DIY Career Planning: Stress-A-Lot
Career Planning is a concept drilled into our minds from a pretty young age, if not school then undergraduate at the latest. The challenge though is that career planning, in line with trends in how we work, for how long, and where we work, is no longer clearly mapped out. Some of us are at structured workplaces, where the organization has laid out a growth path, whether for promotions or raises. Of course the more universal the path, the less customized it is to us as individuals. However for many of us, particularly in non-traditional or resource-limited fields and workplaces, there is no predetermined trajectory that clearly tell us: you have arrived at this milestone, and your next stop is ABC. When I say Career Planning, I am thinking of jobs to have, titles to hold, degrees to get, professional certifications to study for, the whole nine yards.
This is stressful for so many reasons:
We are human, and the unknown by nature can be daunting, particularly in such a crucial area of our lives. Our unknown is compounded by the amount of information and choices we have available to us. Should I do a course, should I apply for a different job, should I move to a different city with more opportunities? Is there more of something I should be doing? What am I working towards?
You never know if what you are doing is “enough”. While feedback on your day-to-day work and performance is helpful, not knowing how what you are doing today aligns (or not?!) with your career long-term is stressful. Perhaps grad school will help, and perhaps not. Will being a manger contribute meaningfully to your performance? Not always. You learn as you go, which isn’t a bad thing by itself but neither is it sufficient as the sole way to learn and grow.
There is no one right way (at least not anymore): For most people, there was only one way to be successful at a career - perhaps you went to trade school, started an apprenticeship and worked your way up; or you went to medical school, interned and became a doctor. For careers like those, those clear(ish) paths may still be applicable, but the other fields that many of us are in, whether in marketing or communications or consulting or insert a field or job title here have a build your own adventure aspect to them.
All of this makes it harder to
Commit to Something
Be at Peace With the Choices You Make
Both of these have opportunity costs, the loss of the benefits from a different choice we could have made. That’s true of pretty much most of life because for every choice you make, whether consciously or subconsciously, there are other options you are discarding. But since they may not be that obvious or high stakes, they don’t occupy our minds as much. If you have made it this far, I hope some of this resonates, even if it is for you to say I knew that already! Intuitively most of us know this, but acknowledging it intentionally is pretty key to tackling the immense project that DIY Career Planning can be.
You could argue that most of these stressors are true no matter which job or workplace you are at. Perhaps, but the intensity of these when you are the sole owner and navigator, is definitely higher. In the next piece in this series, we will look at ways in which you can not just make DIY Career Planning easier, but also make it work for you.