Career Development 101

Whether you have just graduated, are stuck in a dead-end job, are switching careers or just want to move up the corporate ladder a little, career development is something a lot of people struggle with.  They are either under the illusion that it is something that “just kinda happens” or they don’t think it is possible for them.  Or maybe it just isn’t possible right now but whatever their mindset, they neglect to make a plan and look for opportunities to get them the career they have always imagined. 

Career development is not a passive thing.  It is active and ongoing and something that you are going to have to invest some time and energy into.  And it can be complicated but only if you make it complicated and are unprepared to handle the process.  But it is doable; the millions of successful people in the world are a testament to that, so don’t give me any excuses.  I’ve broken it down into five easy stages and though this isn’t an exact science, it should get you off on the right foot.

Know Where You Are

I am pretty sure I have said this before but trying to get somewhere in life without knowing where you are starting from is pointless.  Even Google maps realize this and won’t give you directions unless you provide the search engine with a Point A and a Point B.  My mother doesn’t understand this concept as she constantly calls me from the road, asking for directions, but since she has no idea where she is, I can’t help which is why we got her a GPS last Christmas.

The same is true for you with respect to career development.  If you don’t know where you are or what you have to start with, getting to where you want to be is a shot in the dark.  Make an inventory of your career related skills.  Did you go to school?  What courses did you take?  Do you have any previous related career experience?  Do you have any industry contacts that could point you in the right direction?  Why do you what to go into a particular career?  What motivates you?  These are all important things to consider when plotting your career development if for no other reason that your potential employer will care and you need to have the answers.

Also, when writing down your experience, make sure it is career specific at this stage.  If you have to stretch your imagination to find a link then chances are it isn’t a strong enough asset.  Building up your “relevant work experience” may lend you confidence, but you are only fooling yourself.  For example, when I was applying for a high school summer job at a coffee shop (Tim Hortons, if you must know), I put the fact that I had my lifeguarding on my résumé.  Unless people were going to be falling in and drowning into the ice cappuccino machine, this experience was irrelevant to my ability to serve a cup of coffee in 16.2 seconds to surely morning caffeine addicts.

Know Where You Want to Be

This makes sense if you use the direction analogy again because just like I can’t give my mother directions without knowing where she is, I also can’t help her get anywhere if she doesn’t know where she wants to go and neither can her GPS.

Where do you see yourself in one year? Five years? Ten years even… If you had the time, money and connections to find your dream job, what would it be?

Feel free to dream big here, however, also remember to keep some realistic expectations in mind.  Not everyone gets to be the Queen of England, Leader of the UN or the first person to land on Pluto.  But don’t let that intimidate you. Even if your dream job is outside of your current career trajectory, there is no reason why it still cannot work out.  You have options and there are very few limits that cannot be overcome (except for my mother’s inability to read a map).

Know What You Need to Get There

Time for a reality check.  You now know where you are and can compare it to where you want to be, the gap between the two places can now be measured.  This is not the time to be underestimating the difference because you will only be short-changing yourself.

Consider a variety of different ways to get where you want to go (sleeping your way there is not an option).  Do you need to go back to school?  Do you need to get some more work experience? Would an internship be useful?  Many people use internships to get their foot in the door somewhere they really want to work.  Are you willing to take a potential pay cut?  Is it going to mean travelling more?  Do you have the right contacts and if not, who do you need to connect with to make things happen?  What time frame are you looking at?

Knowing what you will need to bridge the gap between the “here” and the “there” is a critical stage because this will become your road map or in my mother’s case, the GPS.  And as long as you avoid driving into the lake metaphorically speaking, there is no reason why you won’t be able to develop your career as you desire.

Write It Down

After you are done all this planning and strategizing, write it down.  Writing it down will make your plan concrete and give you a visual representation of the steps and milestones you need to reach in order to get your dream career. 

A useful tool would be a work-back schedule.  If you are not sure what that is, feel free to click the link and read up on it some more but basically it is a schedule that starts with what you want to accomplish at the top and works backward detailing every single step needed to get there along with specific actions, tools needed and deadlines.  If you do it right, the schedule will look quite daunting.  However, by breaking everything you need to accomplish into tiny, manageable chunks and outlining what needs to be done to accomplish that small goal, you will be surprised how quickly things get checked off the list.

