Читать книгу Career Management - Carolyn Boyes - Страница 6

Do you take responsibility for your career or do you let your career just happen to you? In the old way of doing things you would leave school or university and expect to have a job for life. But with a changing world you need to stop and take stock.

The world is changing so rapidly now that there is no guarantee you will have a job for life, nor that the company you join will continue to exist, nor even that your industry will still exist in the next decade or so. There is only one thing you can do in a world like this, and that is to be an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs assume that they will have to make their own fortune (and I mean fortune in the sense of both luck and money). Entrepreneurs don’t let things happen to them, they make things happen for them. This can be expressed by an equation: cause > effect.

one minute wonder Take a step back. Think about where you are in your career right now. Decide to make your career successful and fulfilling every day. You are in charge.

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude of mind” William James, psychologist

• On which side of the equation are you? Do you cause the situations you are in or are you generally at the effect of what other people do? Are you an entrepreneur or are you passive?

• Decide for yourself. You can use the equation cause > effect as a reminder to take responsibility for your career decisions.

The self-employed are entrepreneurs. Every day, they take responsibility for making their careers as successful as possible. On the other hand, many employees of both large and small companies fall into the habit of being passive. They turn up to work on time and assume that as long as they do everything adequately, then their working lives will continue at an even pace, and they will always be paid until 30 or so years later the career comes to a close.

In the new world of rapid change this isn’t enough. Every employee needs to be ‘at cause’ for their career.

You need to think like an entrepreneur if you want to make the right kind of progress in your career.