Managing Your Career

This content helps you understand the career optimizer capability framework. 

There is an introduction and three content parts in total. 

Reimagining My Career Options

For any professional contribution, where professional here means you are being paid or compensated for your contribution, ask these three (3) questions: 

1. What problems am I involved in solving?
2. For what activities and deliverables am I responsible?
3. For what aspects of the solution am I accountable?

More details and support for answering these questions are provided in the program starting with the introduction below.  

Professional Activities

For What Activities or Deliverables Am I Responsible?

Every activity is performed with an end in mind. in a professional context, the activity is performed to add value which can be simply described as "solving a problem". 

So, let's start by thinking about "what you do right now" for a living. To answer that, think about the activities and related outputs/deliverables for which you are responsible? 

Executing: 

• The activity: performing tasks based on pre-defined processes and guidelines 
• The output: (what do you show as evidence of activity completed?)

Engaging: 

• The activity: building relationships with stakeholders who require the solutions you represent and ensuring they adopt and obtain maximum value from the solutions 
• The output: (what do show as evidence of activity completed?)

Creating: 

• The activity: analyzing provided/identified domain problems or contextual opportunities, designing, developing and launching solutions 
• The output: (what do show as evidence of activity completed?)

Strategizing: 

• The activity: researching and identifying problems worth solving or opportunities worth going after. 
• The output: (what do show as evidence of activity completed?)

Supervising: 

• The activity: guiding the execution of tasks by multiple people to ensure alignment, coordination of processes and optimization of resources, including time.
• The output: (what do show as evidence of activity completed?) 

Understanding roles as a set of common activities that can be mastered and what "developing mastery" means for each activity. 

Domain Expertise

What Problem Am I Involved in Solving?

The answer to the question relating to the problem and solution, exist in the domains in which you are operating.

The problem you are solving is in the secondary domain, while the solution you are offering is from the primary domain (your domain).

So, for example, if you are a secondary school physics teacher, your primary domain (the solution you're offering) is teaching/education. The secondary domain (the problem you're solving) is secondary school physics understanding for secondary school students. 

Understanding different types of domain expertise as the critical requirement for solving problems and demonstrating value in any role

For What Aspects of the Solution Am I Accountable?

Your ability to raise the value you offer as a professional depends on the value of the responsibilities that can be given to you and the value/significance of the results or impact for which you can be held accountable.

Both of these are determined by your career level and the type of your role, which in turn rely on your competency level.

Are you an individual contributor?

• For what set or subset of results or outcomes of the overall solution are you accountable? 
• What is your current career level?

Are you a non-individual contributor?

• For what results are you and your team as a whole accountable? For what deliverables are you and your team as a whole responsible? 
• For what are you personally accountable? For what are you personally responsible?
• How have you allocated accountability across your team? How have you allocated responsibility for specific deliverables across your team?
• What is your current career level?

Competencies

Understanding what competencies mean in relation to the ability to respond to the demands and expectations of any role, deliver results and solve problems, master activities and develop required domain expertise

Managing Your Performance

The content provided here help you view your experiences with intentionality and understand the relationship between desired results and purpose.

The full coverage here contains an introduction and three content parts in total. Each part helps you to apply the principles to your unique circumstances using templates.

Understanding Performance

The content covered here aims to help you think differently about what performance means and how purposefully pursuing clear results give purpose to your actions which in turn activates your natural learning agility and ability to develop adaptive performance capabilities.

You are encouraged to think about your performance in three ways

• Remedial: Meeting the performance expectations of the current experiences (e.g. role) 
• Aspirational: Pushing the performance possibilities of your current experiences (e.g. role)
• Growth: Readiness to perform in your desired next level of experiences (e.g. next role)

So as you think about performance and purpose, reflect on these three questions: 

1. What am I doing and what am I trying to achieve by doing it?
2. Is there a gap between my desired and actual results? If yes, why?
3. What can I do to close the gap?  

What am I doing and what am I trying to achieve by doing it? 

The first step to becoming more purposeful is to learn to differentiate between actions and results because purpose comes from results, not actions. Being able to make this distinction is a critical first step in living your life with purpose, especially your professional life and career. 

Managing your performance then simply focuses on managing the gap between actual and desired results.

Understand performance enough to be able to analyze it and identify the right objectives that can be achieved with learning support

Understanding Capabilities

Is there a gap between my desired and actual results, if yes, why?

There are many possible reasons why a gap exists but all relate to some aspect of capabilities. For example,

Knowledge

• Knowledge of results: you are not sure what results you can actually achieve or should be pursuing, don't fully understand it or aren't sure how to define it so that you know when you've achieved it. 
• Knowledge of activities: you are not sure what actions you can perform to achieve those results or what you can do that will produce the outcomes you need

Skills

• Skill to perform actions: you don't know how to perform the actions needed to achieve the results or can't perform them well enough

Will/Behaviour/Motivation

• Knowledge of self: you are struggling to find confidence, courage or even the motivation to push yourself to acknowledge the gap and do something about closing it
• Skill to manage self: you don't know how to perform the actions needed to help you manage your courage, confidence and clarity of purpose. 

The ability to perform is all about capabilities. This course focuses on breaking capabilities down so you can - identify the knowledge and skills needed to perform the actions and deliver the output quality that achieves your desired results.

Understanding Development Action Plans

What can I do to close the gap?

What you can do to close the gap depends on what is responsible for the gap.

If the focus is knowledge, you need to acquire or improve your understanding of specific concepts, principles or theories related to the results you are trying to achieve and the types of actions needed to achieve it. 

If the focus is skills, you need to develop the ability to perform the actions or hone the proficiency with which you perform them (quality of output). 

There are different types of learning and development actions that will help you address these and that is the focus of the content in this section. 

Capabilities are to be developed. This course is about knowing what types of actions are best suited to successfully develop what type of capabilities and being able to develop and execute a plan to follow through on the actions identified. 

If you're interested in exploring the career optimizer for your organization or for yourself, get in touch with us.

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