A career is a job you love, right? That’s what a career should be. If you’re in a job that you hate, you should quit. That’s the way I look at it. I’m in a job that I love, so I’m going to make it my career.
Cameron Sinclair – Designer & Humanitarian
The lifelong project career path is evolving inside and outside organizations. You may be a professional, specialist, or craftsperson. What characterizes you is your portable and marketable skills. You’re becoming an itinerant professional. A software engineer learns new software languages and goes where the market is. A lawyer with special skills, such as environmental law, works virtually on litigation cases.
Can you see a CEO as an itinerant professional? Well guess what? CEO’s are taking their bags and moving from company to company. Why? They go to where they’re needed as CEO’s become itinerant professionals, they hopscotch across industry boundaries. A banker may run an electric utility and vice versa. According to studies, a third of the CEOs parachute in from outside the company. What do these portable CEOs have in common? They may not know the guts of the product but they have the skills, grit, and guts to make (manage) work decisions and transform (lead) an organization. In other words, they have the right VUCAN management and leadership stuff.
Another interesting trend is that career satisfaction and success for will depend on developing core competencies and then displaying them in projects. These projects preferably are on your customer’s or employer’s critical growth and profit path.
Work Lesson Earned: COVID has taught many workers about job uncertainty and looking out for #1. Pay attention to getting cross-industry and cross-functional experience. COVID career, work, and job disruptors described in this book are real. They’re not going away. All VUCANs will be impacted.