A Better Way To Plan Career

My students often ask me a question, how did I plan my career and finally become president of Fidelity Investment Company. I always tell them: "in fact, there are no great plans. I am just trying to take every step of my career."

In the years when I graduated from law school, I didn't know that I would eventually become president of a large Financial Services Company. I was a professor of law and a securities and Exchange Commission. Senior Supervisor And partners in law firms.

But in me Career In the first few stages, I had a deeper understanding of myself: I found myself really interested in trading and managing people instead of drafting laws and regulations. So I took the job of Fidelity Investment in 1987, when it was just a very young company. It took me ten years to get promoted in the company. In 1997, I was chosen as the new president under many factors.

What career planning inspiration can I get from my experience? That is, you can't control the track of your career. Too many uncontrollable variables will affect your job choices, including global economic trends, political elections, technological changes, and so on. So don't be confident that you can decide your career.

On the other hand, as long as you have the right concept and recognize that career planning is a continuous process and must be managed actively, you can improve the chances of success in the workplace. At every step of your career, you have to ask yourself, "what should I do next to maximize my choice for the future?"

　　 Learning transferable knowledge

This process starts with the choices you make at school. You want your education to provide the necessary skills and expertise to enable you to work in different fields, which means you have to choose your courses wisely. I prefer courses that involve a lot of writing, rigorous analysis and quantitative skills.

Once you have completed the formal education of the school, the job you are looking for must further expand your transferable knowledge to help you find the next job. For example, if you take the job of integrating a plane lease, you will become an expert in the field in a few years, but this narrow professional knowledge may not be available in other fields. Conversely, if your work strengthens your computer programming ability, you will greatly improve your career choices in the future.

Obtaining overseas work experience is also one of the ways to accumulate knowledge transferable. I have been in Africa for two years, and have lived in England, Japan and China for quite a long time. From those experiences, I learned how to cope with different economic, cultural and political environments. I learned these experiences later in the global assessment and establishment of new institutions.

Similarly, if you have worked in different types of organizations in your career, it will be more attractive to employers. For example, if you have been working in government units, profit-making organizations may not dare to hire you. Public listed companies may not dare to use senior managers of non-listed company as senior executives because they are worried that non-listed company executives can not adapt to the pressure from the majority of shareholders and the securities and Exchange Commission's regulation.

　　 Expand your Interpersonal relationship network

When you learn about transferable knowledge, remember that this is just a small part of the puzzle: your next job must expand your network of relationships. Rewrite a slogan: "organizations do not hire people, they are hired by people." The more people you know, the more people will think of you when you have job opportunities, even if this job opportunity is not open to the public.

Of course, even if you don't change your job, you can set up a certain degree of interpersonal network. You can attend seminars or meetings held by the guild. However, the interpersonal networks built by these activities are far less dense than your colleagues, because you and your colleagues are built up in work, communication and travel.

So, when you consider the next step in your career, think about how much this job can add to your network. If you are positive enough, you can switch to new companies or even new industries to expand your network. Obviously, this will be a major decision. If you compromise, you can switch to other departments in the company, or to lead an inter departmental project from different units.