Norma was on one of her brief annual vacations, just a long weekend, really, because she didn’t take week-long or two-week-long vacations. Norma was what her colleagues called a workaholic. She didn’t like to think of herself that way. She instead believed that she was appropriately devoted to a generally rewarding career. Yet lately, her career hadn’t seemed all that rewarding. Indeed, she was beginning to think that maybe she wasn’t all that devoted or even well rewarded, and that she might instead just be a workaholic after all. And so, with a couple days left in her long weekend, Norma sat down for the first time in years to examine her career.
Evaluation
A little introspection and retrospective over a career can be a good thing at times, to help one look forward, out, and up. Some of us go an entire work life without giving our career direction, accomplishments, challenges, and opportunities much thought. We do well now and then, say, at least every five years, to assess where we stand from a job and career standpoint. Otherwise, without thoughtful evaluation, how do you influence your career? You may as well in that case be at the mercy of industry or professional trends, market and technological changes, and the winds of chance. So while reviewing this chapter, sit back, relax, and deliberate over your job and career, until you have a fresh perspective on where and how you stand, and perhaps also on where you should head from here.
Measures
Assessment generally requires measures. If you’re going to evaluate your career, you’ll soon need some standards, benchmarks, objectives, goals, or values against which to measure it. You choose your goals and measures. The following sections make some suggestions. But as you choose goals and standards, try to make them smart measures, which is an acronym for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. To say, for instance, that your measures should be achievable means to hold yourself to a reasonable standard that you could reach with appropriate effort, not to a standard that only miracles could achieve. Likewise, to say that your measures should be time bound means to assume that you only have a reasonable time within which to achieve them. Don’t set as a measure something that you could only achieve with another hundred years of work. Smart goals and measures make for smart assessment. You’ll discern more and be able to adjust better with smart measures.
Goals
Think first about your goals in pursuing a career. Some goals may be fairly obvious, particularly those that are easiest to measure in numbers, like your compensation, net worth, and retirement savings. Non-monetary, soft goals, not readily measured by numbers, can be much more difficult not just to articulate but to measure. But even with soft goals, like provision and security, you can often find useful measures. You might measure security, for instance, by ownership of a solid roof over your head and enough savings in the bank to carry you through a good stretch of unemployment. Spend some time examining hard and soft goals, related to yourself, your family, and others, and assigning measures. Then confirm where you stand on those measures, to see what you learn and where you may need to refocus your career.
Financial
As just indicated, financial measures can be the easiest to discern and evaluate. Research where others stand financially at your same age and station in life, to see if you’re keeping up, falling behind, or getting ahead through the income and retirement benefits your career provides. Also research what financial advisors recommend for financial goals, no matter how others may be doing. Yet also determine your own financial measures and benchmarks, depending on your values and commitments, and your family’s needs and interests. Your financial picture is likely closely tied to the net earnings you draw from your career, after paying career-related expenses. Making a few job-related and career-related decisions and adjustments here and there to improve your financial picture can be wise. Small changes over a long time make big differences.
Family
Family goals may be your highest priority. You might not think in terms of specific goals you have for your family, instead simply being fully committed to your family’s nurture and care. But nurture and care imply some measures, like a stable roof over your family’s head, in a reasonably secure neighborhood, with nutritious food, comfortable clothing, serviceable medical care, and safe and sound schooling. You may have higher specific goals for certain family members, like to help your spouse complete graduate or professional education, pursue an athletic or artistic career, or recover from injury, illness, or disability. You may desire that your children develop strong faith and sound morals or attend your college alma mater. Your career may serve family goals only indirectly, through the income and security it provides. Yet seeing the connection between your career and your family goals can help you make appropriate career adjustments.
Personal
You may also have personal goals for your career. Indeed, you probably should have some personal career goals, even if you have integrated them deeply into your family, financial, and other goals. You may, for instance, wish to establish your own firm, practice, or business to generate income for yourself, build an asset, and employ children or other family members. You may desire to enter management, administration, or leadership, to prove to yourself, your family, and others that you have the strength, wisdom, insight, and other character that those roles require. You may have a cause to advance through your career or a population to serve and rescue. Personal goals for your career can keep you energized, focused, growing, and striving, serving family, financial, and other goals. Don’t overlook what you personally desire to accomplish in your career.
Development
No matter how you evaluate your current job and career, whether positively or negatively, also evaluate your continuing growth and development. You may be at a stagnant point in a job or career and may need to set new growth goals and courses. How well you’re doing in your current position may be less important than whether that position is facilitating your growth. Some of your least satisfying and least productive jobs may become some of your most important jobs to your advancement and development. Assess whether your job is providing you with developmental and advancement opportunities. Also evaluate whether you are pursuing those opportunities with appropriate discipline and vigor.
Balance
Work-life balance is another legitimate and substantial consideration to make explicit in assessing whether your career is meeting your goals and expectations. Life is not all about work, jobs, and careers. Life can be a lot about those things, but life generally shouldn’t be primarily about those things, at least not for many of us. Perhaps if you were the only one able to cure cancer, then that effort should be your whole life, not merely your work life. But unprecedented work skill and value is not the case for many of us, if any of us. Someone is generally ready to stop in to get the job done in our absence, perhaps better than we do the job, if not in exactly the same way. We are not, by contrast, so replaceable in our spousal and family relationships, and not at all replaceable in our relationship with our creator. A proper life generally has more to it in relationships than in work quantity, quality, or productivity. Consider carefully how balanced your current job and career enable you to be, in nurturing those higher and more-important relationships.
Values
You may alternatively be able to measure whether and to what degree your career reflects your values. You may want your work life and character to reflect loyalty, care, unity, purpose, sensitivity, compassion, beauty, mercy, poise, and grace. You may highly value education, personal growth, personal independence, competition, courage, or collaboration. If you were to articulate your highest ten or twenty values, you could probably rate your career on a scale of one to ten as to the degree to which your career promotes each of those values. With further discernment, you could probably see some small or large changes you could make either in your career or in your attitude and actions toward it, to make your career further promote, preserve, and protect those values. In doing so, you might find yourself finally conducting yourself in the manner you’d always intended and expected but not quite managed, within your career. You could discover a whole new job and career attitude.
Legacy
Depending on how far along you are in life and in your career, you might also begin to reflect on your legacy in, through, and from your career. What impact do you want to make on your vocation or profession? How do you want to change and improve the lives of those whom you serve through your career? What do you want to leave your family that your career could supply? Thinking of your legacy, meaning what remains from your presence after you’re gone, is a good way to take a long and deep view of your career, well beyond the day-to-day concerns of getting a job done. Live for the day, but also live for the accumulation of days and even for the day when you’re gone. Doing so can make your days better, richer, and more purposeful and impactful.
Journal
Title My Assessment the last section of your Career Journal, after the Transition section. Begin this last section by articulating your most-general personal, family, and financial goals for your career. Then articulate measures for each of those goals, in ways that you can determine your progress. Then evaluate where you stand on those measures as to each of your goals. From that analysis, derive a list of things you could adjust or change to improve on those measures. Return to this list periodically over the course of the next few weeks and months to ensure your accountability toward implementing those changes. Over time, see if you can improve your position on progressing toward your career goals.
Key Points
Periodically evaluating your career can help you improve it.
Articulate personal, family, and financial goals for your career.
Articulate the values you want your career to reflect.
Assign measures to your career goals to determine your progress.
Adjust your thinking and actions to improve your progress.
Consider the legacy that you are leaving through your career.
Ensure that your job and career permit a proper work-life balance.