How employable are you? In the current working environment it is a question that more and more people are asking themselves. Despite gaining great qualifications, and building relevant work experience, the biggest challenge facing many people in the coming months is how to remain employable. In my new book "Slave to a Job, Master of your Career" I explore various strategies that you can implement to improve your employability. These strategies include taking an entrepreneurial view in the way you manage your career and looking on your employer as your most important customer. You need to change your mindset, become visionary and look at the factors that make you different, competitive and capable of winning work. Transfer the principles of entrepreneurship into the business of running your career and you can start to appreciate the similarities.
A new business world has arrived and with it comes change and new workplace models that require a shift in people's mindsets. New ways of thinking, problem-solving and understanding both customer and employer needs are now being demanded. Change is part of our working life and to remain employable you must meet your employer's new needs, not their 2008 needs. The last 12 to 18 months have been tough and challenging for most people. However you cannot change the past but you can influence the future. Now you must stand up, dust yourself off and begin again the work of building your career. It is your life, your career and your happiness. Bring creativity and energy to the task of being employable. Stay ahead of the competition and be a leader rather than a follower when it comes to your career management. It is time for change.
Success requires people to stop thinking like employees and start behaving like entrepreneurs. Being an entrepreneur in the workplace means being flexible, visionary, and always being on the look-out for opportunities to improve the way you work. Entrepreneurs seek excellence and ways to add real value to the business. They don't believe that anyone owes them an income; they must go out and earn it for themselves. Bring this way of thinking into your current role and you will strengthen your position. Excite your customer/employer by exceeding their expectations, by bringing your performance level to new heights.
Excellence is about making small improvements consistently. Brian Tracy who is a leading authority on the development of human potential believes that "the key to long-term success is for you to dedicate yourself to continuous improvement." He also talks about the cumulative effect: "If you become one tenth of 1% more productive each day, that amounts to one half of 1% more productive each week. One half of 1% more productive each week amounts to 2% more productive each month and 26% more productive each year. The cumulative effect of becoming a tiny bit better and more productive amounts to a tremendous increase in your value and your output over time."
Delivering excellence is not about working harder it is about working SMARTER. Start the process of working SMARTER by understanding your customer/employer needs at a higher level. This can be achieved by using the Expectancy Model. This model sets out clearly not only what is expected of you in terms of your targets and work objectives but also what you need to do to achieve and exceed these objectives.
Step 1 - Set SMARTER Goals
Establish your customer/employer overall business requirements. Also find out the reason why these requirements are important to them, see how they are aligned to the overall business plan and agree a timeframe for when they should be completed. Then deconstruct the overall objective into a list of key goals that will help you to successfully meet these needs. Use the SMARTER Goal setting method outlined in the book to help you. Then arrange them in order of priority.
Step 2 - Expect you to do
SMARTER goals tell you what you have to do. However the key to high performance is to understand how to achieve these goals. You need to establish from your customer/employer exactly what they expect you to do to complete these goals. Probe them to find out their level of expectation of you. This conversation will help you to develop your strategy for successfully achieving your goals.
Step 3 - Exceeds expectation
This is the edge that you need to be fully effective. Find out what your customer/employer would consider as exceeding expectations. This key piece of information will set you apart. It will allow you to work smarter rather than harder as it helps you devote your energy and effort in the right direction. It will help you to achieve excellence.
Step 4 - High Performance
The Expectancy Model provides you with a framework to achieve high performance. It outlines what you need to establish from your customer/employer: their goals, their level of expectation of you and what they see as exceeding expectations. High performance is about consistently exceeding your customer/employer expectations. Surprise them with your excellence.
Source "Slave to a Job; Master of your Career" by Sean McLoughney (Published by Chartered Accountants Ireland 2009)
Holding a qualification or being able to complete specific tasks is no longer good enough to get you a job, or indeed to hold onto one. You need to be the best out there. As the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr put it:
"If a man is called a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and Earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well."
Providing a consistently high level of performance, together with a service that exceeds the needs of your customer/employer is vital for your continued employability. Be entrepreneurial when it comes to managing your career.
Sean McLoughney - Author of 'Slave to a Job, Master of your Career' (published by Chartered Accountants Ireland 2009). Sean heads up LearningCurve who specialise in the Managing People suite of courses and he also wrote, designed and delivers the highly successful Diploma in Managing People for Chartered Accountants Ireland. The next Diploma course starts in January 2010.