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Risks, Inflections Points and Learning

Career starting point are just that—starting points

There are no longer careers for life. There is not one set pathway to success. Professions that might once have offered structured progression, like law or accounting, are under threat. Teachers and tertiary sector educators are dealing with different student expectations and the potential commodification of some parts of their knowledge base. Much repetitive work is being, and will be, replaced by automation and artificial intelligence.

At the same time, we have great opportunities to use technology developments creatively. In the performance area, whole sets of new capabilities are being employed. In the health sector, many of us are benefitting from terrific developments, as we combine discoveries and new ways of doing things by linking the human and technology sides of health care.

It is this innovative thinking that is the key to success. Your career is now driven by your ability to understand your capabilities, your strengths, any important developmental needs, and what you really enjoy doing.

A friend of mine is a keen sailor. He always talks about having some kind of destination in mind, but the way you get there will vary according to the conditions.

It is not a straight path. You need to use the tiller to provide some direction. Sometimes you have to tack and put up different sails depending on the wind, the swell, and the obstacles along the way. And then you need to adjust and trim the sails as the wind changes direction and strengths.

Sometimes just travelling in a big circle around San Francisco Bay or Sydney Harbour is fine, if that is what you enjoy. Your career can be a bit like that. Careers grow through tacking, using the tiller, and sometimes trimming the sails—choices are made based on the circumstances at the time.

With the trajectory of change now around us, we should expect to have multiple careers throughout our working life. For those of us with opportunities, or who are able to make opportunities, continuing to grow and evolve might take us in quite different directions.

Take some examples: one of Disney’s international technology executives started her career as a public relations consultant, a leading Ombudsman started her career as a pharmacist, one of Australia’s Vice Chancellors was a research assistant in a commercial laboratory, a medical practitioner from rural India is now CEO of a large disability services organisation, a chemical engineer moved into banking and now uses her combined skills and experience to chair company boards, and a law and Asian languages graduate is a global health technology entrepreneur.

Each of these executives used their initial education and experience to build a varied and satisfying career, ending up in roles that they may never have seen themselves in, but their careers emerged from their passions, desires, self-knowledge and growth.

So, the first thing you need to ask yourself is: Where do you get real satisfaction and what type of growth do you want?

In questioning people about their careers, we often ask about their inflection points—what were the decisions you made, the big risks you took, or the career opportunity that really challenged you? Where did you take a career risk and how did it turn out?

Certainly, we won’t always have the choices we want, or be able to choose between options. What will matter increasingly though is our ability and willingness to take risks—considered risks—to gain new or different capabilities and experiences that will give us some future options.

Once upon a time, I had a career plan. But my actual career took a very different path—or many different paths, in fact. It involved taking risks—most of which worked out, but some not as well as I might have wanted at the time.

This chapter will provide some insights into HOW I made many career decisions and what I saw as the risks at time.

These decisions are my key inflection points. They involved some use of the tiller, some tacking and some shifting of the sails.

The plan I had at the start of my career journey…

I am a bit of a planner and a list-maker. I had always planned to meet the right guy when I was about twenty-six, which was a ‘mature’ age to do that forty years ago. This would happen after I completed my university degree, qualified as a teacher, travelled the world and then established my career. Children might or might not happen at some stage. (Due to some minor medical issues, I was not convinced that I could have children, anyway.)

Well, that was not quite how it turned out. I met that guy when I was nineteen, became engaged just after my twentieth birthday, married before I was twenty-one, and got pregnant on our honeymoon. Another three children came along in the next eight years or so, some planned, some not so planned. (Fertility clearly was not my problem, and, if anything, I came to realise that I had the reverse issue.) We did agree to have four, although my husband has no recollection of this (he would have been happy with a few more). I was one of seven and he was the eldest of eight, so four seemed like a good compromise at the time.

When we married, Robert was in the early stages of his studies for a PhD in Chemistry, so of course he was still a student a few years later. This meant remaining in Australia till that was done and travel plans were on hold for a while. Then the two of us were about to become the three of us, so it was time to make some new plans.

I enrolled in some qualifying subjects for a Master of Arts degree with a particular emphasis on the sociology of organisations and anthropology. The plan was that I would return to work for the eight-week required post childbirth period to qualify for a maternity leave payment, which we needed to support ourselves. (This was the arcane system in place then—you qualified for your maternity leave pay once you had been back at work for over two months.) Then I would resign and return to full-time motherhood and part-time study.

