Career Management in the New World of Work

 I am having a lot of fun as I deliver a career management course for millennials for clients. I am learning so much from the participants myself ---about how they engage their work, how much they really want more connectedness in their workflow, and how uncertainty in the economy right now is creating all kinds of anxiety for a generation that is bearing more than its fair share of the pinch perhaps.

If the early returns from this workshop ---which we are deploying across 100 Days with alternating content sessions followed by activity and networking sessions --- are to be believed, then the groups I am meeting with are especially open to the following "lessons":

1) The career ladder is dead, and the successful employee in the new world of work will focus on building a career matrix that includes enrichment activities in current role, lateral moves to broaden exposure through new roles and activities/projects, and entrenching experiences --- steps back to recoup, rebuild strengths, and think strategically about future opportunities.

2) Building first on your strengths ---focusing on those sets of activities that give you energy and allow you to engage your work fully --- is a solid foundation for ensuring you can perform in role and set yourself up for future opportunities.

3) Deploying "multiplier" behaviors --- that include gaining visibility into the workflow of colleagues within your value chain and providing the same visibility to them regarding yours, prioritizing your work for organizational objectives, and thinking deeply about how you want to be experienced by colleagues when you work in teams --- offers a solid strategy for driving impact.

4) On that last point ---about "being experienced" --- this group of participants has shown significant interest in the framework we supplied around THEME--ing your work interactions and in particular creating "memorabilia" or takeaways related to your contribution that not only communicate what you do and how you do it, but actually help your colleagues do their jobs better.

So a major takeaway for me is that we may be on the right track as we think about more productive career management in the new world of work.

The key is to empower our team members to take ownership of their career matrix and provide them with the tools to deploy the right behaviors into our companies' most critical initiatives.