Having an actual list will serve the purpose of keeping you goal-orientated and on track as you can always refer back to it if you stumble, take a detour, or just need a reminder of what you are striving for.

Do It

And last but not least, you have to do it.  Many of us spend all our time planning and not actually doing.  It is great to have goals and an action plan but if you never get around to executing it, it isn’t worth the paper or hard drive space you wrote it on.

Career Action Plan - About.com

Creating a Career Action Plan for Myself - Workopolis

Your Résumé: The Translated Version

Other than your tax return, your résumé is probably one of the most important and time consuming documents that you will ever write.  You carefully analyze your word choice to ensure that it conveys the correct meaning and frames you in the best light.  You list your skills, your experience and your education.  You delete, you tweak, you move things around until you are satisfied.  Then you have someone else edit it and repeat the process.  The final document consists of precisely chosen verbiage representing everything you have done in your life that would make the company want to hire you.  At least you hope.  You sit by the phone and wait for a call.

The process sounds familiar.  Everyone from the 16 year old high school student to the 55 year old who is considering retirement has written a résumé at one point in their life.  We’ve all applied for jobs and understand that an excellent résumé is key to getting that interview and getting a foot in the door of the company you want to work for.

But what is the company you want to work for isn’t local?  What if it is global?

Your résumé is still important and you are likely to go through all the same steps that you would normally go through when applying for a local job.  But the rules have changed.  Dun dun dun. (Cue the menacing death march music).  All of a sudden you are competing against other individuals that probably have a similar work or educational background (which is typical) but more importantly is that these people are probably local to the company.  If the company is in Thailand, then the fact that they already know the language, know the culture, are familiar with the people, best business practices, customs and all sorts of other affairs naturally makes them more suitable for the job at hand because they are the people that the business is going to be targeting.

So other than taking some extremely intensive Thai language lessons and Googling how to build a résumé that won’t completely throw the HR department for a loop, making them wonder what on earth you were thinking, what do you need to do to ensure that your application doesn’t just get a few chuckles and then end up on the top of the pile of office memos bound for the paper shredder/incinerator?

Well first, you do need to do some serious research about how to act professional.  You may think that professional courtesy is universal but with that mind frame you are definitely not going to get a call back.  What is professional in one country might be unprofessional in another.  Some cultures value getting right down to business while in others, it is expected to spend the first few minutes asking about each other’s personal life.  When accepting another person’s business card, never put it directly in your pocket or handbag or what have you in a casual manner that in America, wouldn’t get a second thought.  In fact, when interacting with someone of Asian descent, it is customary to accept the business card with two hands, examine it carefully before placing it in a hard cover folder of some sort to ensure that it does not get crushed.

Next, you must demonstrate your professional personality.  If they are going to go through the trouble of contacting an international job applicant, they are going to want to know what to expect from you in a professional setting personality-wise.  Are you going to clam up?  Are you often nervous?  Do you approach problems with a cool and collective mindset?  Do you stay goal orientated?  Can you resolve conflict before it gets blown out of proportion?  These are all assets that you are going to have to figure out a way to sneak into your résumé with your choice of wording.

Probably the most important thing to do when applying for a job outside of your locale is to know how to sell your cross cultural skills.  Do you speak a second language?  Have you spent time working with teams of culturally diverse people?  Can you put yourself in the shoes of a minority group to assess what sorts of needs they have that could be addressed?  You need to let potential employers know of any unique experiences that you have had that would benefit their company.  It is a good idea to mention things such as cross cultural work experience, whether you have a positive attitude with new work environments, project successes that focused on multicultural customer segments, volunteer experiences abroad, facility with respect to picking up new languages, travel experience, etc.

International internships, if you have done any, are a great thing to highlight.  And if you already speak a second language, even if it is not their own, you should still mention it as it demonstrates your ability to focus on a complicated task and see it through to the end.

If working internationally is something you would like to do down the road but are not quite sure what you want to do quite yet (after all it can mean a really big move complete with enormous shipping crates and insurmountable rolls of bubble wrap), consider looking into acquiring some of the above mentioned cross cultural skills so that when the time comes, you are prepared. 