The choices that were never made…

I started my secondary school teaching career in one of Sydney’s toughest high schools suffering from lacklustre leadership. It was a newly established school where the principal and his deputy were both out of their depth in terms of dealing with its many challenges. But two years later I found myself on the staff of an inner Western Sydney girls’ high school with great leadership.

So, when my eight weeks post-maternity leave was up, I found I was getting physically nauseous trying to resign. I went to see the Deputy Principal, Marie Lynch, for some advice.

Marie asked me what I really wanted to do the most: study, spend more time with our son David, or keep working full-time. The answer was I just did not know yet. She suggested I keep doing all three till I figured it out.

It was some of the best advice I have ever had—and she continued to ask me how things were going from time to time.

Three or four years later, my master’s was completed, we’d had a second child, a third was on the way, and I was still working full-time—broken by short bouts of maternity leave. I’d never had to make that choice amongst the three options.

When Robert finally finished his PhD and got a paying job, we moved into our first home with a mortgage in the mid-1970s—a classic three-bedroom fibro with a sunroom added along the back. We had lived very frugally for many years to save the deposit we needed. We had to completely furnish the house as we had been renting furnished ‘half-houses’ till then, and the only pieces of furniture we owned were a piano and a roll top desk, which probably says something about what we valued at the time!

A sense of purpose and direction: more useful than a detailed plan

You have to work out what is best for you—and deal with situations as they arise.

My friend and former Gartner colleague, Robin Kranich, calls this the WHY, what is it that makes you want to leap out of bed and take on the world? Robin is Gartner’s Executive Vice-President and Chief Human Relations Officer. Last summer, with two kids away at summer camp she took some time to reflect on what drives her, and her WHY in terms of the mark she wants to leave on the world. In her case, ‘her world’ is her family, friends and the 15,000 or so people she works with at Gartner. She wrote down a list of ‘Truths I know about me’ and the result was that she did figure out her WHY. It was about discovering the unique and differentiated talents of others, helping them to tap into it, and then harnessing the collected strengths of many diverse people and perspectives to achieve their full potential both as individuals and as a company. That is her WHY.

This WHY energises her, gives her purpose, helps her to work through the difficult situations and provides clarity that counteracts the occasional inertia.

We each need to find our WHY, our sense of purpose. This helps you to understand your comfort level with your career, personal choices and options, and the trade-offs you are prepared to make. It helps us to have the perspective to adjust to changing circumstances. Sometimes we make trade-offs consciously, sometimes unconsciously, and sometimes just intuitively. It helps to clearly articulate your strengths and trade-offs to yourself, and those around you.

If you have real career choices to make, you’re already heading in the right direction, but, yes, making those career decisions can be challenging. It’s about the level of risk you are prepared to take, your options, how others see you, and your own reality check about your strengths and the things you are not so good at. I am well into my fifth career (I did start out a long time ago) and some choices have been easier than others.

Luck can certainly come into it too: sometimes you can be lucky, sometimes not, and sometimes you will have to work at making your own luck.

First career choices: just a starting platform

Some people always have a sense of what they might want to do.

One of our sons, Patrick (aka Paddy) is a professional musician and music educator. His goal from about age nine was to be a jazz trumpeter—he announced this as soon as he picked up and started playing a trumpet.

When he was about thirteen, in his first year of high school, he had to write an essay about what he might want to do when he grew up. He wrote that, when he was in his mother’s womb, he heard Louis Armstrong play trumpet and he knew then what he wanted to be.

While his teacher was quite concerned about the origins of his career choice, it made sense to us as his parents. And yes, being a jazz trumpeter is part of what he does today. But that clarity and follow-through is relatively rare.

When I was growing up there were generally two choices put to young women—teaching or nursing. I had always wanted to do teaching so that was fine with me at the time. I completed a Bachelor of Arts degree and then a Diploma of Education. My high school teaching ‘methods’, as they were called then, were History, English, Library Studies, and what was called ‘New Media’ in 1969. A few years later I also completed a course of study and exams to qualify as a professional librarian.

Unlike some of my school friends, I had parents who assumed that, if bright enough, I would go to university—though my parents both finished their formal schooling at fourteen. The very special thing about my parents was that they understood that each of their seven children were quite different. What was good for one of us, was not necessarily good for another. We were each encouraged to do what was right for us, and there was no pre-defined path. My eldest brother was the first of our generation to go to university, and all of us completed university studies, professional or technical training.

No matter your path, finding that sense of purpose and playing to your strengths helps you to navigate, redirect or expand your options when you hit those difficult inflection points in your career.