Managing Your Career Life-Cycle!

I’ve been a career and life coach for 10 years now. During this, my fifth career, I have worked with over 5,000 clients globally, and have come to realize that there is a life cycle to a professional’s career. These days a person can experience multiple careers during their working life, quite different from those from the previous generation, who went through just one career, but multiple jobs in that career. Nearly 50 years ago people then went through their entire life working for just one company, often in just one job.

During my life I’ve been laid-off three times and I have re-invented myself each time—and then some, with four re-inventions to my credit so far. In managing a career life cycle I have identified seven stages in which this cycle completes itself. So, as I work through my fifth career, here is some learning that I’d like to impart to those, who are equally adventurous about how to best manage each of the seven stages:

1. End of life of one career: There are many telltale signs that you are at the end of your current career: losing interest in your work (not just your job); inability to compete with the new-generation of your counterparts; planning your weekends at work on Monday mornings, etc. When you enter this stage in your job you must assess if it is the job or the career that you are in that is causing this angst. At the first sense of becoming aware of this condition, you must act quickly, instead of going into denial over it (a common reaction). Either you must seek expert help, or find ways to bootstrap your own re-invention to transition yourself into your next career. This is one of the hardest conditions to detect (because of our ability to go into denial over it, coupled with your overconfidence in your ability for a re-invention), and also one of the hardest decisions to make to leave behind what has been your comfort zone so far.
2. Transition Period: If you want to make a successful transition into a new career you must start actively thinking about a new career, well before you become a job—or even a career—zombie, which involves doing your job even without putting any effort into it. As you slowly devolve–even degenerate–from being “in” your job to being “on” it, you have successfully transitioned into the zombie state. You must plan to undertake your transition into a new career before you become a zombie, if you want to transition successfully into a new career. If you’ve allowed yourself to become a zombie for too long, you may not be able to transition successfully. This also applies when you are out of work.
3. Re-invention: The key to a good re-invention is your ability to fashion and verbalize a new marketing message (your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP) and use that as a platform to become a strong candidate in a market that is new to you. There are several strategies that can be effectively applied to making this re-invention with speed and efficiency. Creating a coherent brand around your new USP is one of the most challenging undertakings during this process. Yet, it is not as hard as it may appear.
4. Marketing Your New Message: Marketing a new message requires an understanding of your new audience and targeting of your message using multiple channels (résumé, LinkedIn, and other social media), including your business card. There are several ways to accelerate this brand building, but without this momentum it is difficult to transition into your new career in a seamless way.
5. Engagement in Your New Career: Most people underestimate what it takes to get traction in your new career. My own experience with myself, and working with my clients, whom I helped in their re-invention, is that you should allow yourself about three years establishing your new brand in your changed career, so that you are seen as a veteran in that space. In my current career, it took me about that time before potential clients started coming to me for paid advice. As you get ensconced in your new career you must also take some key actions to keep your brand fresh and relevant.
6. Managing Your New Career: As with any endeavor, managing your new career takes diligence, proactive actions, and a learning mind-set. Here, too, there are several strategies (now obvious) that have worked for me and for my clients. Although this is not rocket science, you must be prepared to experiment and learn what works best for you and for your new career.
7. Getting Ready for Your Next Career: Once you have gone through the first career-change cycle, transitioning into the second and subsequent career avatars get easier. One thing you learn here is how to best use the available “runway” to make a seamless transition. My hardest transition, which I did on my own, was when I was laid-off as head of engineering at a high-tech company at 48. I did not know anything else then (nearly 22 years back), and career coaching as a profession did not exist as it does today. So, bootstrapping was the only way I was able to transition into my second career, and three others from then on. But, as you learn how to do this, it gets easier.

In today’s economy everyone must learn how to re-invent for themselves (with help as they need it), and to get into a brand-new area of economic activity. Retirement at 65 is also no longer an option for many because of a variety of circumstances. So, learning to re-invent yourself, while you are in prime of your professional life is the best countermeasure for a long-lasting professional life.

Good luck!