Engineer The Shape Of Your Career

Sayings that seem to be true:

• In life, the only things you can count on are death and taxes
• The only constant is change
• In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king [modify re: gender & ruler terms as appropriate]

Here's a new one:

• You get to engineer the shape of your career.

We write a lot about shaping your career. The emphasis is on you, as a cybersecurity professional, creating a career path for yourself appreciating that frequently there is more of a bush than a path. Our approach grows from applied behavioral science because that community has a focus on career identification, management, and development. 

The fact that your career path is a nonlinear journey rather than a process with clearly defined stages and edges can be disconcerting. Yet it is so.

Phil Venables is out with a new post at his blog on managing your career. Phil is an engineer, not an organizational scientist or practitioner. We will thus say that he is writing about engineering your career.

Here are two disclaimers before we review his suggestions: engineering your career remains a "you" thing, and you need to do it.

1. Find 2 or 3 technical issues to become deeply knowledgeable about, and then work to master them. You can find these by connecting with other people in your field or at work, through a professional association, by talking with a mentor, finding a significant problem at work, or just build out something that you like spending time working on. Whatever it is, as the tag line puts it: just do it.

2. Join a professional association. Work toward developing full membership v. paying dues, which could entail extra certifications etc. While we are not fans of certifications in the hiring process as predictors of future behavior, they have a value in terms of demonstrating one's commitment to maintain a level of professional acumen.

3. This next one is strikingly important so we quote at length:

Do the Work...Once you’ve joined some community and got your bearings then figure out how you can be useful. Volunteer to assist in some work streams, actively participate in activities and maybe generate some ideas for new efforts. The main thing to remember is to put the work in...Don’t just confine this to technical work. Some of the most needed work in some groups and even professional associations is to help with event logistics, staffing and administrative tasks. Most of the community and association leaders I know got to be that by not just being a leader of some technical workstream but, rather, by many years of the hard yards of running a conference, helping with membership, managing the accounts and so on.

4. Connect through an organization and find a way to take a leadership role. 

5. Look to what comes next. Given the time it will take to connect with others, build up expertise, and take on leadership roles, you'll find that there are technical challenges outside of your initial area of concentration: schools, social media, etc. Phil mentions that he became fascinated with the role of technology policy being developed at the Council on Foreign Relations; maybe policy development is something you might grow into.

6. Contribute your ideas and efforts to broader communities. This idea builds from the "what comes next" step as you find that you are energized by new ideas and topics.

7. Respond to internal organizational forces, and then help drive them. That is, your employer also evolves and may have ideas or needs that you can contribute to based on your extensive self-development. You won't have these opportunities, or maybe the credibility, unless you demonstrate the growth you've accomplished through your paid and professional work.

Two subsequent thoughts:

You need to take the initiative, and yes you will have to pay fees and spend personal time developing yourself. Let's also state that there are people who have family obligations or work limitations or other limiting circumstances who cannot, at this time, engage in those opportunities. Maybe you can find a 'development buddy' or ask your boss for an hour on the clock for development time.

You may not know where to start. Phil's process works for him. Your process should be based on what interests or motivates or engages you in some way. Your development process begins there.

We come back to asking you to think of your career development as a nonlinear journey. There will be pauses, there will be detours, there will be shifts and jumps. Embrace the challenge even if the ride is bumpy.

Ask us how we can help you engineer the shape of your career.

(image credit: AmmyLucio, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)