Page 256 - Fundamentals of Management Myths Debunked (2017)_Flat

successfully, although those things are important. Let’s fast-forward through all that and Career Module 255
assume that your job search was successful. It’s time to go to work! How do you survive and
excel in your career?

How Can I Have a Successful Career?

What can you do to improve your chances for career success? You’re already doing the most
important thing: You’re getting a college education! It’s the surest way to increase your life-
time earnings. Currently, the average high school graduate earns $27,915 a year. His or her
counterpart with a college degree earns $51,206. College graduates earn, on average, $800,000
more than high school graduates over their working career. Investing in your education and
training is one of the best investments you’ll make in your lifetime. What else can you do? The
following suggestions are based on extensive research into career management.

Assess Your Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
Where do your natural talents lie? What can you do, relative to others, that gives you a com-
petitive advantage? Are you particularly good with numbers? Have strong people skills? Good
with your hands? Write better than most people? Everyone has some things that they do better
than others and some areas where they’re weak. Play to your strengths.

Identify Market Opportunities

Where are tomorrow’s job opportunities? Regardless of your strengths, certain job catego-
ries are likely to decline in the coming decades—for instance, bank tellers, small farmers,
movie projectionists, travel agents, and secretaries. In contrast, abundant opportunities are
more likely to be created by an increasingly aging society, continued emphasis on technology,
increased spending on education and training, and concern with personal security. These fac-
tors are likely to create excellent opportunities for jobs in gerontological counseling, network
administration, training consultants, and security-alarm installers.

Take Responsibility for Managing Your Own Career
Historically, companies tended to assume responsibility for their employees’ careers. Today,
this is the exception rather than the rule. Employees are increasingly expected to take respon-
sibility for their own careers.
Think of your career as your business and you’re its CEO. To survive, you have to monitor
market forces, head off competitors, and be ready to quickly take advantage of opportunities
when they surface. You have to protect your career from harm and position yourself to benefit
from changes in the environment.

Develop Your Interpersonal Skills

Interpersonal skills, especially the ability to communicate, top the list of almost every
employer’s “must have” skills. Whether it’s getting a new job or a promotion, strong interper-
sonal skills are likely to give you a competitive edge.

Practice Makes Perfect

There’s an increasing amount of evidence indicating that super-high achievers aren’t funda-
mentally different from the rest of us. They just work harder and smarter. It’s been found,
based on studies of world-class performers in music, sports, chess, science, and business, that
people like Tiger Woods, Mozart, and Bill Gates put in about 10,000 hours (or 10 years at
1,000 hours a year) of persistent, focused training and experience before they hit their peak
performance level. If you want to excel in any field, you should expect to have to put in a