Life Lessons in Building a Sustainable and Successful Career
I'm back with another mentoring moment and the name of the game today is sustainability. How can you build a sustainable career to ride the tide of this tightening labor market and the looming recession?
To make sure that you still have a job that feels valuable and where you're being paid well when it's over. I know that most of the time, I'm talking about how to find a new job, how to secure a new job, how to be successful in job interviews, and how to make sure that you're negotiating well when you're getting in front of an employer to find and secure a new role. But I also think there is so much value in today's tightening and challenging, and often competitive labor market to think about how to grow and build sustainability in your current career.
There is value in ensuring you're building a sustainable career. Every time there's a change in the labor market, every time there's a change in the economy or every time your job decides that they are going to go on a hiring freeze or start laying people off. You want to make sure that you are building some stability in your career and a lot of that comes from having sustainability practices in your career as a professional.
So in today's conversation, I'm going over three strategies to build a sustainable career.
Strategy number one is to assess the gaps, understand what the gaps are, and understand where there's an impasse in work.
If there are institutions instituting a hiring freeze or they're saying we need to reduce spending in specific categories, that means they're saying, hey, we need to take a pause on doing things that are important to our organization. Pause on things central to their mission, vision, values, and purpose. They need to pause because the company doesn't have the capacity to spend in those areas at this time. Right. And, honestly, from an employer position, that's a good thing. That's what the employer should be thinking about. What do we need to reduce spending on? What do we need to pause on? What do we need to be more strategic about so that we, the whole company, doesn't go belly up and close?
The second strategy is once you assess the gaps, once you recognize this organization's going to have a real gap here or our organization will need some support. Then you can start to take inventory of your own capacity as an employee in the organization.
When you recognize those gaps, you might say, what's my current capacity for taking on new projects? What's my current capacity for taking on a new workload? What's my current capacity for supporting the organization? Given the gaps that I recognize?
It's important to assess your capacity because I think sometimes, we have such affinities for our organizations.
Many of us work in education or human service or government, and we really believe in the mission, the vision, the values of our organizations. We believe in the work. And so we are quick to raise our hand and say, hey, I can help out in this area. Hey, I can add value in this area. Hey, I have a background in this. I can fill in the gap, and that's a good thing, like our human nature to want to help, to serve, and to fill in the gaps in our organization. That's a good thing. And we want to make sure that we're not raising our hand and saying, Hey, yeah, I can help here. Hey, I can fill in the gap. Hey, I can do more here and overwhelm ourselves in our current capacity, right?
So we want to be careful that we want to assess the gaps and know what the gaps are. But that doesn't mean that we should automatically be responsible for filling the gaps and jumping in and doing extra work without being thoughtful about our current capacity. Because the name of the game is to build sustainability in our career, to build a sustainable career, and to build a successful career.
Bringing us to strategy number three, to make the ask. So while your organization may not be hiring anymore, there may be an opportunity for you to fill in the gap and see a 10% salary increase or a higher-level interim role while they're on this hiring freeze or working through layoffs. And so there's an opportunity for you to make that ask to say, hey, I recognize our organization hasn't been able to hire a new training and onboarding professional. I know that there's a gap there. I have a background in training and development and/or training and onboarding of new staff, and I can serve and fill in the gap during our hiring freeze for a 50% salary increase on my base salary.
You can simply make that ask, you know, maybe you have a background in project management. Maybe you've been managing projects without the title for a long time. And now that they can't hire new project managers, you can walk in and say, Hey, I have the capacity to be able to take on two projects over the next six months. And with a 20% salary increase on my base salary and an interim title as interim project manager over the next six months, I'll be able to take on those projects and complete them.
Those three strategies being able to assess the gaps, being able to assess your own capacity, and then being able to make the ask.
Those three strategies alone can help you build a sustainable career. One where you're not job hopping, one where you're able to sustain a challenging labor market or layoffs or hiring freezes and one where you can still build a career that you're proud of that doesn't require you to find a new job or jump to the next industry. To build a career that you're proud of in your current organization or even in your same industry without having to jump ship.
If you're a professional woman working in corporate, nonprofit, or educational leadership who needs support implementing these strategies, I invite you to work with me. Maybe you understand the strategies but realize you need somebody to plan with. You could benefit from having someone with experience walk you through rolling out these strategies. If you could use the confidence and assurance of working with a professional who can guide you as you make an ask of your supervisor or prepare to apply for higher-level roles, then you're in the right place to get that kind of mentorship. I'm accepting new mentees right now, and I invite you to apply to the Mentor Me Accelerator.
Check back each week with the newest blog post from Mentor Me!