Work, success, and meaning at every stage of your career
Building skills on the job
Drones are just one technology that may create thousands, even millions of jobs, within the next 20 years. How can you prepare your children – or yourself – for jobs that you can’t even imagine today?
You can’t know the exact skills, training, or experience you’ll need, but you can develop a mindset that makes you more ready for what the future holds. Here’s how.
If drones are feasible and they do become a local delivery mechanism by 2020 or 2025 (most reasonable analysts’ best guess), your 10-year-old niece or nephew could be building, maintaining, programming or operating them for a living. For that matter, so could you.
Two of the most dreaded questions in interviewing are dreaded for good reason. “What is your greatest strength?” and “What is your greatest weakness?” are mirror image questions that drive jobseekers crazy. (For the record, they drive most recruiters crazy, too; they would love to hear the real answers, but never get more than tired clichés in return.) We are perpetually perplexed by these mirror image questions because they are not mirror images at all – they’re the same question.
Climbing a seven-year mountain may seem like a formidable challenge…at the beginning. But this neurological phenomenon also provides us with a lifetime of opportunity.
The point is that your style is hard wired. Just like your eye color or height, it’s part of who you are. No amount of training or “fixing” will change you; when the next new task or problem comes around, you’ll revert back to your innate style. Your conative style is not related to your IQ, your education, or your job. It’s just who you are.
Women leave positions for the same reasons men do: for bigger challenges, more money and more recognition. But they stay in jobs sometimes for a very different reason, according to McKinsey.
The problem is that knowing we don’t use a good process doesn’t help us, any more than knowing that you’re short-sighted doesn’t help you see better.
I hear from other Boomers all the time about how their age is keeping them from competing in the job market today. They claim that recruiters take one look at their face or (graying) hair and make a quick decision to move on to a younger candidate.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, has been making headlines about her new book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Sandberg’s message is that women too many women are being overlooked for promotions due to lack of confidence and poor negotiation skills, not lack of opportunity.
You can’t be considered for another job if you’re not good at the one you have. Performance is the baseline for being considered a high potential candidate – the price of admission. But what can you do to demonstrate potential – the future tense of being promotable?
Your Work, Your Way 