Call Your Calling

According to Peter Weddle in his book, Work Strong, the challenges and pressures of modern life make it hard for people to listen to their calling. Some never make the effort, feeling work and happiness are incompatible. Others deny their calling and follow the path others have chosen for them. Other people rush so quickly into a career that when their interests change later on, they feel stuck.

Hopefully, you've found the career you were meant to be in and are vigorously pursuing it. But, if not, how do you find it? Weddle suggests a number of exercises you can try, and even offers a mathematical equation to calculate happiness at work (Happiness at Work = Engagement + Relevance + Choice).

Weddle's exercises can help get you thinking. But, the answers will likely take time. If you're able to sit down and analytically think through what you want to do next with your career, great. But, if not, don't despair. You may just need to let these questions marinate inside you for awhile as you go through your day-to-day activities.

Can Professors be Strategic in Their Careers?

Over the past 14 years with HigherEdJobs, I have had the privilege of working with the amazing people who help young men and women further their lives at our institutions of higher education.  I could not have asked for a more fulfilling career.  I know faculty members believe strongly in the value of the work that they do -- educating students, furthering knowledge, and contributing to the greater good.  Passion is often an ingredient to what makes them do what they do.

In this section of Work Strong, the practical formulation and documentation of a plan becomes front and center in the discussion. I believe the strategic nature of the process and formality of the career fitness program suggested is absolutely necessary.  The need to dispassionately review the plan is imperative as well.  However, as I was reading through it, I found myself wondering if many faculty members can be strategic enough to first establish a plan and then dispassionate in truly evaluating it?  If passion is what fuels your career choice, can strategy play a role in the plan and, if so, can that passion be set aside in revising and measuring the success of that plan?

I also found myself thinking about a good friend, who I shall refer to as Preston.  Preston made a very specific career choice in choosing a career in the fine arts over a career in the hard sciences.  He is extremely talented, committed, honest with himself and we all knew (and still know) that he can do whatever he sets his mind to.  Along the way, Preston realized a career in teaching college students his fine arts skills was what motivated him.  As always, he set his mind to it and achieved the goal.  However, as many people learn in the fine arts, Preston's plan to acquire an elite teaching position was not given to him right after graduation.  He then decided to create his own opportunity, creating a position for himself by working for two schools, which has led to some benefits and a solid step in his career plan.  To me, seizing this opportunity is what we all can emulate from Preston's experience.  The plan did not go as designed.  Don't give up.  Revise the plan.  Ph.D.s do not come with Best Buy warranties -- they come with the opportunities that you can help create.

Can you be strategic and create opportunities in what you do today, and can they lead you further along in your career plans?  What are some of the best opportunities you have created for yourself in your career?

Making Plans That Make Sense

So much of what happens in careers these days seems to be the result of outside forces beyond our control. We are buffeted by layoffs or by constraints on hiring or even by the elimination of entire departments. If career paths even exist anymore, they are more like switchback trails than the steady way forward that characterized the past.

In the midst of all of that turbulence, making career plans often feels like a hopeless exercise. Who can predict the future well enough to know what goals make sense, let alone how best to accomplish them? Many of us, for example, have set our sights on earning an advanced degree that will prepare us to assume certain positions in academia or the private sector, but by the time we are graduated, those opportunities have all but disappeared. It's an experience only Bernie Madoff could dream up.

And yet, a career plan may well be the only form of security we have today. However, it's not the plan itself, but the process involved in establishing and using it that protects us. Developing a Career Fitness Plan, in particular, is not solely about setting and accomplishing goals; it is also the way we infuse our direction setting with the two new realities of the modern world of work.

• First, change is the new normal in the workplace. A Career Fitness Plan acknowledges that reality by having us develop not one, but two goals: one that focuses on something we can accomplish in our current job, and a second that points us toward the next job we would like (or should expect) to have. Whether it's in our current department or a different one, our current institution or a different one, our current employment status (e.g., adjunct, tenured) or a different one, that change will almost certainly occur. Why? Because escalating budget constraints, shifting student (and parent) expectations and preferences, and new regulatory pressures--just to name a few--are forcing it.
• Second, change is now continuous in the workplace. A Career Fitness Plan also establishes a developmental or bridge goal that prepares us to make the changes we have envisioned in our first two goals. Because self-development typically takes time to complete, however, we can adjust its scope and content, as necessary, to ensure our progress continues. In effect, we accomplish our objective not by aiming for a single bulls-eye, but instead, by aiming for an ever-tightening progression of bulls-eyes that advance us to where we want to be. A central feature of the plan, therefore, is regular self-assessment. Every quarter, we must review our status to determine if we are sticking to our plan and, equally as important, if that plan is achieving the change we want and need.

Making plans in a topsy-turvy environment is nonsensical, if those plans are predicated on an expectation of orderly progress. If we assume that change will occur, however, and then we proactively plan for it, we can significantly reduce both its discomfort and its potential peril.

Thanks for reading,
Peter

Putting Our Thoughts Into Action

This month we find ourselves entering the third module of Peter Weddle's career fitness program, "Warm Up Your Career Fitness Plan: How to Stay True to Your Calling." This module invites the reader to develop a plan to improve their career fitness. This is the pivotal point in the book where we transition from passive self-reflection to becoming career activists with firm goals to get our careers pointed in the right direction.

Previously in this course, we have defined what working in modern America looks like and what it means to be a professional in higher education. We reflected upon our career happiness and evaluated our "career fitness" using the tools that Peter has created and shared in this book. We have sought out to determine who is in control of our career. Are we the ones standing at the helm steering our careers into favored waters? Or, are there outside forces that have control, blowing us off course? Most recently we have started to investigate who we are, what our Natural talents are, and what would make us happiest at work.

Having achieved all of that, we are now left with the daunting task of setting goals. The object is to make meaningful goals that won't be discarded, as Peter puts it, like New Year's resolutions, but carried on and integrated into our daily work.

These three goal cycles that are discussed in chapter 6 of Work Strong each have their own purpose. The first one is based on Achievements, the second one is focused on Advancement, and the third and final one is about Development.

As these goal cycles apply to careers in higher education, I felt the first one had the most universal feel to it. The first goal cycle is focused on achieving something near-term (6-12 months) that will be immediately enjoyed and have a positive impact on your current job. If the 21^st century version of loyalty to one's employer is to perform at optimum levels at all times, a professor working in academia could view such loyalty to be expressed in terms of volume of published work, as that adds to an institution's prestige.

The old adage, publish or perish, can be the driving motivator to create your first goal. A goal to publish their work within the next 6-12 months and apply for a new grant. One way to accomplish this goal would be to develop a new system for organizing their research and thoughts, so when it comes time to publish an article, everything is laid out orderly and they can focus on just writing. Once successful at achieving this goal, a person will not only feel better about themselves, but also add something to their CV to help them prepare for the next goal, Advancement.

Read on in chapter 6 of Work Strong and share your thoughts about this system of career goal setting and how you might use this system. Please share your story about a system of goal setting that works for you.