Have you ever wanted to work internationally?  What is holding you back?

http://www.transitionsabroad.com/publications/magazine/0609/international_resumes.shtml

http://www.english360.ca/internationalcareerstudies


http://www.black-collegian.com/international/global_resumes_0706.htm 

Gaps Years for Everyone - Part 1

Gap years are not just for students.  Now before mature professionals and active boomers begin to scoff at this idea, call me crazy and have flashbacks to the Bill Cosby comedy series “Kids Say the Darndest Things”, hear me out.  You obviously have some preconceived false notions of what a gap year is and who can participate.  Therefore, I am going to try to break it down and explain away some of the stereotypes you may already have before the studio audience starts laughing at me.

What Is a Gap Year?

A gap year can be defined as any change in the regular pattern of your working life spanning from a couple of months to a year or longer, as long as it is greater in length than a regular holiday.  A gap year can last six weeks or longer and gives the participant a chance to be freed from professional obligations.  In academia, a gap year is also known as a sabbatical where teachers refresh their knowledge, conduct original research or join an exchange program.

Going abroad is not even essential to a gap year as the term simply means taking a leave of absence from your typical routine to pursue another goal, dream, interests or family orientated activities.  You therefore could theoretically use your gap year to do volunteer work in Ethiopia to save the starving children or you could take a road trip to see just how many Tim Horton’s you can hit up between here and Nunavut.  The choice is up to you and your options (please don’t take the road trip) are wide open.

Who Can Take a Gap Year?

When it comes to taking a gap year, age does not matter.  Seriously.  Gaps years are typically associated with college or university students but anyone from a 19 year old college freshman to your 70 year old grandmother can take a gap year.  You can go by yourself or you can take your family if that is a feasible (or rather desirable) option.

Basically, if you drive 2 hours through rush hour traffic each day to put up with a supervisor that belittles your efforts, shoves you in a small cubical, docks your pay when you take an extra 30 seconds for lunch, forces you to work overtime on the weekend causing you to miss little Timmy’s little league game and you need a break longer than the 5 vacations days you had to sell your soul to get, you qualify ... as do all other professionals that don’t find their work lives quite as depressing and just think it would be neat to try something different.

Triggers & Motives

There are many reasons why people decide to take a year off ranging from the desire to seek personal development to the fact that they just need a change in pace.

Burnout – You are bored, really bored and probably feel exhausted more often than not despite the 10 hours of sleep you got plus that nap you took sometime during the day in your office chair.  This feeling of burnout is rooted in how you feel about your current job/lifestyle/routine. 

Excess & Affluence – Maybe you actually love your job and look forward to getting up each morning to spend the day with your co-workers but something inside you is feeling inspired to make change on a larger scale than being the only one in the entire office that can convince the copier to actually copy things instead of eating them for breakfast.  You are satisfied with work but you also imagine how you could contribute towards the greater good in the midst of a crisis with the excess of resources you have at your disposal. 

Sensory Overload – You work in a large, thriving metropolitan centre; picture New York and Sex in the City, but unlike Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda (don’t judge me, I actually had to Google their character names), you desire to seek a simpler, less burdened period of time away from the “fast track”.  To spend even one month away from the smog, the billboards, the media and the pressure would be a relief.

Depression &Trauma – Many people that feel depressed and worn down by their jobs decide to take a gap year which is along the same lines of feeling burned out though depression can be a bit more intense and should definitely be addressed. Similarly those that have experienced a recent traumatic event (i.e., natural disaster, death of a family member) can find themselves reassessing what is important in life and decide to take a gap year in order to fulfill some life-long goal or to gain some much needed perspective.

The Danger Age – Research suggests that at the age of 30, many people are looking to find more purpose in their lives beyond their nine to five jobs or perhaps even just feel like they need to take the chance while they still have it prior to parenthood if that is somewhere they feel their lives will eventually take them.  (Personally I prefer the idea of being an aunt to being a mother because at the end of the day I get to give the kids back, but that is a completely different topic).  Now whether that age is actually 30 is debatable but in essence it is the point of your life when you begin to feel like you are running out of time to be young, adventuresome, and maybe a tad privileged.    

