Elevator Pitch

Click the little arrow to listen.

Welcome new readers!

Stephen Smith Productivity Workflow consulting

Register for SOBCon 2009

Click here to Register for SOBCon 2009

Please visit our Sponsors



--> Fresh Focus on Productivity Consulting Blog for Profit
Wrike.com

Utterli


Business Development in Context

Get this widget!

  • Recent Comments

    • Chris Edgar: Hi Stephen -- I started up just a few months late to get inc...
    • ics consolidation debt: ics consolidation debt debt consolidation ics...
    • Elvis: fweHBb0soTX7W...
    • @Stephen: Hi Bridget: Your focus will come to you in time. It will tur...
    • Martin Lindeskog: Bridget Cavanaugh: I have read GTD several times, but I have...
    • Martin Lindeskog: Fun exercise. I got the following result: "Perspective: 3...
    • Josh Feierman: Good stuff Stephen! I'm going to recommend to the folks at...


  • Lijit Search


    Visit the Productivity Lens for more information about Getting Things Done and other resources.


    PRODUCTIVITYZEN.COM



    del.icio.us RSS



    Technorati HQ

    Add to Technorati Favorites










    Setting Goals for Your Career

    December 1st, 2008 by Stephen

    Posted in Follow Your Dream, Links, Personal Development List, The Examined Life, Work 2.0 |

    If you're new here, Welcome! To learn more about what this site is all about click here [link].

    Connect with Stephen at LinkedIn - Click hereProductivity Tools and DIY Calendars - Click hereI am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

    Subscribe by E-mail for updates on: Productivity methods, Lifestyle innovation, and the collaborative design of the next-generation personal knowledge management system.

    Click Here for an overview of the content. Please take a look at our sponsors. (Hosting isn't free...)
    Please contact me via e-mail: stephen @ hdbizblog dot com

    Thanks for visiting!

    As the new year approaches, many folks begin to think about New Year’s Resolutions and setting goals for the coming year. Sometimes these goals involve your job, your health habits, or other personal development topics.

    Jeremiah Owyang published a list of Six Career Tips for people in the corporate world. One of the most interesting was this one:

    Reverse engineer the job you want
    Another useful tip is to reverse engineer the position that you desire to be in. Earlier in my career, I aspired to be a web manager, so I took job descriptions of web strategists and looked at all the skills and experiences needed. I printed out the job description (circled the salary) and taped it to my bathroom mirror, I saw it every morning and night, a double dose of self-reflection. Over time, you start to piece together the projects, programs, and apply new skills to learn how to do this. With time and perseverance, your resume will catch up to where you want to go.

    Another tip that resonated with me was his perspective on education. Quite a few of the people that I have managed and trained in the past have been young people, just going off to college, and they have asked me about the value of education and what they should study in order to get a “good” job.

    My advice often conflicts with what they have heard from parents and guidance counselors. In my own experience those guidance counselors were dead wrong and the whole profession should be outlawed. An education is important, depending on what field you are looking to go into. Most of the time I recommend that you go to college and study something that you are passionate about, or at least very interested in. I’ll let Jeremiah cover the rest:

    Education matters, but not as much as you thought
    For very specialized jobs, where in school training is essential (law, medicine, sometimes programming) this bullet doesn’t apply to you. More and more executives I meet have degrees in something they didn’t study in school for. For most jobs, they hire you because of what you can do for them, not what school you went to. There’s a reason why education falls to the bottom of the resume, and the ‘value statement’ is at the top, quickly followed by real world experience. Don’t get me wrong, education is very important, a bachelor degree is really expected in today’s workplace, but I often lean on the broad, theoretical knowledge I gained as a primer (or glossary) for me to dive in deeper in the business world.

    The future of work is changing, schools are not preparing children for it.It is increasingly up to you to help and educate yourself.

    If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/6z3co8. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen


    Leave a Comment:


    Subscribe to Productivity in Context by Email.
    Get involved with the Knowledge Management forum.

    One Response

    1. Caroline's debit card loans Says:

      Reverse engineering is something that has never occurred to me before but it seems so logical.

    Leave a Comment

    XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

    Please note: Comments with links are moderated. I get a lot of crazy spam. Scroll to the bottom for subscribing to the comment and submitting your Comment.

    Subscribe without commenting

    Creative Commons License
    This work by Stephen Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.