Get Career Fit

Healthcheck Your Career and Leap Into Your Future

Michelle Gibbings

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780730382072
• eBook ISBN:
  9780730382102
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Future-proof your career and plan your leap forward

Gone are the days of slowly making your way up the corporate ladder to retirement. Now, with the rise of freelancing and the gig economy, the workplace is becoming more flexible and independent — which can leave hardworking people scrambling to find a way to stay relevant.

Author Michelle Gibbings addresses your worries and gives you a way forward. This book sheds light on what you can do to reignite, reshape and liberate your career and offers a fool-proof plan for getting your career back on track.

With Get Career Fit, you can build a career ready for any change the future may bring.

Phase 1 Assess: Where are you in your career now?

Your career is just one piece of the big pie we call ‘life’, so you need to examine it in the context of everything that affects you externally and the decisions you are willing to make internally.

In this first phase, you’re going to assess your career as it stands now and where it could be in the future. You’ll identify what impacts your choices, including family, colleagues and individual circumstances.

Just as you have a regular medical check-up, you need to periodically check up on your career. How fit is your career? Have you been oiling the machine or have you been cruising, watching too much TV on the couch, eating potato chips and letting things get away from you?

Through this process you’ll start to identify your individual constraints and, more importantly, where there are opportunities. So let’s lose the remote control. It’s time to get fit for the future of work!

CHAPTER 1 Check

Are you future fit?

‘Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.’

Lao Tzu

For some of us, work is a necessary evil, to be endured in return for money so we can pay bills, go on great holidays and fund a lifestyle — it’s a means to an end and nothing more. For the fortunate few, it’s something we love doing. Work gives us purpose, satisfaction, enjoyment and fulfilment.

Love it or loathe it, work is a critical part of your life.

Across your lifetime, you are likely to spend up to 100 000 hours at work or in some form of employment. That’s based on you starting full-time work at 18, retiring at 65 and working only eight hours a day for the standard 261 working days of the year. If you are a workaholic or are used to putting in a few hours of overtime each week, it’s likely to be substantially higher.

So wouldn’t you rather be doing something you actually like to do?

I don’t mean you’ll like every minute of every day (that’s totally unrealistic), but on balance you find it stimulating, interesting and valuable. Something you feel good about getting up for instead of hiding under the doona.

Many of us feel trapped in a job we don’t like. We’re bored, in a rut, stressed out or overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work we need to do. And yet we remain in that rut, telling ourselves, ‘Yeah this place sucks, but better the devil you know. At least I know how this place works.’ Or, ‘I don’t know what else to do. It’s too hard to find a new job.’ Or, ‘I can’t afford to go — this place pays too well.’

Does any of this sound like you? If your work makes you so unhappy that it impacts not just your wellbeing, but those around you, then it’s time to consider ‘voting yourself off the island’. That means taking control and making the decision to go somewhere else or do something different, even if it feels hard or uncertain.

Yes, finding work can be challenging, but a job doesn’t just provide financial benefits — it’s also critical for our self-esteem and mental health.

There’s no doubt there will be points in your life when throwing in a job could feel like an irresponsible luxury. There’s the mortgage, school fees and bills to pay. It’s not a luxury, though, when you’re working in an environment that is eating away at you, impacting your behaviour, destroying your self-confidence, and causing undue stress and anxiety. If you don’t change the environment, it will slow you down, block you or stop you in some way.

Career stop signs

Change is hard, which is why so many of us stay in jobs we hate until something (or someone) forces us to move on.

Here are six warning signs that it may be time for you to cast that vote:

1. Your performance is dropping. Your work environment no longer brings out the best in you. Your motivation is low so you only do what you have to do. This ‘bare minimum’ approach is impacting your performance, the outcomes you deliver and ultimately your reputation. This type of damage can have long-term consequences, including making it even harder to get that next job.
2. Your values are misaligned. Your values and those of the organisation are out of alignment so you feel like you have to change who you are when you are at work. This may show up as your not feeling comfortable voicing your opinion, or finding yourself forced to support ideas that go against what you believe in.
3. You now have ‘cynic’ as your middle name. You spend large parts of the day complaining about what’s happening at work. You don’t trust your work colleagues and you no longer offer ideas on how to improve things. You only complain about them.
4. You are constantly worried you are next in line. Your workplace is forever restructuring and making people redundant, and you are constantly worried about when the axe will fall on your role. You can see that technological change is going to consume your job.
5. You’re on the brink of burnout. You feel burnt out and the physical signs of stress are presenting in how you behave at home with your friends and family. You feel exhausted all the time and the thought of going to work makes you feel anxious or highly emotional. You dread Monday morning, and likely drink several glasses of wine or beer in the evening to drown out the day.
6. You’ve stopped learning. You don’t feel like work is challenging you. You’re bored or uninterested by what’s going on. You feel like there’s no more room to grow or expand your horizons. You need something else to push you so you’re not always working on autopilot and counting down the clock.

How many of these conditions can you relate to? All, none or some? If it’s all or some, it’s time to seriously think about overhauling your career. It’s time to change and get in shape!

Find new cheese

In his classic business parable Who Moved My Cheese, Spencer Johnson tells the story of two mice, Sniff and Scurry, and two little people, Hem and Haw. The mice and the little people lead a comfortable if predictable life, taking the same route each day to the store of cheese on which they feed. One day, however, they discover all the cheese is gone.

Sniff and Scurry had been noticing the gradual reduction in the cheese store and weren’t surprised. They moved on quickly to find a new source of cheese. Hem and Haw, though, found the change very hard. They felt entitled to the cheese and had become lazier and less inclined to put effort into finding a new source. All of this made it much harder for them to adapt when the change hit.

They became nervous and unsure about how to respond to the changed conditions. After much pain and struggle, they eventually found an effective way to respond and ultimately to find new cheese. They learned many lessons along the way, a pivotal one being that they needed to ‘smell the cheese often so you know when it is getting old’.¹⁰

There are many people who, like Hem and Haw, don’t know how to react to change and specifically how to respond when their job changes or disappears. This is a very real problem, because all our jobs are being impacted at some level by new technology, artificial intelligence and automation. And this is why you need to learn to leap and reinvent your career, at any age or stage.

You must look ahead and plan so you don’t wake up one day and discover all your cheese is gone.

Change is hard, but it doesn’t have to be so. All you need to know is how to find new cheese. The only difference between you and someone who has made a career leap — from lawyer to media personality, sailmaker to corporate leader or sports star to investment banker — is that they were intent on finding new cheese.

These leaps didn’t happen by accident. They were planned and involved deliberate decisions and targeted actions. They reinvented their career step by step, which is what you’re going to learn to do.

Is a robot coming for your cheese?

We are all being impacted by technological change and automation. The two questions to ask yourself are, ‘How much am I being impacted?’ and ‘What does this mean for me?’ Your answers will help set you up to take advantage of new opportunities as they arise.

There are a number of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Get career fit online
• Introduction
• Phase 1: Assess
• Phase 2: Architect
• Phase 3: Activate
• Phase 4: Accelerate
• A message from Michelle
• Sources