

• I own a home, have a family with community ties, and I can only change employment to a limited number of local employers.

• There is so much for me to learn, and I don't know how to focus on what is most important.

• Because of personal, family and work time demands, I don't have the time to study and learn new concepts.

• Seminars and short courses cost more than I can afford.

• Educational opportunities are not available in my community.

Step 4 – Identify the practical first step to overcoming the barriers.

List alternative scenarios and analyze them. Then, based on the criteria outlined in step 2, determine which alternative will serve your situation best. Then, you will have the information you need for a plan describing the activities you can pursue in the near future. Ultimately, this plan will put everything in front of you. Commit to one of the activities. By doing so, you will have initiated your plan with a practical first step.

Your practical first steps might include:

• Defining your personal/professional mission or strategy.

• Assessing your career competencies and gaps.

• Determining what it means to be a global engineer.

• Setting goals relative to your future educational growth.

• Determining what family, employer or professional society resources are available to you.

Choosing a practical first step amounts to establishing a tactical plan for moving toward your vision of excellence.

Step 5 – Carry out your tactical plan and then repeat the process.

All that remains in the process is following through. Initiate the activity you chose as the practical first step toward accomplishing your vision of career excellence. Then, repeat the whole process repeatedly over time. Each time will become easier, and your motivation will increase with each success.

Just do it — you'll like the 'new you.'

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Vern R. Johnson is Associate Dean of Engineering at the University of Arizona in Tucson and IEEE-USA's Career Activities Editor.