The lifelong project career path is evolving inside and outside organizations. We may be professionals, specialists, or craftspeople. What characterizes us is we have portable and marketable skills. We are becoming itinerant professionals. A software engineer learns new software languages and goes where the market is. A lawyer with special skills, such as environmental law, may move around the country or even the world working on environmental litigation cases.
Can you see a CEO being an itinerant professional? Well guess what? More CEO’s are taking their bags and moving from company to company.
CEOs are also becoming itinerant professionals as more hopscotch across industry boundaries. A banker may run an electric utility and vice versa. According to studies, more than 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 guts to make (manage) the hard decisions and transform (lead) an organization. They have the right management and leadership stuff.
Career success for all of us depends 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.
Life Lesson Earned: The career, work, and job changes described in this book are real. They are not going away. All of us are impacted.