Property Ladder Pressures – If you own a house chances are that is where your money is tied up and taking an unpaid leave of absence from work is not possible.  Full time earners often feel pressured to buy property rather than continuing to rent a.k.a the black hole of doom that sucks away all your hard earned money with nothing in return, and therefore feel that this is their last chance to do something exciting before becoming a responsible homeowner with a ... wait for it ... *gasp* mortgage.

Freedom from Responsibilities – The last child goes off to university or finally moves out and suddenly people feel a lot more freedom to travel and be more ambitious in their adventures.  You no longer are responsible for making sure Junior has clean clothes and six meals a day.  You get to start thinking about yourself again for once and it can be extremely liberating.  At this point, you are probably feeling a bit more financially secure as your kids are grown up and paying their own bills meaning extra funds for your retirement savings or that new ATV speedboat hammock for the cottage.

Turning Fifty – When nearing 50, people begin to panic that they are reaching retirement age and desire to try something that will shake off the metaphorical dust and prolong the fact that they are getting “old”.  For those that fall into this category, you are not “old”, you just have a few more grey hairs than you did a couple years ago and are still perfectly capable of being active and exciting.

Retirement – With so much extra time, many retirees prefer to stay active as long as they can and choose to accomplish this through a wide range of experiences including gap year programs.  Remember when I said that even your 70 year old grandmother could participate?  Well I wasn’t lying.  She can and she’s probably been retired already for 20 some odd years.  If she can do it, so can you because chances are it will be much more satisfying than a mundane vacation somewhere down south in Florida where surrounded by uninspired retirees on the beach, you are going to feel older than you actually are.

What are some of the reasons why you might want to or have chosen to take a gap year?  Do your reasons line up with any of the options posted above?

Internationally Diverse Employees are Sexy

You can stop dialling your lawyer to file a sexual harassment lawsuit.  I am not about to encourage CEOs and HR managers to start hiring job candidates because the new employee is a curvy Brazilian supermodel or a well tanned Italian stallion.  Excuse the controversial headline and start thinking “attractive” along the lines of what cultural diversity can contribute to an organization that is faced with the culturally diverse challenges that a globalized workplace delivers. 

So just to be clear, hiring hunky Alessandro because he is an enjoyable piece of eye candy is NOT alright.

It IS alright to hire Alessandro because his education, work experience and professional work ethic make him a good fit for the available position.  And it is perfectly acceptable that his cultural background gives him an added edge in the eyes of the potential employer because the marketing position that he applied for means that he will be dealing with many partner companies overseas in Europe making his heritage an added bonus when it comes to bridging the lines of communication.

Encouraging a culturally diverse workplace where there are people from a variety of international backgrounds is extremely attractive to employers for a variety of reasons ranging from the fact that it is profitable to the fact that it is marketable. 

According to Targeted Diversity Recruitment Centre, a diverse workforce enhances:

1. Connection with the customer:
The needs of diverse customers can be better understood when the workforce itself is diverse.

2. Employee motivation:
Employees maintain productivity when they know that they are treated with dignity and respect.

3. Employee innovation:
A work environment favourable to diversity is open and flexible and also favourable to employee innovation.

4. Employee recruitment and retention:
A workplace that emphasizes interest and concern for its employees as people first is able to attract a higher-quality workforce.

5. Continuous quality improvement:
An environment where employee talents are valued will help to continually improve quality.

Creating a diverse work environment is important to employers.  It demonstrates that they support the inclusion of all ethnicities and all backgrounds; encouraging equal opportunity employment.  Companies that encourage this type of a workplace also tend to be the ones that provide the most support and training for their new hires. 

So how does this relate to you as the job seeker, not the employer?  It would seem like you are out of luck.  After all, you can’t exactly change your genes.  So if you are a pasty white person (no offense to the pasty white people, I am one of them too and I feel your pain when it comes to trying to get a tan in the summer and ending up looking like a lobster instead) there isn’t much you can do about it if the recruitment office is looking to diversify the team and wants someone with a unique ethnic background.

But let’s think about it for a moment.  Are they really hiring based upon skin colour?  Hopefully Probably not.  They are more likely looking for the diverse cultural viewpoint that they assume is coming with that skin colour. They might indeed be looking for someone to join the business development team that deals mainly with East Asia.  They assume that they should hire someone from that regional background with the expectation that this person will be familiar with the cultural expectations and nuances of doing business in Japan, China, Taiwan and maybe even Mongolia. 

