CareerSherpas: Climbing the Mountain

Maybe it’s a cliche, but a lot of people I talk to still don’t really ever ask themselves if what they do is a career or just a job that they’re marking time with. If you aren’t thinking in terms of what your career is and where you want it to go, you’re likely to be unable to reach your potential, hate what you’re stuck doing, or worse yet – both!

So for those of you who might have trouble with the distinction, a career is less about what you’re doing now and more about what you’re trying to get to do. Consider that many people with somewhat more generally applicable skills like IT workers, writers, salespeople, financial analysts and call center representatives are seeing the average tenure time drop dramatically. I’ve heard a number of recruiters quote recently that the average IT job lasts 18 months. Knowing that there’s a lot of folks out there with much longer tenures, that means the vast majority are hopping after less time than that!

The reality that this illustrates is that none of us have any real reason to believe that we’ll be staying at the same company for a long time. In this reality planning for where we want to be in our next job, or the one after, or even the one after that becomes not just a nice idea, but an imperative to success.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll start to explore the different stages of a career and how to make the most of them to help propel you onward and upward through whatever trajectory you choose in your career.

Peter Fitzgerald is the founder of CareerSherpas.com and is currently working on his first book, managing a team of project managers, and attempting to learn the bagpipes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 8:49 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.