MANA Chapter 17

Careers vs. Jobs

Jobs	Career
Short term	Long term
Low growth opportunities	Focused on growth
Compensation focused	Experience focuses
We do what we can to get by	We want to go above and beyond
Leave work angrier	Leave work happier
Depleted Mondays	Excited to go in on Mondays
Uninterested in values	Aligned with our values
Looking for other opportunities	Upward mobility
Not enough time in the day	Fulfillment on the job
Viewed as a grind	Viewed as a journey

Old Career Paradigm:

• Mutual Loyalty Contract

  • Tradeoff between compliance and job security

• One Employer Focus

  • My way or the highway (training!)

• Top-Down Firm

  • Power bubbles to the top

• Corporate Allegiance

  • Loyalty to the organization is more important than the task itself

New Career Paradigm:

• Discrete Exchange

  • Trading productivity for expertise

• Occupational Excellence

  • Our employees are great inside and outside!

• Organizational Empowerment

  • Power is more evenly-distributed

• Project Allegiance

  • The task becomes more important than blind loyalty

The Establishment Stage - 3 Primary Concerns

• Psychological Contracts: balancing the implicit with the explicit

• Outsider to Insider: turning into one of the crowd

• Newcomer Socialization: finding your clique

The Advancement Stage

• Career Paths: sequence of job experience that an employee moves along during his or her career

• Career Ladders: structured series of job positions through which an individual progresses in an organization

• Career Lattices: building experiences by moving;

  • Laterally through different departments in the organization

  • Through different projects

The Maintenance Stage

• Structural Plateaus:

  • Occurs when the individual becomes unable to rise further

  • Likelihood of additional hierarchical promotion is very low

• Content Plateaus:

  • Employees who are proficient in the role

  • Additional development opportunities unlikely

  • No longer excited or curious about their work

What to do when we plateau?

Make a wildly different career transition

The Withdrawal Phase

• Phased Retirement: an arrangement that allows employees to reduce their hours and/or responsibilities to ease into retirement

• Bridge Retirement: leaving one organization for another that allows  you to scale back some of your responsibilities

• Career Anchors: network of self-perceived talents, motives, and values that guides an individual's career decisions

  • Creativity

  • Security

  • Competencies

Career Functions: 

• Sponsorship, coaching, and protection 

• Facilitating exposure and visibility

Psychosocial Functions: 

• Role modeling

• Acceptance and confirmation

• Counseling and friendship