They are hiring someone with cultural experience; they are hiring someone who knows how to effectively communicate and deal with these ethnic differences.  Why can’t that be you?

The workplace of the 21^st century is looking for diverse employees so you need to make yourself more diverse.  So what if you are one of the aforementioned pasty white people who grew up in a small town in Northern Ontario where the closest thing you had to Chinatown was sushi you can pick up at the pre-made food section of your local Loblaws Superstore.  I know I did.  But that doesn’t mean much on the grand scale of things.  I still know that many Asian countries are high context cultures, preferring to leave things unsaid and let cultural expectations fill in the blanks.  I know that word choice is extremely important since very few words can have such a complex message where as in low context culture such as America, everything needs to be explicit and fully explained.  I know that harmony, order and self-development are important underlying values and therefore confrontations and other forms of disagreements are often avoided which could come at a cost if the party I am dealing with is put in an uncomfortable situation and I don’t realize it.  And I got all that from my extremely brief International Marketing class at college.  Think about the insight I could gain if I actually travelled to and worked in Japan for a few weeks or even a few months.

There is no reason why we need to be restricted by our cultural diversity or lack there-of.

With all the educational travel opportunities available through the hundreds of organizations, there is no excuse for not being diverse on a global scale.  At the very least you can Google the information but that does not compare to living it firsthand.

Here is my advice.  Consider taking some time away to live it firsthand.  If you are a student, take a semester off or commit your summer vacation to doing an international internship.  If you are a more seasoned professional and don’t feel like you are able to take what amounts to 3-6 months off in order to do an internship, consider completing an educational tourism program where you take an intense two week vacation that is dedicated to learning a new skill and immersing yourself in the culture at the same time.  Imagine that you are a senior journalism editor and you had the chance to travel to Cuba to work on an international magazine alongside Cuban locals, engaging in everyday conversations and business interactions.  It would be not only thrilling but a wonderful career advancing use of those vacations days you have been allocated. 

When it comes right down to it, diversity is here to stay.  Globalization of the workplace is happening.  International internships, edutourism travel programs and further training are the tools you need to adapt.  Because when it comes right down to it, the business world is changing and if you want to stay ahead of the curve and not close off any avenues of opportunity, you need to be prepared.

Remember, diversity is sexy attractive in a good-for-customer-service-and-innovated-work-environment kind of ways and not an Alessandro-is-super-cute-when-he-has-no-shirt-on kind of a way.

http://www.equalitymagazines.com/index.php/why-diversify/why-hire-diversity

http://www.mongabay.com/reference/country_studies/japan/SOCIETY.html

http://www.internationalcareerstudies.com

Thailand is Calling... I Hope They Are Not Calling Collect

Ok, so Thailand probably isn’t on the phone for you.  But chances are they will send you an e-mail if you are interested in getting in touch with the Ministry of Education.  In fact, they will probably jump at the chance to respond to your e-mails because English speaking teachers are in high demand and they are looking to hire a lot of them over the next few years.

This topic is probably going to be most interesting to students currently at teacher’s college, completing concurrent education programs or are a recent graduate of either one of those aforementioned options.  However there really are no limitations in age or education with this topic so listen up and pass this around if you know people who might be interested. 

Why are we talking about Thailand today?  Well other than the fact that I thought Cuba deserved a break, there are exciting opportunities currently available that people need to jump on right now to take advantage of before the chance disappears.  So get ready to jump in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

The Thai educational system is growing at a rapid rate.  The government in Thailand spends approximately 27% of their annual budget on education compared to the 14-17% that many other countries spend which gives you a pretty good idea of how strong their commitment is to the development of the next generations. 

The Ministry of Education is building more schools, increasing class sizes and going on a hiring spree in order to cope.  Both the public and private school systems are glutted with children and the demand is only increasing.  This is causing quite a dilemma actually.  The flux in the demand for teachers isn’t being met.  Well actually that is only partially true.  There are teachers for math, social studies, geography, history, and all those other lovely subjects that were the bane of my existence back in elementary school.  I particularly wasn’t a fan of history.  Remembering all those dates and odd names of dead people was never an interest of mine.  What Thailand needs however, are English teachers.

