Career Growth Paradigm Shift

Traditionally, career development was meant to be an annual or bi-annual activity composed of two things:

1. Performance management process led by HR
2. Individual Career Development Plan led by the manager

In today’s ever-changing work environment, we have to shift how we think, manage, and grow our careers with modern tools, processes, and mechanisms. Let’s dive into the old way vs. the new way.

Individual Career Development Plan (old way)

If you have some experience working in corporate America, you may have come across a thing called Individual Career Development Plan (ICDP). This is a very traditional way of managing your development because it consists of a limited few things to help employees grow.

• Strengths and weaknesses ​
• Short-term and long-term career goals/objectives
• Development activities for those goals​

These are usually short-lived because they are built by a specific manager for a specific role at a specific company and are long forgotten by the time the next review cycle comes up or when you decide to leave a company. The whole process of an ICDP starts all over again and doesn’t really move your career forward.

Career Playbook (new way)

A playbook originated from American football for a book containing a team’s strategies and plays. What a playbook really is a framework for success with a repository of information, strategies, and actionable plans. A playbook is usually:

• Very detailed with all the information
• A real-time document, which means it’s updated on an ongoing basis
• Structured with actionable tools​

You may have heard of the phrase ‘you are the CEO of your career’, which means you are your own boss and your career is a business and YOU are the product! Don’t leave your career in the hands of your mentor, manager, an HR process, etc. You have to truly own your career, which means you have to:

• Identify your goals and a blueprint for meetings those goals
• Design long-term plans to move your career in the direction you desire
• Build short-term tactics to drive your career development forward

You can do all this by building the Career Playbook that stays with you as you navigate your career from different roles to different companies.

A good process you can use is:

• The starting point: Where you are now in your career
• The destination: Where you want to go in your career
• The gap: The obstacles you must overcome to reach the destination
• The route: How to close the gap to reach your intended destination

Let us build you an action plan for your career goals — My Personalized Plan.