If you are having an accidental career, it can have a devastating impact upon your professional growth. It means you will miss out on notable job opportunities and miss out on building your financial security. Ultimately it means you will risk limiting your personal happiness over the course of your future. That’s a huge loss!
What Is an Accidental Career?
First, you need to understand what an accidental career is. For most it means that you are not approaching your career with any notable degree of strategic focus, discipline, or dedication. It means that you are most likely:
- Passively waiting on your company to let you know when and if you might be receiving a promotion
- Assuming your work stands for itself
- Not actively seeking new job opportunities inside or outside of your company
- Not building an expansive network internally or externally
How to Avoid Having an Accidental Career:
To avoid this pattern, you need to first shift your mindset. It’s up to you to carve out your career path. Your success depends upon your investment of time, effort, and dedication.
Dedicated Time
To start it’s important to simply block time to focus on your career development. Maybe you start with one hour/week and then expand your commitment as needed.
Determining Your Career Path
Once you have committed time to your career development it’s important to determine what roles you would like and how you would like to arc your career. You need to explore and answer questions like the following:
- What could be my next best role(s)?
- What role would I like in 3-5 years?
- What would be my dream job at the peak of my career?
With some of these milestones defined, it’s so much easier to develop yourself. If you can articulate your goals, then the process by which you achieve them becomes significantly easier.
What If You Don’t Know?
If you don’t have answers to the questions above that’s perfectly okay. Many leaders don’t know what they want to do next. If that’s the case, then you have to do a little self-analysis and a little networking.
With regard to self-analysis, you have to explore what types of work create engagement for you. What energizes you? What brings you joy? What maximizes your skill sets? What are the criteria that you will use as part of your decision making around a new role?
For example:
- Location
- Compensation
- Career Growth Opportunity
- Manager
- Company Brand
- Company Performance
- Industry
- Benefits
- Culture
- Travel
Simultaneously you need to define what skills you have that can be scaled and leveraged for future roles? What technical skills do you possess? What people leadership skills do you possess? What skills do you still need?
If a future path is still unclear, then you need to invest time in meeting with people in roles that you might consider. This includes colleagues inside your organization and colleagues that are outside your organization. When you are together, ask them questions like:
- What are the best parts of your job?
- What are the worst parts of your job?
- What recommendations do you have for me if I were to pursue a role like yours?
- What career path are you imagining for yourself?
This part of the process requires some active networking. Internally it means reaching out to individuals that you may not know, which requires introductions from colleagues you do know, or it means introducing yourself through LinkedIn or external networks or conferences.
For people who have introverted preferences, this is a difficult task that requires discipline because they don’t get energy from socializing. It will take setting goals, applying disciplined efforts, and dedicating time. But, this is a key success factor, and without this investment it’s likely that a career will become accidental.
Building Your Brand
Once you have begun to determine where you would like to explore the next steps in your career, you need to start to build your own brand. That means have a polished resume that you can share with any potential hiring manager. In reality, resumes take considerable work for them to be effective and for them to draw the attention of readers.
Some critical foundations include the following:
- Having an objective that helps hiring managers and recruiters know explicitly what role you are interested in pursuing
- Having an executive summary that emphasizes your key experiences and capabilities
- Having job experience segments that focus primarily on your accomplishments and what you have created for business impact – vs. relating a description of your role
- Having descriptions that consistently start with meaningful action verbs such as led, managed, created, established, etc.
Complementing your resume must be your LinkedIn profile, which should be at 100%. You should ensure you have a great picture, a comprehensive but concise job experience summary, and multiple recommendations. Since recruiters almost exclusively use this platform for their searches, it’s critical that you have your page fully updated and complete. As well, the URL for your LinkedIn profile should be available on your resume as many companies will rely exclusively on that content and AI’s evaluation of that content.
To ensure that you have a breadth of exposure to interested companies you should also consider having your profile on multiple other job aggregators. These would include Glassdoor, iHire, Indeed, and others. Casting a wide net is always a good thing. The more you can create visibility and interest in your profile, the greater your chances of uncovering your next best role. You can always take a pass on a recruiter’s inquiry or say “later.”
To create an even broader network, it’s strongly advised that you also connect with some search firms. You can leverage ones that specialize in your industry or field of work or you can explore some of the top firms in the country like Korn Ferry, Spencer Stuart, and Heidrich & Struggles. The more senior your position, the more it makes sense to partner with an expert who has access to companies and roles around the world.
To expand your network further, you might also consider going back to your university’s career services and seeing if they can connect you to alumni that are in key positions or companies that interest you. There’s nothing quite like the bond of being an alumna. Somehow those four years of common ground create a notable willingness to act as a very helpful liaison.
Networking
To build up your network requires a dedicated investment of time. It means blocking your calendar to reach out to meet people, build relationships with them, and to leverage them for expanding your network.
To start you need to create a list of all the individuals you should meet and then prioritize them. From there you need to reach out with an introductory email or a request to “connect” on LinkedIn and explore if and when you might be able to talk with them. This could be over Zoom, Teams, or in person.
The key is making your ask an easy one.
- Don’t ask for more than 30 minutes
- Don’t push for a meeting too soon on the calendar
- Don’t ask for a job as that might deter them
- Do appreciate their skills, background, and brand
- Do ask if you could seek out their advice and guidance as most people like sharing their experience and advice
Once you have enabled a meeting, provide that person with an agenda of some kind that articulates your desired outcomes. For example, by the end of the meeting, what would you like to better understand? Helping them know how the meeting will be productive and efficient will give you more credibility.
At the end of the meeting, one important best practice is to ask them “are there any individuals that you might know and that you believe might be helpful to my job search?” If you get a positive response, then you can build on that request and explore if they might make a personal introduction.
Your goal should be to walk away with 2-3 more people that you can add to your network. Your goal should also encompass an agreement of when and how you might stay in touch with them. “Would it be okay if I circled back to you in a few weeks to share an update and seek a little more advice?”
Following the meeting, it’s key to send a very customized and personalized thank you note. Helping them feel appreciated in a meaningful way will enable you to sustain your relationship with them and encourage them to keep you in mind if and when they see a job opportunity.
Last but not least, a key step in the networking process is to keep a detailed record of all your meetings and new contacts. You want to capture their names, contact information, when you met, what you discussed, to whom they referred you, and when you might re-engage with them.
Building this on some kind of spreadsheet will help you manage your search and network with high touch. It will enable you to circle back to people with the right timing and the right content so that they appreciate your approach and thoughtfulness. Networking is really all about relationships and how much you conscientiously demonstrate your care for a person’s time and contributions to your professional growth.
Summary
So, if you think you are by chance having an accidental career it’s time to do something about it. It’s time to make yourself a priority and take care of your future. Set a goal of interviewing a minimum of 5 times/year.
It’s the only way…
- To know how happy you are
- To learn how much you could earn in the marketplace
- To build a great network
- To know if the “grass is greener” anywhere else in the industry
And you need to remember that you “are not cheating on your partner!” You are simply taking care of the most important person in your life and that’s you!