Now I am not talking English teachers like we have here in high school where everything revolved around reading this really old book and writing a 20 page report on the different themes, prevalent characters and how the author was beyond his or her time.  I am talking about English teachers that are more similar to our French teachers, where it is more like conjugate this noun and this verb and remember that the little accent goes to the left instead of the right. 

I am referring to English as a Second Language.

Obviously your English is impeccable otherwise reading this article would be a bit of a tedious task.  So already you meet one of the qualifications the Ministry of Education has for their teachers. 

Due to the globalization of the workplace and international business boarders becoming obsolete thanks to technology, the business world is changing in favour of western culture.  The use of English is most prevalent in media and the internet.  The Thai government has long since realized the importance of the English language and is aggressively pursuing solutions to the language barrier, making English a core subject in the curriculum.  So crucial is the implementation and incorporation of the English language to student education, many private schools and even some public schools are beginning to offer other core subjects such as math and business in English as well. 

The Ministry provides twelve years of formal education for all Thai students.  Six years at the primary level, and six years of secondary education.  Students are required to complete at least nine years of schooling.  The current education system is undergoing reform as class sizes are becoming larger with as many as 60 students due to the gross flux of demand and the underwhelming number of qualified teachers to fill that void.

Several thousand English native speakers are employed in the public and private school sectors.  This practise is growing as it encourages the students to develop oral expressions and increase their knowledge of a foreign culture.

Why is this all so exciting?  Well, as I have mentioned, they need teachers who speak English and as it turns out, you speak English.  Therefore, you qualify for this experience. 

Think about it.  If you are a student teacher trying to get your degree then you understand the importance of getting classroom experience under your belt before you are launched into the fray of 30 some odd sticky and sweaty unruly 5^th graders.  My father is a teacher and has been for the past 25 years.  The stories he comes home with would shock you at times as you wonder how kids can be so unreasonable.  You have to respect the amount of patience and experience (and restraint)  it takes to be able to deal with an 11^th grader who decided he couldn’t wait to use the bathroom and peed out the back door of the classroom.

So what do most future teachers do in order to gain this valuable experience before they are tossed to the wolves?  They volunteer in the classroom, get a job at a summer camp, find another teacher to be a mentor and a host of other activities all while going to school and trying to earn enough money to pay for said school since teacher’s college can take a minimum of four years. 

Now we get to the really exciting part.  The Ministry of Education in Thailand is offering teaching students a chance to come to Thailand and teach.  They will provide you with accommodations, food, a job and a weekly stipend of spending money.  They will train you, offer in-class experience dealing with students, mentor you, and share their culture, language and an endless supply of smiles.

If you accept an internship position in Thailand, it will not only benefit your future career (after all a teaching gig in Thailand is going to look great on your resume) but it will provide an amazing experience that you will be able to talk about for the rest of your life.  Consider the fact that you will gain a global perspective for your career.  You will be introduced to new teaching styles and practices that you would never have encountered if you stayed in Canada which will shape and round you out into a more effective leader of your classroom. 

Like I said, get ready to jump.  Ask your school advisors what international internships are available to you in the teaching field.  Your experience might even be able to count as course credits.  Thailand is not the only place offering teaching internship positions either. 

Not a student?  That’s fine too.  Many seasoned and professional teachers that are looking to take a break from their normal classrooms are signing up for international teaching programs too.  It provides valuable insight, a unique perspective and can prove to be quite the adventure.

Not a professional teacher?  You are still welcomed to participate.  The Thai government recognizes that English speaking natives without college or university programs also have a lot of knowledge to offer students.  In fact, the only two requirements you need in order to apply for an international program with the Ministry of Education is that a) you speak English fluently and b) you are at least 18 years old.

Do your research.  Below are links to general information on the Thai education system and some featured programs that you might be interested in.

http://www.internationalcareerstudies.com/edutourism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Thailand

http://www.moe.go.th/English/

http://thailand-business-news.com/asean/34279-thailand-needs-to-reform-its-educational-system-for-2015#.Tw3ycGET0oM