Sometimes, a Career Transformation Starts With You

22	Aug
	2013

Future of Learning

*This story is an excerpt from the forthcoming Ferrazzi Greenlight book titled The University of You: How to Become a Continuous Learner and Change the Trajectory of Your Life. To explore what The University of You has to offer, check out the framework of the book.

Abby was operating on some assumptions. She thought she would easily climb the ladder to any position she wanted while acting carefree and careless. She could be unorthodox, even thumb her nose a bit at her professors when she was at school and at her bosses at work – and still she was certain that her charm would be a magnet. It always was. It would attract people, drawing them closer until they were bewitched by her natural intellect.
Abby first adopted this insouciant persona at school. Because of a lack of funds and, well, initiative, her higher education career began in a two-year community college. The competition there was well below her league. Consequently, she stood out academically and received a full scholarship to the local state university, where she completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science. She didn’t work very hard at either school. Time after time, she submitted assignments that were not even remotely what the professor had asked for; nonetheless, the material was smart and betrayed a creative intelligence.
Most of the professors gave her high grades – she graduated with an A- average – although grudgingly. More often than not, written across the page, in angry scrawls, was the comment, “This was not what I had asked for.” There was no doubt but that Abby, perversely, enjoyed her maverick status. “It was fun thinking that I was so obviously gifted that whether I completed an assignment correctly or not didn’t matter,” Abby says. “I would move ahead anyway.”
She was certain this pattern would continue when she took her first job as a programmer for a start-up medical equipment company. Sadly, she was deluding herself. Even after months on the job, her supervisor gave her only the easiest tasks and she was always paired with a leader on every project. Abby was also pointedly excluded from meetings about the company’s direction.
Clearly, her boss had noticed that her output consistently diverged, by just a bit but enough to be troubling, from what he wanted. In short, he didn’t trust her to take on anything overly critical or strategic – the kinds of work people need to do to get ahead. Abby was languishing at her job. And with the company hanging on to its supply of venture capital by a thread, she knew that she would be among the first to go when the inevitable layoffs came. She began to wonder about how she came to hold those assumptions, and what to do about them.
That’s when she decided to alter the trajectory of her career. “I said to myself, ‘You developed your personality on your own, you can change it to become what you need to be to succeed at work on your own, as well,’” she says.

What Abby will learn is that while she took the responsibility to initiate and manage a career transformation, it is only with and through other people that it will succeed. Like Abby, you may find the best place to start this “gap analysis” phase of the continuous learning circle is where we find everything these days: the Internet.

Abby first searched the web for a self-assessment test to see if she could identify where she needed to focus, or if there perhaps was some diagnosis for the kind of challenges she was facing. Maybe she could uncover new insights about her situation, she thought, and – who knows – even find others who were similarly challenged.
Abby recognized that a significant piece was missing from her work experience. Something wasn’t working, something could get better. As a leader, I always assume things can get better and it is our responsibility to work and search for what, and how, to make them better. Not everyone starts with this level of motivation, I fully appreciate that. It is critical that managers help employees to wake up, to ignite this awakening that they can improve and do better.
Abby’s dissatisfaction is her own challenge to manage. As managers we can help the “Abbys” around us begin to experience this awakening. We must encourage them to ask the question: Is this where I want to stay? We should encourage the fire of motivation, where we find even the smallest embers alight.

*To make The University of You as impactful as possible for organizations intent on moving to intentional, self-directed learning for their employees, we will customize the book with stories and examples drawn from the learning paths of the leaders and individuals in each organization. Contact us at info@ferrazzigreenlight.com for more information.